At what price "cool"?

The other day I was biking home from work. I came to a red light. Three high school kids crossed the sidewalk in front of me. All three at some point in time all but gawked at me, and they kept looking back after they crossed the street. The look was clearly not one that I'd have received had I been in a Mercedes or a Maserati. No, it was more in the "does that dude on the bike come from Mars?" vein.

I feel pretty confident I know why. I was in full bike commuter regalia - rain jacket with vents open, bike helmet, front and tail lights a-blinking, panniers, right pant leg rolled up, the whole nine yards. In Holland this would make me normal, in Chicago not unusual, but here in Miami this is the functional equivalent of maybe growing a third eye in your forehead - something you just don't see everyday, if at all ...

Miami is hyper-America. Take the worst elements of shallow American consumer culture and boost them with some steroids. You've got an idea of Miami at its worst. (Disclaimer - I like living here. The positive stuff is for another day, another time, another blog entry.) In my neighborhood particularly, you see high-end conspicuous consumption. By having neither a Mercedes nor a SUV, never mind by being a one car family, my wife and I are the Coral Gables equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies.

So, by being a sensible bike commuter, I pretty much epitomized the antithesis of what passes here for "cool."

But I have to ask, at what price comes being "cool" here, at least when it comes to whether and what one drives? We live within a stone's through of the Everglades and yet people drive SUVs to go six blocks to the 7-11 to get their sorry ass a Big Gulp. Humanity walked from Africa across the Bering Strait to Patagonia, and yet here in the most advanced society humanity has yet devised, most folks can't even envision a half mile walk to get a soda pop.

I have yet to figure out why in the world anyone in the Gables needs a Range Rover. Are there packs of rogue wallabies over by the golf course? And then there are Hummers. People here drive Hummers. Seriously, folks - do you expect to fend off IEDs on the way to Publix to get groceries? Do you fear the possibility that the Taliban of Dadeland Mall are going to seize your women folk and put them in a burqa?

Buying a vehicle that costs tens of thousands of dollars; that simply sits and occupies space 99% of its existence (ask yourself - what portion of a vehicle's existence 24/7/365 is spent with a person behind the wheel?); that costs hundreds of dollars a year to fuel up and insure; that destroys the very air we breath, the soil that feeds us, the water we drink; that requires the maintenance of an insanely expensive military state simply to secure its fuel; that indirectly, through that fuel, finances the world's most repressive states; that indirectly, through that fuel, finances the world's worst terrorists (as Bill Maher put it, when you drive alone, you drive with Osama ...); that gobbles up inordinate amounts of government resources to maintain roads that gobble up an insane amount of space; that is a menace to pedestrians and those who themselves don't drive; and that contributes to urban sprawl and a lack of human connections, is just not all that cool when you think about it.

And when I think of costs, when I think of the age of those kids and the lengths to which this imperial beast will go to protect "our" oil - how did it get under their sand anyway? - I wonder if their lives will be a future cost as well.

I'll settle for not being cool. It's healthier for my self, my sanity, my community, and my planet.