The Rugged Individualist

I took a respite today from The War Against the Car. Due to blowing snow, I took a pass on commuting via bike this morning and ended up losing a battle to the rugged in-duh-vidualists at the Walled Street Journal.

Welcome to the modern-day Luddite movement, which once raged against the machine, but now targets the automobile. Just last month, environmentalists organized a "world car-free day," celebrated in more than 40 cities in the U.S. and Europe. In the left's vision of utopia, cars have been banished -- replaced by bicycles and mass transit systems.
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To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable -- it is our exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways.

Coming back to reality, I have found that the smaller U-locks work just as well as the bigger Kryptonites as a prophylactic against thieves. You can easily slip it in your pocket and just about any hand-rail will work. Strange that I finally figured this out after all these years.

I may have lost a battle today, but with my new lock cum brass-knuckle, I may end up winning the war.