Taste of Utopia

It’s good to hear that the Poodle has come out of the crate.

It starts with a trickle: A few nobodies go carless (myself in 2006). Then something big happens: The Angry Poodle throws Exxon under the bus, and writes about it. Next, I predict one or two Very High Profile types—a sports star, for example—will be seen on TV walking around Los Angeles and taking the Expo Line to Santa Monica.

All of a sudden there will be a mad rush to dump the pollution machine, get out of the box, and live downtown. Children will chalk play zones in the street, adults will have Scrabble matches in parking lots, we’ll all lose that last 8 or 12 pounds, and no one will ever ask us to help them move this weekend.

We’ll have a good decade, maybe 15 years, and then the price of personal drones will come down, and people will go back to being paranoid and hiding behind doors. Nothing lasts forever, but it may give the planet just enough of a breather to keep us all from roasting to death.