It's About Affordability

I love analogies of all kinds. Analogies've been very good to me. For example, thanks to my ability to ace SAT multiple choice analogy questions, I was able to attend college. That was in spite of the countless Ds in Language Arts I earned by not doing any of my stupid moron teachers' stupid homework for morons and stupid losers, on account of my being socially maladjusted.

But, more important than getting into college so you can study hard, excel, party, and get laid, analogies can be instructive. By means of analogies you can learn to better live in this complicated world of ours, and so better party, and get laid.

Here's an instructive analogy: Living on the street out of a cardboard box even though you are able-bodied, is to being homeless, as being unable to drive to work even though you have a functioning car is to being gasolineless.

In ten years, as the price of gasoline continues to rise, I expect there will be thousands of the gasolineless walking 5, 10, or 15 miles to work every day. People who can still afford gasoline will look down upon the gasolineless. They'll say, if only the gasolineless applied themselves and worked extra jobs in other cities, they could afford gasoline like decent people. Boneheaded compassionate conservatives will lament the downward spiral that results from gasolinelessness. Because many of the gasolineless won't be able to get to work at all, their rents and mortgages will go unpaid, causing them to become homeless, too, after which it will be minutes before they start begging and using their change to buy Thunderbird. Boneheaded compassionate Liberals will speak of the ennobling effects of gasolinelessness.

High School kids will go gasolineless for a weekend to learn how hard it is, then write term papers on how it felt. The ones who weren't disposed to be sympathetic from the start will write about how it wasn't so bad having to walk to the neighborhood McDonald's for a change, and how the gasolineless are all whiners and losers.

After another ten or fifteen years, the gasolineless will be visible everywhere, bringing down property values and bumming decent people out. People will bitch and moan about how they can't drive two blocks without having to ignore a dozen or more dirty aggressive hitchhikers. So a Ten Year Plan to End Gasolinelessness will be developed by a Committee to End Gasolinelessness in King County. The committee will have numerous subcommittees, because the gasolineless come in so many different kinds. There's the Single Adult Gasolineless, the Families With Children Gasolineless, and the Senior Citizen & Physically Disabled Gasolineless.


[Above: As gasolinelessness increases, we'll be subjected to scenes like this everywhere. Our young men and women will all become indistinguishable from Europeans.]

They will come up with something called Gasoline-First. The idea originally will be to supply gasoline to all the gasolineless first, and only when they are in a stable gasoline-adequate living situation to begin work on the problems that made them gasolineless, so they can gradually improve themselves, develop work skills, and find productive work appropriate to their needs and abilities. Advocates of the Gasoline-First approach will tell the skeptics that it is easier and cheaper to give people gasoline than to have them cluttering our streets and highways thumbing rides, leaving us no choice but to jail them all.

Unfortunately there won't be funding for all the gasoline needed to do Gasoline-First for everybody right away, mainly because not enough people involved in the Ten Year Planning would raise hell and demand full funding. So in all the subcommittees the talk will focus on the Chronically Gasolineless -- people who are gasolineless for either long periods of time or repeatedly, who are the costliest burden on society. With the money we save Gasoline-Firsting the Chronically Gasolineless they believe we will eventually be able to Gasoline-First others.

Also our success in helping the Chronically Gasolineless out of Gasolinelessness will show what's possible and create the political will needed to end all Gasolinelessness, just in the nick of time, before the ten years are up.