When I was growing up I was taught that the advent of the personal automobile was a vast improvement in the freedom, mobility, and general welfare of all Americans. This was true. Children are now taught that people should enjoy being herded onto mass transit to sit between homeless derelicts that throw up on your shoes and gang bangers looking for a fight.
The dawning of a new age of freedom!
COGs understand cars. They break the world into three categories; people with cars, folks like children and the elderly who cannot have a car, and people who don’t have a car as a demonstration of their inherent uselessness.
An adult without a car is going nowhere both literally and figuratively. (Though COGs might shy away from flowery language like “figuratively”.)
- All COGs have cars. They have a car because they have actual lives and actual responsibilities. They need to get to work…every stinking damn day and not just when the bus is running. They need to get to their kid’s soccer game. They need to get groceries. They need to visit Grandma.
- COGs do not oppose electric cars, recumbent bikes, in-line skates, or whatever flamboyant horseshit non-COGs choose to gallivant around in. They only oppose paying for it. Also it would be nice if you stayed the hell off the road. COGs secretly wonder how the heck you can hold down a job if you use a recumbent bike as a means of transportation.
- COGs have valid drivers licenses and insurance on their cars.
- COGs don’t drive drunk.
- If a COG gets a speeding ticket for going five over the limit they’ll try to keep it under their hat.
- Male COGs believe adult men who don’t have their own car should never get laid. Female COGs will never seriously consider a liasion with a man that doesn’t have his own car.
- COGs never park illegally. They’re not sure why.
- COGs appreciate superior vehicles but will be satisfied by darned near anything that is guaranteed to start on a cold morning and move under its own power.
- COGs view car leases with suspicion but will usually accept payments on a car loan.
- A COG, when facing dire financial stress, view the loss of their car as the first step on a slippery slope that leads to doing tricks in an alley in Tijuana.
I’ll break ranks with you a bit here. I ride my bike to work on occasion (upright, not recumbent, though). I figure that if I’ve got to get in 5+ hrs a week of PT by reg anyhow, I might as well save a few bucks in the process.
But you do own a vehicle right? Getting a little fresh air is not anti-COG…I commute on motorcycle every time I can.
Also, and this will ruffle feathers, I think myself and many of my readers might not be COGs. (There’s another series of posts in there somewhere.) That doesn’t mean we’re layabout yahoo sheep…only that we’re a bit more “deliberate in thought and deed” than the herdlike COGs of yore. We almost have to be to survive in modern times.
Four vehicles… if I can count my tractor!
Never had a car payment, never will. Bikes, the same. If I can’t pay for it, I shouldn’t have it in the driveway. I’m not proposing it as a COG rule or anything; it’s just my policy. I don’t believe in debt.