Make the world a safer place … buy an SUV.

ALTERNATIVES JOURNAL: Spring 2004 (See also: Opposing Viewpoints: The Environment, Thomson Gale, 2005)

Everyone should have a Sub Urban Vanity – or rather a Selfish Upscale Van. Or is it a Simply Unnecesssary Vehicle?  Forget the name. The ads all say we need one.

SUVs are ideal for city driving. They are safer, particularly in a collision with someone who doesn’t have one. 

SUVs make it easier to escape the city. Cities are clogged with noisy cars and trucks spewing toxics, so you need a dependable get-away vehicle.  How better to flee than with four-wheel traction, hill descent control and all-terrain, anti-lock brakes?

SUVs give your children a secure environment — an extended warranty cabin where they can drink chilled beverages while they figure out how to cope with the extra carbon dioxide you pump into the atmosphere on their behalf. Why keep fossil fuels in the ground when your kids appreciate a challenge? 

Your SUV’s seat-cooled three-zone climate-controlled interior provides a comfortable refuge from power-hungry bureaucrats promoting the notion of global warming. Nothing, not even climate decay, catches you by surprise — you have blind spot monitoring and the ability to engage in intellectual off-roading.

People without SUVs lack not only fully independent rear suspensions but imagination. Driving a white SUV, you’re no bland commuter — you’re an aid worker in Borneo. Get it mud-splattered and you’re not putting off the car wash — you’re an adventurer on safari chasing down fleeing antelope (wearing bike helmets) in the Valley of the Don. And in Cadillac’s new mega-model, with room for eight and cargo, you’re not a solo-driving, gas-guzzling boor spewing 15 tons of greenhouse gases annually from a vehicle rated a perfect zero by the US EPA — you’re a self-sacrificing patriot waiting for the call to transport troops, arms and bio-suits to the terrorist front.

I used to fret about SUV waste and inefficiency. A big SUV weighs over 6,000 pounds, the average driver only about 150. Forty pounds of metal and upholstery to transport a pound of flesh can’t make sense, even if you are putting on weight.

If the secret to a prosperous economy is producing big useless objects that pollute, then why not produce big useless objects that are benign, such as immobile slabs of metal for our driveways. Freed from our cash-eating gas-gluttons we might work a day less each week, pool our money for advanced rapid transit and hire a Sherpa clan when we really have to off-road in the Himalayas. There would still be plenty of jobs. Marketing representatives, for instance, could be re-deployed from convincing people that Trail Blazers, Pathfinders, and Navigators are crucial for finding the corner store, to pitching the enviro-friendly slabs as the latest fashion accessory for the wealthy.

I am no longer so naïve. One day, my economic theories so polluted my thoughts while signaling a left from my bike, that I missed the scent of an approaching Durango. A horn blast sent my brain hurtling into my skull’s dashboard. A little man leaned out an orifice of the behemoth and bellowed, “Get off the road, you’re not a car.”

The jolt re-arranged my thoughts into a new, lighter order. I realized that I had not been leading the life of an exemplary consumer. I only occasionally bought a cheap tire tube for a flat or demanded emergency services when flattened by a more enlightened SUV driver.

Big SUVs, and smaller vehicles before them, create production jobs and endless spin-off employment. There are maintenance crews for roads, insurance adjusters for the injured, cops and judges for the inebriated, asthma puffer sales reps for kids, grief counselors for teenagers, and nurses and doctors for the not-quite-road-kill.

The SUV is truly the hemlock-spiced lifeblood of our wellbeing.

But the next chapter of this feel-good story is still being written. It will be called: Everyone should have a Hummer.