4 November, 2005

When you ride an electric scooter around town you quickly realise what energy use actually means and it starts to become obvious that we currently burn diamonds. I have a choice when I get on my scooter. It’s a simple choice. I can accelerate quickly and sacrifice distance or I can ease back and get another 5km of travel. In a world that is rapidly running low on oil (that magical substance that drives our society) our current approach to travel seems to be more and more obscene. I lean towards going for distance which means I hold my speed down a notch and don’t accelerate like a bitch on heat. My scooter is essentially a speedy bicycle where I don’t need to pedal. I use it when I am going somewhere sweat is not a great idea or when I’ve already biked that day and am feeling nutted. While riding a scooter the true obscenity becomes obvious. Drivers accelerating quickly from a set of lights only to be braking 5 seconds later for the next set and probably using enough oil to support a small village for a month. I no longer feel sympathy for speed related “accidents”. Sounds awful? It is but I have come to understand that despite all the warnings we still drive with a throttle jockey mentality and the obvious outcome of that is regular and fatal collisions. You drive too fast you will eventually hurt yourself or someone else. Either way you are a total prat and dangerous. I imagine that tolerance for that attitude will get lower over time.

In a similar vein, the reserve bank keeps giving us warnings about our spending. This is an indication of how insane we have actually become. A sane person wouldlook at spending and say something like “If I spend more than I earn I am truly fucked”. Today the response seems to be, “some magical force of economics will ensure that all my investments will go up and that my return will allow me to constantly upgrade and stay ahead of the economy”. I read something recently that noted that intelligent people die in storms more often than “people of lower intelligence” because they think they can outsmart the storm. It makes sense to me. Intelligence without wisdom is just another sort of stupid and it seems to be the prevalent form these days.

I have been hired as a teacher. Be afraid…