Why I was manning the hustings with a placard rather than merely standing on the sidelines with a reporter’s notebook? Well, it all started a few weeks back when I wrote a column in which I mocked SUVs as wasteful, dangerous and really annoying to drive behind.
The column earned me applause from dozens of environmentalists (which, we all know, is why I got into the journalism business in the first place), while others complained that I needed to “get off” my “smug” “ass” and actually “do” “something” about these gorillas in our midst.
Do something? That sounds like a lot of effort-and effort, I’ll remind you, is not why I got into the journalism business.
But these energetic folk had a point. What good was I if all I did was sit around and complain (and eat bonbons, let’s not forget that)? I vowed then and there to take action (albeit without giving up the bonbons).
Fortunately for me, my sudden zeal coincided with the formation of an SUV protest group in Philly. A member of the still-unnamed group had contacted me and asked me to participate in that weekend’s first-ever Day of Outrage. It was all set for Mother’s Day, so I figured, “Hey, I got nothing better to do, so I’m there.” (Sorry, Mom.) The organizer of the group told me that I’d be joined by a dozen angry people, including “two anarchists,” but when I got there, I found only five activists. The anarchists didn’t show-proving once again that you simply can’t make plans with anarchists.
The group-which was christened the “SUV Strike Force” after rejecting my suggestion, SURVIVE (Sport Utility Roadsters Viciously Inflame and Victimize Earth)-chose to protest SUVs at an organic-food supermarket called Fresh Fields.
I’ve always resented organic-food supermarkets, especially the way in which they market the so-called “organic” produce as an essential part of a healthy, active lifestyle. But as a protest site, Fresh Fields was perfect. After all, auto manufacturers consistently market their SUVs the same way, even emblazoning their 12-miles-per-gallon trucks with fresh-air names such as Pathfinder, Explorer, Trailblazer, Highlander and, my personal favorite, the GMC Yukon Denali (named in tribute to two areas of the globe that are being slowly denuded by global warming and other human processes).
You’d think organic-food eaters would be the last people buying SUVs, but the Fresh Fields parking lot was full of them. At one point, a quarter of the cars in the lot were SUVs.
So there we were, all six of us, ready to send a message to the world about the damage that is being done by these trucks, which, despite gas prices that will reach $2.50 a gallon by midsummer, remain the fastest-selling segment of the auto industry.
Strike Force organizer Kate Miller, a friend of mine who is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, handed out homemade protest signs (they were beauts, too, with nifty wood supports and thick oak tag that I later discovered-whew!-was recycled). This being my first protest, I shied away from aggressive signs like “SUVs are for SOBs” and “SUVs Kill!” in favor of a different approach: “You’re Too Smart to be Driving an SUV.”
Another Strike Force member, who refused to give his name, favored an attack strategy, handing out fact sheets that lambasted SUV drivers: “HYPOCRITE! You shop at Fresh Fields to help the environment, but the car you drive destroys it!”
“We can’t be polite here,” he said, although he stopped short of plastering SUVs with tough-to-remove bumper stickers, as other groups are doing. “We have to turn SUVs into the new fur. I mean, PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] got people to stop wearing fur by turning fur into a lifestyle choice that is no longer socially acceptable. We can do that with SUVs.”
Judging from our little protest, that’s going to be an uphill battle in America, where consumption has always been a family value. Even as gas prices soar, we refuse to curb our profligate ways. Not even President Bush is about to stand in the way of America doing what it does best: consuming.
“The president believes that it [wanton fuel consumption] is an American way of life and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one,” said Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer, issuing words as truly unbelievable as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman-Miss Lewinsky.”
Reactions from SUV drivers at Fresh Fields were mixed: Many gave us the finger or urged us to visit a very hot place typically reserved for unrepentant sinners, but some were open to hearing about the downside of the SUV revolution. (The vast majority, to be honest, didn’t really understand why some guy was running after them screaming, “Your car kills! Your car kills!” while I paraphrased that old civil-rights chant, “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, SUVs have got to go!”)
One unaware GMC driver actually came over and listened intently as Miller told him that the car he was driving spews out 47 percent more pollution than the average car, that it’s three times more likely to roll over in a crash, that it’s twice as likely to kill the driver of another car in a collision and that its gas mileage is laughable when you consider that even the Model-T Ford got 20 miles per gallon. (Don’t believe me? I wouldn’t either, but smarter writers than me have come to the same conclusion. Check out Paul Roberts’s great piece, “Bad Sports: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the SUV” in the April issue of Harper’s.)
Of course, most SUV fans strictly adhered to the Fleischer Doctrine.
“This is America,” one man said. “People can buy whatever they want. Sounds to me like you’re trying to tell us all what to do.”
“No, we just hope people will make better-educated choices when they know the facts,” Miller explained, growing a little frustrated with Americans’ seeming refusal to accept that there are ramifications to actions such as the purchase of $35,000 trucks.
“This whole thing sounds like Al Gore stuff,” the man said, walking off dismissively. (Who knew that, in exile, Al Gore’s name had become shorthand for Americans’ latent fear of communist-style dictatorship?)
Meanwhile, the still-unnamed Strike Forcer taunted SUV drivers as they turned into the Fresh Fields parking lot. “Get rid of that car!” (Admittedly, he was not always ready for prime time, sometimes yelling, “Get out of that car,” as if trying to instigate a brawl that he would most certainly lose.)
After an hour of taunting and leafleting, the Strike Force had collected the names of 10 people willing to show up at a future protest-including one woman who was still limping from an accident involving an SUV that totaled her small car-and suspended the day’s protest content in the knowledge that we’d pissed off a few smug SUV drivers, educated a few others, comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. (For me, it was like college all over again, without the constant struggle to get dates).
And the only fuel we burned was our own. Sorry, Ari.
