Bandwagon -v- 'Gas'wagon

Gas guzzlers. Dontcha just hate 'em. Ummmm, well No, actually. I mean, why should I? If some people need, or even just want, to drive around in larger vehicles why the hell should it matter a jot to me?

Trouble is, thats not good enough for the sandal-wearers. They want anything with a 4x4 badge on it to be removed from our roads under pain of social leprosy. Here's the 'manifesto' from the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s.

"Our goals are to make driving a big 4x4 as socially unacceptable as drink-driving and to increase taxes on big 4x4 vehicles, including a CO2-based congestion charge in London, variable parking rates and increases in road tax. We are demanding an end to 4x4 advertisements in the mainstream media. We will pressure the UK government to agree to binding emissions targets for the auto manufacturers. We will also work towards visionary and sustainable transport solutions."

How can anyone not find that to be utterly flippin' barking? Dont these cretins understand how completely barmy such statements sound to the mainstream public? They cant even manage to define what a 4x4 is - their best description is a basic shape, for God's sake! Now forgive the stereotyping, but have you ever noticed that these people fit a particular mould? Long, unwashed hair, unemployed and welfare-dependant, wear sandals and wooly jumpers, armfuls of similarly workshy kids? What socio-economic subgroup happily fits all those descriptions? 'Non-conformists' works for me - these are people who dont comfortably 'fit' with societal norms and, in their resentment at being 'different' they need a cause to champion. Today, its 4x4's. If the rest of us cave in to their hare-brained concepts, they'd need another cause tomorrow or they wouldn't have any meaning to their lives.

Its difficult to view the people within these campaigns with anything but candidates for 'sectioning' simply because of their radical level of intolerance for those around them. 'Greenpeace', one of (if not the) most completely removed from sanity mobs around, have a video online where colleagues of a chap spit in his coffee, stick a sign on his back saying "I am a pr*ck", and mutter "W**ker" under their breath as he walks past. Whats his 'crime'? He owns a Toyota Landcruiser! At the risk of sounding serious again, are we as a nation that consumed with hate that we find lunacy like that acceptable? Because of his choice of car? Intolerance, sad but true, breeds intolerance - I think its high time people like this were lined up and shot at dawn.