Take My Truck, Please

Last week, I used a sledgehammer to take down a disused shed in my yard.

A sledgehammer is a tool so primitive that it's barely a tool at all. You pick it up and drop it down. You pick it up and drop it down. You can get a nice rhythm going with it, but in general, the sledgehammer, the short-handled hoe, is something people have run away from for centuries.

When I announced that I was going to waltz with a 9-pound hammer, one of my friends who drives a backhoe for a living sighed sadly.

"Too bad we can't get my backhoe into your yard," he said. "We could take that shed down in 10 minutes."

Everybody started with a heavy rock to pound things, then shaped a stick into a handle, then dug for coal and smelted iron, then built a railroad, then drilled for oil, then invented the backhoe.

And now, just to survive, will we de-industrialize and go back to some kind of village living where, presumably, it will take the whole village just to raise one child and maybe help from the next village to tear down a shed, if we even have sheds?

These ruminations about the simple life did not stop my wife and I from employing the seldom-used bed of my pick-up truck to haul the remains of the shed to the city dump.

For the next week, as oil oozed out of my television set and covered my living room, I began to contemplate oil and its byproducts. The cellophane on a cigarette pack. The plastic flowers that adorn some of the graves in the cemetery across from my house. The 8-mile-each-way drive I took on vacation so my wife and I could eat breakfast at a place we like. Sitting in my favorite bar, sipping a Guinness, I contemplated the fact that Irish beer comes to America by ship and to the bar by truck.

It makes you sad after a while, that kind of thinking, because you feel like you're the prosecutor at your own trial and your court-appointed lawyer didn't even show.

Like I said, I drive a pick-up truck, a big one. I don't need a truck, not even a small one. I just like driving a truck. I'm not alone, either. At the newspaper where I work, you see the vehicles in the parking lot, and it's hard to believe the building isn't a union hiring hall for carpenters.

I disagree with whatever political party is in power. I'm working class enough to hate any boss just for being a boss. It's not fair, but hate will keep you going when love will leave you flat. I don't like taxes, recycling or the census. I'm not right or left wing. I'm just uncooperative and surly.

No, I don't much like government, but I believe the United States should tax gasoline until it costs $10 a gallon, and that means you'll have to live closer to work, and it means vegetables and Irish beer will get more expensive. Legally restrict the use of plastic. Throw money at solid ideas for alternative energy and throw money at the crackpots, too. Sometimes the crackpots are right. Henry Ford, for instance, was a loon.

And, yes, tell guys like me that, unless we can prove we need it, we can't have that giant pick-up truck. And don't kid yourselves, there are plenty of construction workers driving an eight-cylinder pick-up truck they don't use on the job because the boss supplies the lumber and the concrete. You bring yourself and your tools — tools you could fit in a hatchback.

Government is at its best when it maintains essential services and makes sure you can't do things that hurt everyone else, which is why, the free market notwithstanding, you can't drive drunk, sell porn to 9-year-olds or open a whites-only restaurant. Some of us would do it if we could, so government has to stop us.

I'll pay $10 a gallon for gas if I have to, but I'll have to use a lot less. And I'll bring my own bags to the grocery store if the plastic ones are outlawed or if they charge you $3 for every one you use.

Everybody talks about America's "addiction to oil," but let me be one of the first to say it plainly.

I can't stop by myself. I need help.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com

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