When soccer moms drive tanks, society has clearly lost it

There are only a few things in this world that truly scare me. Centipedes, bats, Gary Busey, just to name a few. But believe me when I say that I am justly terrified every time a petite, middle-aged woman comes barreling down the road in one of the enormous pseudo-tanks we call Hummers, cell phone jammed against her ear, undoubtedly asking her husband if he would prefer KFC or Fred Meyer chicken strips for dinner.

The Hummer is a commercialized version of the military Humvee, which is a lightly armored vehicle designed to break through enemy barricades. How that translates over to taking the kids to Karate lessons is beyond me. Last I checked, running errands in America doesn’t typically involve crashing through barricades (unless, you know, Fred Meyer is surrounded by a ten-foot concrete wall routinely patrolled by armed guards).

I don’t think we will ever truly know who decided that marketing military vehicles to the general public was a good idea. Frankly, I don’t want to. If I were to someday discover who it was, I’d spend the rest of my natural life tracking him down, cornering him in a small town just beyond Cuidad Juarez and ending his life with a swift tire-iron to the skull.

The point is, there’s nothing scarier than a stressed-out soccer mom behind the wheel of a large, armored military vehicle. Is it the fact that, if I were to collide with one, the giant steel behemoth would rip through my helpless Toyota Corolla like a rock through a wet napkin? Or maybe the thought that, if a Hummer owner feels that the driver behind them is following too close, they could have Timmy jump in the rear machine gun-nest to cover their six (and believe me, 11-year-olds are extremely trigger happy)?

Honestly, I think the real reason Hummers terrify me is because the people driving them are irrational morons. What else could they be, willingly purchasing and driving a vehicle – during a severe oil crisis, mind you – with an average gas mileage of eight MPG? These are people under the delusion that their hair-raising quests around the col-de-sacs of suburbia and their frequent trips to the neighborhood Wal-Mart require a reinforced-steel chassis, able to sustain artillery and machine gun fire (which, I’ll admit, in a Wal-Mart parking lot, isn’t actually too far-fetched a danger).

These are people who clearly have no higher brain functions and no semblance of reason. These are people who are most assuredly completely insane.

And don’t we have laws that keep the mentally ill from driving automobiles?