Personal Carbon Footprints

We have been hearing a lot about this term lately, to the effect that: "We should all do our parts to be environmentally friendly, to leave the least “personal carbon footprints" as possible in our daily life." But in the past week, I have encountered two incidents that were environmentally unfriendly, not to mention humanly unkind.

I was driving my family on a freeway to a friend’s house for dinner. The traffic was moving blithely at a leisure pace. Then I heard a car honking a series of "get out of my way" blasts from behind. I glanced at my rear view mirror and saw a black SUV weaving its way in and out of traffic and trying to get to nowhere fast. As the SUV zipped past me, its tailpipe belching out clouds of black exhaust, its driver kept blasting the car horn as if he was performing a CPR on his gagging car. Then it cut in front of a Toyota to my left, the driver in that Toyota yelled out "Hey, buddy, what’s your hurry? Heaven can’t wait?" A less cordial voice echoed him "Hey, it is better to shit in your pants, if that’s your hurry, than to get us all killed!" The gruffish man in the SUV, a huge monster of a gas guzzler, stuck his middle finger out in appreciation, hurled back a series of retorts sprinkled with the big "F" word as blatantly as his honkings and accelerated, leaving a trail of foul "personal carbon footprints" and smoky bad feelings behind him.

In another incident, I was eating an ecologically friendly dinner of organic vegetarian tofu dish with my family at a restaurant and in came a couple of corpulent proportion, both in weight and fashionable wealth. Their combined bio-mass must have tipped the scale at more than 500 U.S. avoirdupois pounds. I normally form opinions of people not by their appearances but by their behaviors. They parted the crowded restaurant’s traffic wave just as Moses parting the Red Sea. They walked as if they owned the right of way, charging ahead, yielding to no one and taking no prisoners.

In deference to their loud display of haute couture and lofty station in body index, a svelte and graceful hostess, probably an aspiring fashion model, led them to a roomy posh bench seat table close to ours. They mounted the seats as if ascending the thrones, making all the noisy fanfare of their presence by protesting it was not a good location, bad lighting, etc. The queen grilled and pestered the poor hostess with questions and pronouncements that put the Medieval Roman Catholic Church Inquisition to shame and the poor girl close to tears. Distracted by this noisy interruption to their quiet dinner and the rude treatment of the hostess, all the neighbor diners glanced at them askance. They belonged to the class of people called nouveaux riches, they demand respect where respect is not due and any small slight reminds them of where they have been.

Then they held court with a pile of food large enough to feed the Darfur refugee camp for a day or a troupe of fashion models for a month at the height of New York fashion show season (OK, I may have exaggerated a little). Talk about consummate consumption. Just as everyone thought the quiet had returned to the Western Front, then out came a cannon shot that’s heard all over this part of the haute cuisine world. Up shot the Queen of Hearts from her royal perch, red-faced, breaking loose a series of gale-force winds. She hurtled headlong towards the lady room and missing the royal flush along the way, dripping a trail of odorous "personal carbon footprints" behind her.

So, folks, be nice to your fellow man! Try your best to leave small "personal carbon footprints" for the rest of the world. Be environmentally and courtesy aware! Check out some of my social poetry at http://pfjchow.com/Documents/index.html