I was perusing The Huffington Post today, and came across a story about a teen driving on one tank of gas for the whole summer.
I usually don’t like to post about stuff from HuffPo, simply because they’re almost radical left and my husband’s redneck ways still cling to me in a sort of affectionate kind of way. (We kill rodents [read: jackrabbits], love to shoot and drink and drive our truck – it’s our only vehicle, though – and not necessarily all at the same time, but catch us on the right Friday.) And a lot of the comments on this article were really rather venemous toward the girl who is doing this.
But really, let’s drop the snark for a second and evaluate. Most of the comments revolve around how the commenter didn’t have a car in college and if they did it wasn’t til right before they graduated, on and on. Maybe that was recently, maybe that was ten years ago. The fact of the matter is, giving our teens their very own form of transportation seems to have become the norm. Even just five (or is it six now?) years ago when I was in highschool, the student parking lot was jam packed with everything from Lexuses (Lexii?) to a really awesome Rabbit – tricked out in hippy like spray paint with some mushrooms and the like.
Now that we’ve dealt with that point, let’s move on to the next point. Whether or not public transportation should count against her one tank of gas goal. If she had driven her car, would the buses not have run? Would the trolley have stopped entirely? From my (somewhat) logical viewpoint, she’s riding on transportation that would’ve run whether or not she was using it, therefore, it was fuel already predetermined to be used. I don’t think that counts. In fact, if we’re going to get so darn nit picky about it, what’s the point in having read the article, or watched the interview at all? (In order to get to the mention of public transportation, one would have had to watch the interview, and if a person is that nonplussed about this whole endeavor, then why watch the video?)
When you boil it down, she’s doing something that’s, really, out of the norm. She’s using public transportation, she’s riding a bicycle, and in a time when most teens would scoff at the idea of being caught dead on the bus system. We’re not talking about preaching to the choir, here, we’re talking about spreading the green news, people!
And for the commenters that failed to see it as news – it was actually inserted as a fluff piece between news stories. The bit about “all this breaking news” was actually the reason why he had to cut the interview short. The impression I got from Danni was that it was simply a challenge she’d made for herself, she started blogging about it, and then it grew from there.
