Quixotic

I was driving a friend home from breakfast the other day.  Every Monday morning a group of us gather in a local restaurant, eat yummy food and get caught up.  This particular friend has mobility issues, hence the drive home.

She asked what I was planning to do with the rest of my day.  I said that I'd like to get to the library, but with all the snow we were getting, the sidewalks might be a bit messy and maybe I'd leave it another day.

Sounding a little annoyed, she said, "You know, you are allowed to drive once in awhile."

And I thought.  Hmm. 

Apparently my purely personal decision to not drive for errands that are less than a mile from my house and that I really didn't think I'd been preaching about, but obviously have mentioned - the environment is a regular topic of conversation on Monday mornings - gets under peoples' skin.

I've been called an environmental extremist because I don't own a dishwasher.  I usually keep pretty quiet about the fact that I don't own a clothes dryer, either.

And if my own, few, really simple choices are seen as extreme, well, humanity is pretty much doomed, isn't it?

Because the planet? Has been around a long time and has weathered worse storms than the one that's heading our way.  But humans?  We're fragile and weak.  And apparently too stupid to save our own skins.

Sometimes I can take the long view and see that things come and things go and maybe our time is just over. 

But most of the time, it really just pisses me off that the thing that's going to cause the extinction of the species is our own sheer laziness.