What's wrong with this car?

[Okeefenokee]

There's this car.

It's supposed to get thirty miles per gallon, but it only gets ten.

Its engine is supposed to last for 300,000 miles, but the driver has to replace it every hundred thousand miles.

The tires are supposed to last fifteen thousand miles, but they're only averaging five thousand miles.

The suspension should keep the driver riding smoothly for about five years, but he has to replace it every year if he wants a smooth ride.

What's wrong with it?

He takes it to the mechanic, and the mechanic starts looking it over.

He checks out the engine to see why the fuel economy is so low, and why it isn't lasting as long as it should. He checks out the tires to see if they're defective. He looks over the shocks and struts to see why they keep failing.

On and on, he looks at each individual component to figure out why nothing on this car is working like it's supposed to, and he can see that everything is worn far worse than it should be. Every component is in far worse shape than it ought to be, but he can't find what it is about this car that is causing everything to break down far more rapidly than it ought to.

So what's wrong with the car?

Examining the car won't tell him that the driver is the problem.

He guns the engine every time he accelerates, and doesn't start braking until he's so close to where he needs to stop that he has to squeal the tires. He's killing his fuel economy by driving this way, and adding additional stress to every component of the drive train.

Not only that, he never changes his oil or any other fluids, thus destroying the engine and transmission. He never checks his tire pressure, so they wear out early and further degrade his fuel economy. He doesn't change his air filters. He hits speed bumps and curbs regularly at full speed. He drives his car like no one ever taught him how to drive.

His father didn't have these problems. Times were different when he got his first car, and he grew up learning the right way to operate and maintain a vehicle, so it would last. The cars back then couldn't take so much abuse, nor were they so cheap to repair, so he learned early the right way to do things.

Easy on the gas, early off the gas. Every time you hit the brakes you're wasting gas. If your car dies on you in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, there's no one coming to help you.

The mechanic is focused on the individual problems ailing the car, the symptoms, but he's missing the cause. The owner is running this car into the ground because he can. He's got a cheap fix for every problem he causes, so he keeps causing them, and every mechanic that gets called to fix these problems is stuck scratching his head as to why the hell everything on this car keeps breaking.

But this isn't a car, and it isn't a driver, and it isn't a mechanic.

It's a nation, and its electorate, and its government.

And when it dies on you in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, there's no one coming to help.

Just something I was thinking.

[Montegriffo]

Good anology for how we treat the planet.