Experts Agree: Our Cars are Trying to Kill us

Finally, it’s starting to slow down. I hardly had time to think. The radio host shouted what he had to shout, I unbuckled my seat belt, stepped on the gas. Now here I am flying through the air, my Volvo dangling on the edge, the cliff now fading behind me, its highest safety rated frame half wrapped around a tilting light pole. If I had had some time to think, I would probably still be in the car, letting my blood boil and my anxiety grow as the radio host would continue his rambling. What are you gonna do? You live and learn. Well, I won’t be living through this one, and though I have lived a lot, I don’t know what I’ve ever learned.

At least it won’t take long to identify me. Won’t even have to run the plates on the Volvo. Only one car in the world has the particular collection of bumper stickers mine carries. Left to right there is the Green Peace sticker, the Keep Austin Weird, the No GMO’s, the Pro GMO’s, the fund NASA, the end NAFTA, the save the whales, the Build the Wall, the Drill Baby Drill, and the NRA sticker. If you go up on the trunk there is the Make America Great sticker and over it the Feeling the Bern Sticker. Both of which sit on top of the Yes We Can sticker and across from all of them the I’m With Her. There is the faded Ayatollah Asshola sticker, and the Food not Bombs logo. I have the rainbow flag and the equality sign obscuring the It’s Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve sticker. On my back window in one corner there a Marine Corps emblem and a peace sign on the other. In the middle is a God Hates F… sticker. The last three letters of that one someone had ripped off, thank the Lord. Those were just the stickers on the top layer, beneath what you can see is a variable bumper sticker graveyard pasted over and buried. I used to get a lot of looks when I drive down the street. My car quickly becomes a local celebrity in any location it finds itself.

Those bumper stickers, they are the graveyard of my life, my obsession, which all became too much today. It started in earnest in 93’ with the bright green globs of fire caught by night vision lenses spread over the scrolling ticker of the CNN new feed, but the seeds of my obsession were planted long before Ted Turner turned on his cameras. At 8 years old, I stole my mom’s credit card to sponsor starving children in an unnamed African country after watching a Save the Children commercial conveniently places between Saturday Morning cartoons. I had a ferrous debate about the haves and the have not’s with the operator when she wouldn’t take a ten thousand dollar a month contribution from a nine year old boy using a fifty year old woman’s American Express.

One week, when I was eleven after a particularly doomy and gloomy Sunday sermon, I tried to convert my lab partner who happened to be the only Jewish girl in school. My incessant harping on this young woman did not sit well and after a long conversation about religious tolerance with her, her parents, my parents and the principal, I started the Highlands Elementary Interfaith league. I was and remain the only member of that particular club. For whatever reason, when presented with a cause, if it touches me and they all do, I can’t help but get involved. These episodes were a headache for my parents but pretty minor events. My problems really started with the advent of 24-hour cable news. These problems only grew as the fiber optic tentacles of the internet have webbed their way throughout the globe.

I was thirteen when Saddam Hussein and Bush the first had their battle in Babylon. One of the earliest clear memories I have was George Bush staring into the camera, like he was looking into my vary soul, and laying out why the US could not let Saddam’s evil continue unchecked. I was enraged at the dictator, I was impassioned with good old American pride, the kind of pride that kills, and I was terrified. This was my baptism: this life I have led, that day Saddam got some bad news, George got a boost in the polls and I got a new life. Before I went to sleep that night I searched all the dark corners of the room, not for some fanged vampire or hockey mask clad murder, but for a portly middle aged fella in a beret clutching a Scud missile. Saddam Hussein and his evil army was the greatest threat this world had ever known. CNN had told me so and I had to act.

The next day I got my buddies together and organized war games so that we could be prepared should the Iraqi army march on our town. At school, I started a letter writing drive to encourage and support our troops. The Interfaith league promptly expelled all Muslim members, which meant nothing as I remained the only member of the interfaith league. I suppose I would have let a Muslim contingent remain as long as they signed a loyalty pledge and willfully subjected themselves to random examinations of patriotism. Bush’s speech and the endless images of our American Military might have turned me into a hawkish zealot. That is, until a week later when a war photographer turned peace activist was given fifteen minutes on the air.

This man spoke about the children dying in the bombing raids. He spoke about the lack of clean water and the broken electrical grid in Baghdad. He discussed the plights of the old, the pregnant, the poor and the sick. This man put a human face on the inhumanity of our war, and I was floored. I hated myself, but also knew there was no time to dwell in my mistakes; I had to act. The next day, I organized a peace rally, a peace sit in, a peace walk out, a peace bake sale, and the Interfaith league participated in a letter writing campaign. There was only one letter written by yours truly, but the league had reversed its previous position and was now actively seeking Muslim membership. CNN had shown me the horrors of Desert Storm, the greatest horror of this or any age. I had taken action.

The war came and went and I found myself on various sides of the conflict depending on which experts CNN was able to book and which ways the public, or at least the public opinion polling was leaning. At any moment, I was sure what the right course of action was, though that action was always subject to change. CNN had told me, and so I believed, that this war in the Gulf was the most important event that had ever or would ever happen in human history and I had to be involved in some way.

The war came and went, and not long after was the crack and crime crisis. The stats were startling: one guest form the Urban League pointed out how crime rates in urban centers often approached the violence seen in war zones. The woman pointed to illegal guns and poverty as the source of the issue. The next day, I signed up to volunteer at a local soup kitchen and picketed a local gun shop. It was the least I could do to help. The commentator said an entire generation of children was at risk. My mom was pissed because I skipped school to march back and forth in front of Larry’s Guns (Larry happened to be my uncle) screaming about gun violence.

Uncle Larry didn’t care for the picketing either. When he brought me out a bottle of water and a Cup of Noodles for lunch, he also slipped me a newsletter from the new and improved NRA describing the beauty of an armed public. Give good law abiding people weapons of death, and the bad guys would be wiped out in days. This was the only way to deal with the scourge of urban crime. The newsletter was full of indisputable facts and multicolored charts. Who can argue with multicolored charts? I dropped my sign and marched right into the gun shop, tried to buy a handgun. Larry couldn’t sell me one since I was under 18 (I started a letter writing campaign to address that issue the next day, with major participation from the Interfaith League), but he did give me his extra .357, which was nice. I wore it on my hip the next week as a sign of protest against our weak, gun hating society. It got a lot of stares and when I was stopped by the police, they didn’t seem to care about a 14 year old’s right to carry. After they dropped me off at home, my mother took the gun and returned it to Uncle Larry before scolding me for skipping school to walk the streets brandishing the weapon. How could she care so little about what was happening in our world?

As important as guns in America were, soon I learned of something much more insidious, something that was a silent killer, a murderous evil monster existing just below the surface of polite society. I’m not talking about Gangster Rap (though I seriously considered taking on that monster), I’m talking about vaccinations: the silent killer. I read a scathing expose of big pharma and the vaccine scam in a Fate magazine I stole from the Walgreens (at this point, my mother would not let me watch the news and had cancelled our daily newspaper subscription). The magazine described how the government and big pharma were using vaccinations to control the minds of our children, all part of some great master plan or something. The Interfaith League jumped right on it starting an aggressive letter writing campaign. These were our kids we were talking about, something had to be done. Of course eventually someone pointed me to a number of articles about the life saving nature of vaccines.

I took to the streets, setting up on a corner, standing on a milk crate, loudly proclaiming the benefits of vaccinations to all who would hear. Most people looked confused when the heard my exhortation for kids to get shots and adults to boycott Fate magazine. A few argued with me, but for the most part people did what they could to ignore my shouting, which tapped down the fervor which allowed the mind to wander. Across the street was a large billboard advertising Scientology. At first, I noted the sign and ignored it, but more and more it drew my attention, what with its fancy font and ten foot tall letters. After a few hours of earnest resistance to the call, I gave in, packed up my wears to search out the group and hear their message.

I knew I already had too many unexcused absences to pass my junior year. I had a few dollars in my pocket, inherited form my grandfather. I had yet to hear about the evils of inherited wealth. I had the time and the money to give the Scientologists a shot. I mean, what could it hurt? It was nice, I was audited, learned a lot about myself and the Thetans. It was a great two weeks with Scientology. Then one morning I work up to find a pamphlet dangling from the door knob of the apartment I was sharing with two of my new brothers in the faith. KILLING WHALES was scrawled in stylized blood spatter font on the top of the page. That pamphlet set me straight and the next day I was out of there to fight a great evil, perhaps the greatest evil of this or any time: the wholesale slaughter of the whale population. Before I knew it, I was on a boat heading for the Bearing Sea to put myself and my life between Japanese whaling boats and those great majestic Leviathans.

For the next couple decades, things followed this pattern. It seemed every time I opened a newspaper or turned on cable news, some horrible world-destroying event was happening and I felt a call. I heard the arguments and believed them. When claims were made, I took them at face value. To me daily, the very balance of the universe was in humanity’s hands and humanity had a bad case of Parkinson’s (another cause I would spend a week camped out in front of the CDC protesting; not the illness or funding for a cure, but the fact that the illness was obviously an immune response to the fluoride in our drinking water, which was itself the greatest threat to humanity at the time). I heard the siren song to the causes of mass incarceration, of global poverty, of war and racism in their million forms. I heard the call to battle against big government, inoculations, the NRA, the NBA, SAG, WWIII, IWW, the NYPD, NWA, PETA, the PLO, among others.

I’ve been a member of the Green party, the tea party, the Wigs, and the federalists. I spent a month in Al Qaida, Al Nuzra, the Israeli defense Force, and the Black Panthers. I was in Green Peace, and Brown War (a little known outfit who’s main goal is to chlorinate the oceans and air condition the globe, I don’t think they’re still around). The news kept pointing out the problems and I kept racing to solve them. My friends had stopped talking to me, my family had given up, I was broke with no diploma and no prospects, and still a ways from rock bottom.

I tried to stop, really I did. I spent a winter on a boat snatching crabs off the bottom of the Bering Sea. I came to it naturally. I had spent a week and a day chained to an off shore oil rig for noble reason. When I finally gave it up, I was out of money and had no way back to the lower 48, so I took a job on a boat out of a basic need to survive and it was great. I was free of the incessant call of the news channels with their hypnotizing tickers at the bottom of the screen, but it wouldn’t last. Eventually, I began to worry that something was happening somewhere in the world. Something that mattered more than anything that had ever happened before or anything that would ever happen again. There was an illness being spread, a dangerous political ideology, ecological disaster, war or pestilence, some modern heresy. There was something happening out there in the great wide world, how could I let it pass? How could I not get involved?

We didn’t sleep much on the crab boat, but when I could lay down, I didn’t sleep. I found myself sneaking onto the bridge and fiddling with the radios, just to get a little of that good stuff. Finally, I caught an NPR station drifting over from the Aleutian chain. I could just make out the newscaster’s voice but it appears the liberals were at it again. A gaggle of long hairs was trying to stop Monsanto from putting out a seed that could feed the whole world. The only problem with it was each seed was ten grand and caused screaming boils to appear on anybody with skin darker than an Irishman. Lousy bleeding hearts were outside protesting. I guess a few boils is too much for their sensibilities. I jumped off the crabber the next time we made land fall, spent all of the money I had made on poster board and magic markers and made my way down to counter-protest those fools. It took a week of intense reading before I realized the error of my ways and joined the movement to eradicate all GMO’s from the planet.

There have been a few times I intentionally tried to escape the lure of the news but could never quite escape it. I went on what was meant to be a month long silent retreat at a remote Tibetan monastery, but every time I closed my eyes to meditate, I would see the “Breaking News” headline flash before my eyes. I spent hours pondering what the terror alert level was. My mantra was: “Breaking News” on the inhale and “this just in” on the exhale. After three days, I was on the first rigshaw out of town. Once back in the world (even a remote Tibetan mountain town), the news was everywhere. If you shut off your TV, it’s on your phone, if you turn off your phone, it’s on the radio, if you turn the radio off your cousin will tell you about it. Keeping the news out was like holding back a glacier, and even if I could have stopped the flow of information, I never really wanted to.

Until one day, one horrible day. It happened with some warning which was only found out after and used by the people in charge to blame others in charge who they didn’t like so much. It killed a lot, maimed many, decimated some. It was part of a larger trend and perpetrated by the usual suspects in a new way that nobody saw coming. It was the first shot in a war that would consume us all, a death sentence to democracy, a slippery slope toward Armageddon, and it was my fault.

At the heart of the horrible horrible news was an issue I had already been intimately involved in on both sides. I had already done my part to address the issue as best I could. That night I sat up and wondered how this could happen all night. I considered both sides of the coin and then realized it was all because of me. Two days earlier, I was meant to be at a protest. I was supposed to be flying my flag and marching against the evil du jour, but it was hot and I was tired. I stayed home that day, and as a result this happened. Not directly, what I was supposed to be protesting had nothing to do with the issues that lead to this terrible event, but the universe of world events was punishing every one to make up for my sin of sloth. I looked back at all the cataclysmic events of the past year and saw that in each event I had somehow been slack in my obligations just before. I had met a girl instead of writing a letter, I had gotten drunk instead of sitting in, I had gone to a movie instead of a rally. It was me: somehow my failings had led to the endless stream of Eschaton, a river of death and destruction continuously flowing through the world. Finally all the insanity made sense, it was all on me.

It was then I realized that my job was not to react to the news but to try and create a better world. I was to create better news through my actions. CNN, MSNBC, FOX , Huffington post, Weekly World News, I wasn’t responding to them, they were responding to me. If I did the right thing, good things would happen in the world, or at least bad things wouldn’t. If I didn’t do what I was a supposed to do, there would be terrorist attacks, tsunamis, outbreaks of terrible illness. I was not responsible to the news, I was responsible for it.

After this realization, life became a little more difficult. I had to be very careful about every move I made. I knew if I did the wrong thing, or didn’t do the right thing, then the very world itself would shake. There was something empowering about finally having some control over all the chaos. If I wanted a calm and peaceful world without all the potentially world ending events, then I just had to act right. Problem was: nobody was around to tell me what was right or wrong.

I turned to the faiths. Frist Christianity: I kept the commandments, I loved my neighbor, worked at the soup kitchen, taught Bible study, learned how to play an acoustic guitar and then played it for the kids in the youth group. Things in the world seemed calm for a few weeks, but then bam: SARS found in San Salvador. Christ might not be the true path, who knew? Judaism seemed to be the next best thing (I had already done the reading after all). I didn’t make it much further than separating my cheese plates from my meat plates when the Kurds blew up a military checkpoint in Turkey in an apparent bid for independence. I must not have been chosen. Islam was the next on the list. I got my mat, learned the prayers, said them with regularity. I memorized scripture, recited the words, but six weeks after my conversion and what do you know? Flesh eating amoebas in Duluth’s drinking water.

I gave Buddhism another shot, tried Humanism, worshiped Hindu deities, even thought about Scientology again but fool me once, you know? No matter what storied faith tradition I tried, some other terrible cataclysmic event snuck its way back into the news. I tried ethical systems, I tried hedonism and pietism, nothing seemed to work. Finally, I got into twelve step programs. I fared no better there until one day during an AA group, I thought to myself: “Wow, when these people were drunk they didn’t give a shit about anything, maybe if I’m careless things won’t be so bad.” Then next day I took up drinking and everything had been coming up roses since.

I got a job, which I lost, but I got another. I found an apartment, even met a woman or two. I still watch the news at the bar but nothing worries me too much. I mean a little outbreak of Ebola, old news, another Intifada, intifada shmentifata is what I say. No need to worry. I’ve been drunk six months or maybe three years now and the world has been calm. That is until tonight.

There I was sitting at my favorite stool minding my business. The news wasn’t even on, some unending baseball game between two teams from cities hundreds of miles from here was flickering on the pixels. All of a sudden the game cut off and the breaking news cut in. The bartender turned down the music and the entire bar stood in silent shock at the story. It was local event with national and international implications. It was something that could affect us all, something that would create a new normal for us all. This was another once in a millennia event. The entire world was changed for the worse.

I didn’t even pay my bill, just stood up and walked out. The bartender pulled his attention away from the TV long enough to scream at me, but I kept strolling. I guess he figured I’d be back cause he didn’t bother to chase me down. I jumped in my car and turned on talk radio, wasn’t even a preset had to tune through the static. I drove and drove, listing to the host talk with growing excitement about the day’s event. His rage and fear built and built. This was it: everything was crumbling and there was nothing I could do to stop it, somehow I probably caused it. The universe grew and shrank around me, my chest tightened, my heart pounded. I couldn’t hear words any more. Eventually, the sound of the radio just became an electric scream of fear. Then I did it, I unbuckled my belt, crashed into the light pole and sent myself careening over the cliff.

It’s almost peaceful, flying here. The noise of the radio is left behind, the air is cool and indifferent to the machinations of humanity. Ahhh, If only all of life could have been like this.

The next day on MSCNBFOX

“A man inexplicably crashed his car and flew to his death off highway 1 today. Could this be the first sign our cars are out to kills us? One expert believes it is. Find out next on Extreme News Today.”