The other day I hit a light pole with my car, and I was pissed, especially since I was trying to be safe by looking to my right to make sure no cars were coming down this one way driveway before I turned left to leave the parking lot. Little did I know that while I drove slowly looking right, ready to gun the engine and turn left, my car had drifted toward the light pole that I thought that I had cleared on my right. I stepped on the pedal and BAM! My left bumper hit the light pole.
It wasn’t a major accident. I couldn’t have been going more than 5-10 miles an hour, if that. My air bag didn’t deploy. I wasn’t hurt. I was more surprised than anything, and although I knew that I had scarred the bumper of my brand new car, I didn’t even bother to get out to see the damage. I figured that I’d look at it when I got home. It couldn’t be that bad. I was just hurt that my new car didn’t look new anymore.
As I had suspected, the paint was rubbed off of my bumper and there was a small gash above it. I figured that I could pay for the damage out of pocket and not contact my insurance company. It couldn’t be more than the $500 deductible that I’d have to pay anyway. Well, was I in for a surprise! By the time the estimate came back to me it was over $3,000. All I could do was laugh. Was this a joke? I discovered quickly that it was not.
What I found out was that the car that I was driving was the joke. It was explained to me that the cars these days were made out of plastic and the thing that I called a bumper really wasn’t a bumper. They don’t make many cars with bumpers anymore. Cars made out of steel were a thing of the past. The man at the Collision Center
Later I thought about what he said and realized that he was absolutely right. I’ve lived long enough to be driving a plastic car, put my groceries in plastic shopping bags, drink my milk and juice out of plastic jugs, which I pour into plastic cups. I can eat off of plastic dishes, with plastic knives and forks. The toys that I buy for my great-grandchildren are all plastic and most of the purchases that I make are made with a plastic credit card. Just about everything around me these days that is manmade is made out of plastic and worst of all, every day I speak to plastic people who show no emotions for others, and things are not getting better.
Usually I try to get too serious in these little messages that I write, but I can’t find one thing amusing about what’s happened. As I watch my great-grandchildren and their friends sit before plastic computer screens every day for hours with little human interaction, I can only see things growing worse. Real is becoming a thing of the past, and pretty soon that will become a plastic memory. Lord am I grateful to have lived in that past, because you see a plastic world just is not for me. Now you can muse on that.
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