Ed Firmage Jr.On Two-Year Olds Walking to Church
As I’m about to discuss the world religious, I begin with a confession. I’m the anonymous source of Cliff’s photograph and caption about walking instead of driving to church (“Church Goers Should Walk If They Can”), which prompted one LDS reader to wail, “Try walking half a mile with a two-year old.” Well, honey, I have.
When my wife and I were poor students in Jerusalem, we had no car, so we either took the (excellent) public transit or we walked. More often than not, we walked, since Egged did not cater to LDS families needing to get to church on Sunday. And guess who walked with us? Our two-year old daughter, Elizabeth.
Our adventures in walking didn’t end when we got back from Israel. We subsequently discovered the pleasures of walking with our kids through the mountains and canyons of Utah. Sometimes we carried them in backpacks, but just as often they walked on their own two feet. At the ripe age of four, our daughter Victoria knocked off a ten mile hike in Capitol Reef without being carried one step.
So, to church-going readers I say that walking to church with a two-year old is not yet beyond the ability even of today’s well-fed LDS. Those who take the half-mile challenge will find strength in the loins and sinews, and best of all, will have loins that don’t look like doughnuts and kids that don’t look like self-propelled, jelly-filled pastries. They will also discover that the obese, armor-plated, soundproofed, begadgeted Escalade capsules in which they move themselves from one Lord’s errand to another is simply a Prius yearning to be free.
July 17th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Great post!
Something tells me, however, that if you take the difficulties associated with walking a two-year old to church off the table, our LDS friends will simply come up with an equally absurd excuse why they need the Escalade waiting for them in the parking lot.
Hypocrites! All of them!
July 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
You still driving your SUV Albert? Isn’t it all of us? I seem to remember the vehicle being used for short hops down to Dans, or the liquor store from Cliffs’ house.
I guess it all depends on what you need and worship. We all have our personal weaknesses.
July 17th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I ride my bicycle to and from work everyday - don’t know what you are talking about!
July 17th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Hiking in Capitol Reef, (Sleeping Rainbow), at four!
Lucky girl!
July 17th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Albert,
Well, there is the practical problem of how to carry all of that Scriptural baggage to church. Perhaps in the interest of limiting global warming and local pollution, the Church could suggest that Sundays be “Scripture Lite” days, when the burden of carrying one’s Quad (all-in-one Scriptures, not to be confused with quads, the atrophied muscle group responsible for locomotion to and from church) is lifted, thereby making walking possible.
Then there is the problem of how to carry all of the paraphernalia for keeping the kids quiet through three hours of ecclesiastical lobotomization (kids at first naturally object to this procedure). There are, for example, the baby bottles, the bags of Cheerios, the oversize picture books, the stuffed animals, the Book of Mormon action figures (complete with pop-off heads), etc., etc. Maybe, in addition to being Scripture Lite days, Sundays could also be declared Kids-Free. Parents could leave the brood at home in charge of one another (which would have the possible side benefit of also reducing the surplus population) and spend a couple hours without the twelve little heavenly spirits.
After due consideration, however, and strangely inspired by such unorthodox solutions, everyone might, like the Monty Python knights in search of Camelot, declare church a silly place and go off to worship (on foot, of course) in Neffs Canyon or the Mt. Olympus wilderness.
I can hear my fellow wilderness-loving hermits–”the nice thing about being a hermit is that you meet people”– gasping, “No, don’t tell them to come up here!!!” Here I reveal the brilliance of my plan. In suggesting a course of action so potentially detrimental to my own Sunday solitude, I ensure that my solitude will never in fact be disturbed, except by other heretics, the unchosen few.
In all likelihood, therefore, we heretical hermits will continue to enjoy our sabbatical wilderness, the faithful will continue to drive to Sunday lobotomization, and the world will continue to go to hell.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Do you or do you not own a 6 cylinder SUV that at one time or another left Cliffs house for the purpose of procuring beverages less than 1 mile from his house?
Isn’t it true Albert, that this would not have been a one time occurrence?
I may remind you that we were not discussing how you get to work, but post employment practices.
Ed, then there is always the issue of how to get the 3 litre box of wine back to the house. Usually come up short and have to get another, which is even more dangerous on a bike, than in a car. Pays to invite a teetotaler. They can make the run.
July 17th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I’d drive my car 1 block just to bug you people.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:00 am
Thought of giving up my SUV, guess now I’ll definitely keep it.
On a serious note, this is something that I’ve encountered previously. I’m not rich enough to own a car for every reason I have to drive. I commute to work most days, I haul stuff for the family on other days. Sometimes I go camping, some of my hobbies require more space than a sedan allows, some days I just run errands. So, what should I do?
I can’t afford a different car for each reason, so I buy a car that meets the maximum requirements and do what I can to conserve. This is what makes economical sense for my family and me; deal with it. I haven’t looked at the difference in pollution levels between vehicle types lately, but I bet it is not that great of a difference. Gas economy is a price I PAY, not you or others. When you are paying for my gas, you can dictate what I drive.
As for as driving to church when the people live close by, it also depends on what else those folks are doing before and after, doesn’t it?
I’m not familiar with the LDS church, but our church often has small group meetings afterwards or a group of friends meet for a meal. Appearances are often deceiving.
Should people conserve and be environmentally friendly, yes but not at the expense of living life.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Bob,
My post, if that’s what you’re reacting to, wasn’t about the kind of car you drive but about how you (not you specifically) drive it. Of course people may have things before or after church that may necessitate their showing up in a car. But that’s the exception not the rule for a neighborhood church such as the majority of LDS wards here in SLC. In other denominations that don’t have the presence that the LDS Church does you may live twenty miles from your church, and that will necessitate driving or taking public transit. What I’m talking about is an attitude of not giving a damn, of living mindlessly and doing things a certain way without thinking or caring about the consequences. Driving to church when it’s within walking distance and you’re able to walk and other considerations don’t dictate that you MUST drive is an act of not thinking and not caring. It’s also just plain laziness. Period.
“I haven’t looked at the difference in pollution levels between types of vehicles…but I bet it is not that great…” Actually, it is. Without necessarily pointing a finger at your particular choice of vehicle, let me just say that the amount of pollution is directly proportional to the gas mileage of the vehicle. Take CO2 for example. According to the EPA, you emit almost 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gas you use. A Prius that gets 50 mpg in the city therefore emits 2.5 times less CO2 than a Yukon Hybrid that gets 20. Multiply that difference by 100,000 vehicles and you see that the total difference, environmentally speaking, is staggering. More staggering still is the difference between not using your car, even your Prius, versus being lazy and driving when walking is possible.
“People [should] conserve and be environmentally friendly but not at the expense of living life.” If by “living life” you mean doing anything you want to do, then your attitude is a prescription for suicide. Being environmentally friendly is not a lifestyle choice like putting on green versus red shirts. It’s a choice of life or death. If we ignore the environment in our daily decisions, including those involved in “living life,” then we are digging our own grave, and our lifestyle will die with us. Here on the Wasatch Front, for example, an estimated 2,000 people die prematurely each year from illnesses related to our dreadful air pollution (source: Utah Physicians for a Health Environment). How much we drive our cars is directly related to this pollution and therefore to our health. Here in Utah one in 79 boys are born with autism–twice the national average. The leading suspect in autism is environmental mercury, and the leading cause of this is coal-fired power plants. If living life means acting without thought toward real energy conservation, which we haven’t even begun to practice as a community, then we’re dooming our sons. That’s not my idea of “living life.”
It’s also not my idea of morality. The LDS Church has chosen to spend its real and its political capital on utter irrelevancies such as defeating gay marriage while one in EVERY 79 boys here will be born with blighted futures. That’s a moral outrage that the Church, which portrays itself as a moral crusader, chooses to ignore. It’s just one of many similar instances of priorities wildly out of whack. LDS leadership is straining at gnats and swallowing camels. They’re even more clueless than the membership. In fact, LDS leaders are in danger of becoming their own worst parody.
Mormons here on the Wasatch Front, like Americans in general but worse, are stuck in behavioral ruts so deep they can’t see over the top of them. Driving to church is one of these. You can prettify your rut and call it “lifestyle” or “living life” or whatever you want. It’s still a hole in the ground.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Bob said:
I believe that was exactly the point of the original post. Do what you can to conserve–like walk to things that are only a short distance from home. That would include, for most of us Mormons along the Wasatch Front, Church.
And we do all pay the price of your gas. We all externalize the cost of our fuel consumption in the fumes that we leave in the air which eventually cause the DEQ to issue air quality alerts recommending that we not breathe the air. Because we all pay that price for the fuel auto users burn, the entire community does indeed have an interest in “dictating” how we use that fuel.
Mature attitude, Ken. Be extra lazy and extra polluting just to spite people. Nice.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Ed, if you are an environmentalist, you must be familiar with David Suzuki. Working with a conjunction of scientists, they developed an environmental calculus.
Part of the calculus is about cars.
The determination came to be that owning a car, never mind driving it, places a persons impact on the environment as the equivalent of 100 3rd worlders. Simply the industrial waste produced to manufacture a vehicle places a person in the rarefied air of mass environmental poisoner. The mining, the fuel to acquire raw materials, manufacture, etc. etc…
After that driving is just a matter of degrees as to how “bad” you are to the likes of David and REAL environmentalists. That said Dave has one, and travels by jet regularly to spread his wisdom around the world. As we can see, what with vehicle numbers increasing planet wide, people are listening. Fuel demand never higher, as is the price.
The idea that someones gas hog makes them a bad person, is negated by the fact, plain and simple, if you own a car, you are in the paint with everyone, and your concept of superiority serves only your ego, if not the planet.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I’m seeing a pattern here. It seems all the anti-conservation folks are using selfish motives to justify their treatment of the planet and to deny their responsibility to larger society.
“Pigs get slaughtered”
July 18th, 2008 at 9:58 am
It isn’t that, it is simply as we know it, the conception of ourselves as polluters, linked to the new religion of conservation, doesn’t particularly accomplish much. As far as I know, Cliff, you still own a 6 cylinder SUV, and while the game talks well, the reality doesn’t. Ride the bus much?
Your own home, unless you have destroyed it, is about as big an energy derelict as can be had without actually trying. The environment doesn’t care if you have good intentions, comes down to calories. Heating with electric or gas, is the way of life in Utah, pile on the coal come winter, let the fallout drift over Colorado. Just they way it is for now.
Do you think your hot tub is a luxury? It is heated by coal.
To be sure there are plenty of people conserving that do a far better job than you do, that do not hold entirely “progressive” attitudes. The proof of conservation comes in your own personal usage, anything less brands one a hypocrite. That said, judging people on energy usage is a choice, one that obviously has social backlash. Economics will decide the issue in the end, not morality.
The fact remains, that the human race will burn more hydrocarbons next year as this one, demand and the spread of cars to the 3rd world hurrying unabated. What isn’t burned here, gets burned somewhere. Conservation is important, but it simply provides more supply for a growing population of drivers. Quite a conundrum, with few answers.
With china building 500, 500 MW coal burners in the next 5 years, what we conserve they will burn to add to the worlds pollution. Think we can get them to stop? It’s why we aren’t stopping either.
Pigs get slaughtered, Cliff, but Wild Boar rule the roost.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:59 am
To Who is Watching the Watchers
I know David Suzuki, and I agree with him about the cost of even owning a car. That does not, however, by ANY means negate the impact of driving one. That’s like saying that having pneumonia is really bad, so smoking while you have pneumonia doesn’t matter. The former may in fact kill you. The latter probably will.
Unfortunately, our society here in the western U.S. is set up so as to be almost impossible without a car. Unlike European cities, which with a much longer history of settlement have favored densely clustered population, ours are spread out over miles. And unlike European cities, ours have dreadful mass transit. The reason our cities are set up this way is that they came into being, or matured anyway, in the era of the automobile. They presuppose the auto in absolutely every detail of their planning and layout.
If you live in the West, you therefore have to have access to a car. People who drive cars are not ipso facto evil. But we often are careless. The point of my post is that we need to take care, to be thoughtful about how we use our cars, and hope that through concerted action on many fronts we can prevail upon the auto industry to give us something dramatically better, and that we can prevail upon our benighted so-called leaders to make mass transit and environmentally friendly urban planning a priority.
Those of you who console yourselves by dismissing environmental concerns as “superior” are right only to the extent that you persist in acting like an idiot. Everyone makes mistakes (like designing your cities around the automobile). Only an idiot persists in his mistake. If that makes me superior, then so be it. Natural selection has no prize for second place.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:19 am
The point is Ed, that the damage from driving is only the half of it. One way or another conveyances have to get people around. In France the entire grid that runs trains, streetcars and electric buses is run on nuclear power, here we burn dirty and produce carbon. Pick your way and live with it, don’t like it, make personal changes. No one else is going to do it for us.
This is a giant country. No public transit system is going to serve the US in the manner we live and the spaces between economies. Just the realities of a big country. Whatever is going to be built, will be expensive. If you wish to live in an enclave that serves your needs, no one is stopping you, but it is ludicrous to think that our government is going to legislate it….and the coal burns out on the Swell day in day out for all of you. If you conserve, they will sell the extra power to someone who wants it.
Well as far as my own life is concerned, I have about as low an environmental footprint as a person can get, but that does not mean I judge progressives still living within the paradigm as idiots. They can do that well enough themselves.
If you have the dough, you can drive your car. Fill ‘er up.
You are mistaken Ed, no one judges you for your choices. There are no determinations limiting transportation choices here but economics. Not recognizing that is the idiocy. Plenty of those with money, often conservative, already own hybrids, in fact it is people with the money that make the changes, while many broke as a joke progressives are still puttering in old smogmobiles. The government is not going to buy you a new car/conveyance.Not the ones I am looking at, left and right.
It is 9 trillion in debt, and facing up to 40 trillion in unfunded liability mandates in the next 20 years. Can you say inflation? Or the alternative, bankruptcy?
As in all cases, when the economy goes to hell, any hopes of environmental preservation tends to goes along with it. Any hopes we have will have to be undertaken personally, or in private groups.
Natural selection favors those with control of calories and energy Ed. Proven throughout history. If you have the energy, your peoples do better. There is little argument. That we would hope it was clean is of course a major consideration, but for histories sake it is generally secondary to having the power.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
How did a volume of ice that lay upon the land, to the extent that sea level was 300 feet lower than today, some of it 10,000 feet thick, spontaneously melt with CO2 levels 40% lower than they are today? This is the very short period between 13k, and 9k years ago.
Now that is warming of a magnitude people today cannot comprehend. Ice a mile think covering all of Canada, melting away. What is the explanation for this? Why without knowing is any conjecture today taken seriously?
Has it occurred to anyone that our success as a species correlates to this ongoing warming that in fact upon initiation has nothing to do with us?
In an environment where there were no anthropogenic sources to speak of?
July 18th, 2008 at 10:39 am
For those of us who flunked Chemistry:
July 18th, 2008 at 11:01 am
I find interesting that the same folks that complain about the top down morality of religion and “right wingnuts” engage in the same practice when it comes to the religion of enviromentalism.
Their logic is even the same. Saving folks from themselves.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:05 am
That’s a great post, Richard.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am
A good thing too, as it provides a necessity for all plant life. Don’t much think CO2 is the problem, the real problem is toxifying of areas where flora grow. That the sea cannot produce as much algae, and sequester the CO2 is more of a problem than the production of CO2 itself.
With far more capacity for removing CO2 from the environment, destruction of marine environs has worse implications than the production of CO2. No matter what there is going be CO2 production, even if we are gone. That is proven in the geologic record, over and over. There has been a great deal more carbon in the atmosphere as now.
The largest producer of all greenhouse gas, in the rather industrialized state of Washington these last few years has been reactive Mt St. Helens.
July 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
JD,
I had in mind something different than a top-down fiat from government. Government is, after all, supposed to represent the people. What I had in mind was ordinary people saving their own ass. Hence the idea of voluntarily choosing not to drive when possible. What I had in mind was people, recognizing the state they’re in, telling their leaders what to do (isn’t that always how it ends up being).
There is another strategy, however. We can continue with the status quo, drive ourselves off the cliff, and if there are any survivors from the crash, rebuild society. That was the strategy that Ed Abbey favored. Let the whole thing devolve into anarchy and start over. As I read posts from people who seem to think that conservation is bad policy being foisted on society by liberals, I find myself warming to Abbey’s strategy. If I lived by myself, I would probably strongly favor it. The one thing that motivates me to continue trying the alternative is looking at my kids, who don’t yet have a say of their own in this mess.
As for Who Watches, you’re right. A lot of it comes down to money. America, through the present crooked administration that we elected, has ponied up or will pony up at least $3 trillion for the debacle in Iraq. That same money would go a long way toward turning our country around. We chose instead to try and cement a sweetheart deal on more oil. To the extent that this is about money, Who Watches, we can say that we have chosen poorly.
America still has the means, in spite of W and his cronies. The question is whether we have the will.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
We all love our children and are concerned for their futures Ed, in the end though, they must make do with what they have been handed, as all have, and to my constant amazement from study of history, we find a way. Somehow, we are resilient. Otherwise the scrapheap awaits.
It has always been about money, and if it isn’t, it is then been about insane belief. Given the litany of history, pray that it is going to be about the money. It isn’t just about this administration, that is a tired old saw 8 years in, with no one resisting.
W and his cronies cannot kill this country. This too shall pass. The question is as my partying friends say…”How you gonna act when you get there”?
Speaking of scrapheaps, there is so much high value scrap everywhere, so much potential…, do you really want to sell it all to China? 350 bucks a ton for clean steel.
I really think the future of the Country, and the human race, is a simple state of mind…within the constraints of physical limitations. Consider that we don’t know all the secrets of the Universe…by far.
July 18th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Why don’t you liberals admit you love high gas prices. In fact you would love to see gas go to 10 or even 15 dollars a gallon. At that rate government would have to massively subsidize energy, and, food, and the massive unemployment that will cause will bring back the new new deal and the new great society. Thus the government and the special interest groups that control it would have control over every aspect of our lives. Only then can the socialist utopia that liberals dream of become a reality, where everyone is equally miserable and completely dependent on the government.
July 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Ok, Ken, I admit it. So what?
July 19th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Ken missed med-call.
Somebody wake him.
July 19th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
We have to do everything we can to stop the evil Al Gore from succeeding!
Right Watcher? Right Ken?
July 19th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Oh you mean the Algore that flew in on a fuel guzzling Gulf Stream Jet, accompanied by an entourage who were paraded through the streets in several limos and SUV’s? One of which was observed idling for half an hour as to keep the air conditioning running as to avoid the audacity of causing a drop of sweat to appear on his or family member’s foreheads while they were whisked back to their Jet and back to their opulent lifestyle? All for him to lecture us about sacrificing our lifestyles and modern conveniences for the sake of the planet?
July 19th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Ken, are you suggesting that if A.G stayed home and we all shut down our computers so as to reduce our carbon footprint, then drove the biggest gas hogs, just to piss off the ‘other’ wing, that everything would automatically right itself? …Liberals could then be renamed conservatives and, having seen the light, would be more fitting company for the likes of your most enlightened ilk? …all the while your and my tax money go to all that other conservative crap for which this admin is altogether too well known? Makes perfect sense. Thank you, very much.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Ken,
You are too funny. As cav said, you really need to get back on the meds.
PS While you are at it, tell us what it feels like to suddenly realize you have been wrong, wrong, wrong on so many fronts.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Ken:
Give up trying to be the next Sean Hannity. KSL doesn’t have three hours to give you and Doug Wright isn’t about to give you his spot either. Besides, warmongering is on the way out.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
I’ve been enjoying reading your posts…very illuminating.
I’m looking forward to many more.
-Dave
November 12th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I think the world would be a better place if everyone else took the bus to work instead of driving.
Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others