[OKC] Fw: Comment on "Bumper Cars" (OKG, 12/29)

[Walter Jacques]

Friends,

This is a forward of an email I sent to the editor of the Gazette earlier today, which may or may not be published on Wednesday.

If gasoline seems pretty affordable, it's only because the price (in dollars at the pump) is held artificially low.  There's a far dearer price that we're paying for it, both in defense spending and the lives that we're losing or destroying in order to get it.

Please do what you can to support public transportation in Oklahoma City.  Even better, think twice before driving somewhere, especially one at a time.


Thanks.

Walter Jacques







----- Original Message ----- 
From: Walter Jacques 
To: Rob Collins 
Sent: Sunday, January 02, 2011 3:49 PM
Subject: Comment on "Bumper Cars" (OKG, 12/29)


To the Editor,

An interesting exchange in the December 21 city council meeting between Councilman Brian Walters and Mayor Mick Cornett ("Bumper Cars," OKG, December 29, 2010), caught my eye.  Walters complained that public transportation, as opposed to vehicular transportation, is subsidized and would "take away that freedom."   Mayor Cornett correctly pointed out that roads and fuel are also subsidized.  

 

I served in the defense of this country for 21 years, periodically having to wear a gas mask at all times in a region where they really don't like us.  I was there in large part to give Americans like Councilman Walters the freedom and ability to pump foreign gas into their cars.  

 

Fuel subsidies extend far beyond financial subsidies mentioned by the mayor.  Add the cost of prosecuting a war costing billions of dollars a day (now totaling in the trillions) for over nine years; the thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of limbs lost; and the enduring effects of traumatic brain injury, PTSD and other psychological problems that our troops bring home from combat, sometimes to marriages doomed to failure from the stress.  These are the often-forgotten costs of "affordable" foreign oil and individual transportation.

 

Councilman Walters' daily commute is not only the most highly-subsidized mode of transportation in the history of this planet; it's also the most wasteful.  Choosing to travel one person at a time in a vehicle consuming extremely costly foreign oil where public transportation is or should be available will ultimately cost us the freedoms that Councilman Walters and the rest of us hold so dear.  When defense spending to support this addiction to foreign oil has destroyed our economy, life for us is going to change - if we don't run out of oil first.  

 

Nobody is proposing to take away Councilman Walters' personal vehicle.  But when it makes sense to fund and develop solid public transportation, we should support it and use it to the hilt.

 

 

Walter J. Jacques, Maj. (Ret.), USAF

Del City
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