Conserving in America

I'm driving with my kid in my 2003 Mini Cooper, which I purchased when gas was about $1.30 a gallon.

"There's another Mini," she says. "How come there's so many Minis around here?"

"Because this part of town is more liberal than our part of town," I say. We are in Cleveland Heights, close to Case Western Reserve University, about 20 miles away from our White Wonder bread suburb on the city's South side.

"Aren't you a liberal?"

"Yeah."

"What's that have to do with cars?" she says.

"A lot of liberals drive small cars in order to conserve gas," I say. The Mini gets anywhere from 30 to 40 MPG depending on any number of things. "You don't find many liberals driving big cars unless they have a pretty good reason."

"You mean big cars like Dummers?" she says.

"Exactly," I say. "Big cars like Dummers. A lot of your conservatives like your Dummers."

"Don't Dummers use a lot of gas?"

"Yeah," I say.

"Then why would a conservative drive one?" she says. "Shouldn't a conservative conserve? I mean, you conserve everything, so you're a conservative, right?"

"It's the terminology. I'm a liberal, but I conserve. A lot of your conservatives don't like to conserve. That's the irony of the thing, kid."

She considers this for a minute and says, "They ought to call those conservatives the wastetives."

* * *

Wastetive: An American "conservative" who fails to actually conserve anything. The wastetive twists the noble concept of freedom into a selfish and childish lifelong tantrum that swirls around the wastetive's own overblown sense of entitlement and sentimental pining for an obsolete perception of the American Dream shaped wholly from conspicuous consumption.

A wastetive complains about having to drop his or her beer can into a different trash can than their Whopper wrapper and will often refuse to do so. They drive their gas-guzzling SUV to work all by themselves, clogging up the highways while feeling smugly "safe" within their giant steel box whilst their exhaust pipe pours out toxic fumes that poison our future. Many wastetives choose to delude themselves into believing that there is nothing toxic about vehicular exhaust fumes. To them, I ask this: how about you load up the Escalade with your wife, kids and dog Spoofy, park it in your three-car garage, close all the doors and fire up the ignition?

No? Gee, why not?

Oh yeah, everyone will be DEAD in about an hour. Will you believe the fumes are toxic then?

Although a wastetives will never conserve anything on their own, they whine and moan whenever someone else suggests that they pay more for their gluttonous ways via taxes or (gasp) legislation. In such a case you will see wastetives do what they do best: use more than they need. But in this case the resource will be words. No one can gas on like a wastetive who is afraid someone will ask them to conserve.

A wastetive demands that they must have everything they want! while a liberal only takes as much as they need.

Fortunately, the idiotic way of the wastetive is finally garnering proper recognition. No one much likes the wastetives except the Saudis. The wastetives fund a lot of the Saudis' operations and are even building a glittering city in the middle of the desert courtesy of the wastetives. It's called Dubai. Yes, the Saudi's really love the wastetives.

Until the wastetives learn their lesson, the rest of us will just have to tolerate them.