It’s time to move on public transit

(March 10) - Fifty per cent off the price of a Hummer. So read a sign on the roof of a dealer near an on-ramp to the interstate in Knoxville, Tenn.

Lynne and I were down there at the end of February, visiting her sister. The weather was a bit warmer than here, but the economy is every bit as cold. When I pointed to the Hummer sign, Nancy shrugged her shoulders. A couple of months ago, she told me, another SUV dealer had a similar sale. Buy one and get a second for one cent.

They still can’t sell the beasts.

This isn’t a bad news story. It would be if people bought them at the reduced rate. That would mean the only reason Hummers were not selling is because it costs too much to get them off the lot. In truth, it costs too much to keep them off the lot.

The problem is not the sticker price. It has nothing to do with the wages and benefits earned by the workers who build them. This is the case not just for Hummers. It also applies to all the other vehicles that people are not buying. As the chief economist for the Canadian Auto Workers explained recently, they could all work for nothing and nothing would change.

The good news is that more people in more places are thinking about the carbon costs as much as the dollar costs. When the economy turns around, as it surely will one day, people will start buying cars again. The appetite for monster vehicles like Hummers will disappear, but the public will feast on fuel-efficient ways of getting around.

Governments that want to kick-start the economy with infrastructure investments should look and learn. Now is the perfect time to develop better public transit.

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It was a pleasant trip. We got home to the news that the downtown graffiti artists were back at work. Last Friday I took a walk along the path behind the River Run. Some graffiti had been erased from the rear of the building. One of the information plaques about the ecology of the Speed River was spray-painted with a denunciation of racist white history.

It really is idiotic. It reminded me of the strangest exhibit on display at the Museum of Appalachia just north of Knoxville. It’s a collection of huge white crosses Henry Harrison Mayes made and erected at the side of major highways from 1917 until he died in 1986. He was a Kentucky coal miner on a peculiar mission. He put up thousands of them, painted with messages like “get right with God” or “if you go to Hell it’s your own fault.”

His goal was to put at least one in every country of the world. He donated three to NASA with a request to bring them to the Moon, Mars and Jupiter. It was the sort of in-your-face foolishness that has little to do with any meaningful understanding of spirituality. If anything, it should embarrass those people who want religion to be taken seriously.

The Guelph graffiti artist is the Henry Harrison Mayes of protest politics. The messages are on the same level of intellectual clarity.

One that I saw said “evict the police.” Others apparently called on us to kill the police and their families. Others protested the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler.

None of it bears any resemblance to effective political protest. It is more like immature adolescent rebellion.

That it is imposed on our public spaces anonymously and under the cover of darkness makes it all doubly pathetic.