Beep Beep

Here's one more "silver lining" we're getting along with the black cloud of recession hanging over the country.

Americans in recent years Americans were buying about 60 new cars per each 1,000 of our population, but recently that figure has sunk to 35 per 1,000. It's a trend I expect to hang around, since the kind of "recovery" Wall Street has in mind isn't going to happen.

In the long run, this means fewer jobs for auto workers, but it also means less gas consumption and less damage to the environment.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said that all real change is incremental, and accomplished by small steps.

It was slowly and by degrees we got ourselves into the mess we're in now. The only alarmingly rapid expansion of the failed, futureless way of life we're stuck in came during the last 10 years. It is by degrees that we will work ourselves out of it.

Illustration, "Beep Beep," by James Rizzi.