By MIKE COURTNEY

Here is a new car. It is built around technology that was invented over 100 years ago.  While light bulbs, clothing, building materials, electronics, medicine, space research, and virtually everything else in our life either has changed or been invented in the last 100 years our car has remained fundamentally the same as the Model T.

Never before has the need to re-examine our marriage to this expensive, filthy, land gobbling automobile and find a better way been greater than today. Immersion in a fantasy world TV brings us, where your persona is defined by the shape and look of your car and cars roll out on imaginary roads leading you to ever seek for paradise may be the primary reason society cannot advance its transportation infrastructure. At least half of America is partially or totally disconnected from reality. The Limbaughs that dominate radio and TV are the weecants. Every organization has a few weecants.  Successful ones hear the weecant voice, for they do provide some balance, but they are not allowed to drown out the weecans, or the organization fails. Unfortunately these weecants are in many of our cars homes and brains for hour’s every day. Far too many. No wonder we are so disconnected. I did hear a couple of them say maybe a bailout was not the best way to spend a trillion bucks of our kids’ money. Well, duh.  

Let’s look at the facts.

The cheap oil is gone. Billions of people on the other side of the world want a better way to get around than bicycles and animals. With our projected population in 25 years and projected number of people requiring personal transportation all of the roads we now have and are building will be obsolete and/or inadequate. Our entire transportation system relies on piston engines. We pay a tremendous tax to finance roads and road upkeep, yet our secondary roads and bridges are in many cases crumbling throughout the nation. We support an entire industry through taxes fees and fines made up of lawyers, police, judges, jail keepers, etc., just to keep order on the highways. We allow our transportation system to make us criminals because it does not meet our need for speed and safety. That being said, let’s ask the question. What would be the best way to shoulder our kids and grandkids with a trillion-dollar debt we invest to save our bacon today? Should we bail out the investment banks or should we set some different goals?

How about we roll up our sleeves and get started tomorrow. I thought of some goals. Let’s increase the number of trains tenfold in 10 years. How about cars that fly, and no oil used for fuel? How about no more air in the tires, no more tires, no more asphalt? Drive to Chicago in 45 minutes in 10 years, great goal I think. Let’s invest in our own auto industry and demand they achieve these goals. If there is money in it, they will. A trillion dollars. Forget the banks, how about fuel cell that supplies a neighborhood; no more wires and poles. Clean water and a sustainable lifestyle for the next 100 years. All of this and more is achievable with a trillion dollars well spent.  

We will, like legendary lemmings, jump over the cliff of extending our disconnected incumbent Congress for two more years but there are differences in voting for a Republican or Democrat president. A key one being after the election our leaders will believe the Earth was created about 4,000 years ago and the only way forward is to maintain the status quo, or this needs to change, but we are not sure how to do it. I hope we as a nation vote for vision, with all of its uncertainty, and not continuing down the same stagnant course.    

Mike Courtney is a resident of Pendleton.