Teaching Carpools in Driver's Safety

There are few words that can accurately describe the idiocy of some of the people that we intentionally elect to public office. Seriously, these guys ran for office against live people! I could see them getting elected if they were running against a can of Spam, John Corzine, or a hookworm, but against a serious candidate? How does it occur?

If we tossed darts out of an airplane we would have a 90% chance of hitting someone with a bigger clue than Rep. Bert Johnson (D-City In Ruin) has ever had in his life, and a 100% chance of hitting someone with a smaller ego than Dan Scripps (D-Stryker's back pocket.)

Their latest brainchild is a bill that would make it necessary for driving schools to emphasize to their students the importance of carpooling, the benefits of fuel efficient cars, how to maximize fuel efficiency while driving, and recycling fuels and parts. I wonder if they will also propose in subsequent bills that driving schools teach their students that big gas guzzlers, while less fuel efficient, are a lot safer than driving Smart Cars.

Are they thinking that there is no other arm of government that currently toots the horn of fuel efficiency and energy conservation? As I commented over at The Blog Prof's (who gets the h/t on this,) Michigan is a state that is supposedly trying to find duplications in its operations so that it can cut the fat and operate more efficiently. Now we have dipsticks like Johnson and Scripps intentionally going out and finding new ways in which to duplicate the efforts of our benevolent government. Who are the slow learners here? Of course any added costs necessary to this enlightened learning experience will be passed on to prospective drivers (or most likely their parents) and taxpayers in this sour economy where nobody has enough money, especially parents with teenage children.

I like this planet and I like saving money, but I'm particularly fond of my own two teenagers (sans the not picking up bit,) and I don't think I'm too far off base when I say that driver's safety is called driver's SAFETY for a reason, and I want instruction in driver's safety class to emphasize safety, not the flavor of the month environmentalism.

Scripps and Johnson must think that all of this is necessary, I suppose, because slow learning kids have failed miserably in picking up on things in the environmentally charged classrooms of today, and because knuckle dragging parents such as myself are not fully capable of prioritizing our kids' at home learning opportunities as well as Misters Johnson and Scripps would like. Maybe we could get these cranial marvels to mandate that kids pick up after themselves too.

Do you think that teens will absorb and adopt the cost and health benefits of carpooling better than they have the anti-smoking message they've been hearing from the government and parents since they were about two? (Particularly with smokes at about $8.00 per pack and the coolest President evah avoiding all cameras when he lights up.)

If looking at gruesome pictures of lip tumors and blackened cancerous lungs isn't enough to get teens and a president from using tobacco, and watching videos of people torn apart because they were driving too fast isn't enough to get them to slow down, how on God's green Earth is cajoling teenage NASCAR fans into slowing down to gain an extra three miles per gallon going to do the trick? One thing is certain, turning off the gruesome video in favor of an air pressure gauge slide show is going to be riveting.

If you cannot do it for the safety, do it for the planet!