I was driving to Springfield yesterday morning.
It was 5:00 in the morning; I had friends who had to catch an awfully early train.

There was an inch of ice on the road.

I passed a sport utility vehicle.

Now, I think it’s important to realize that I drive an old Subaru and I’m from south of here. There’s no reason why I should have passed anyone, nevermind a Massachusetts-plated beautiful blue SUV. But I did. I motored right by the damn thing. In the ice.

If someone’s going to drop $40,000 on a gas guzzling road danger, at least drive like it – that SUV should have been monster-trucking it along the highway at 110 miles per hour, squishing cars that got in the way. Instead, it was crawling along the highway at a paltry 30 miles per hour, or roughly six gallons per hour.

I fear I’ll never understand the desire to own an SUV. I prefer used Japanese cars that get good gas mileage, have enough leg room in the back for friends of mine who are taller than me and that are mechanics’ dreams when it comes to repair. Perhaps I’m not cool enough to understand the need for other vehicles; I’m guessing it’s a status thing, but I don’t really care either way.

Such excess is a funny thing. Everyone seems really interested in getting more, more, and more. I can’t say I’m innocent. I’d love to get more money than I do now, I’d love to have more electronics than I do now, I’d love to get lots more of lots of things than I do now. But it seems like there’s a point where we realize that we’d love to have more, we’d take it if we got it, but we’re happy with what we’ve got.

It’s a funny thing, too – I watched a surreal argument the other day on the best news channel in America, Fox News. A former Black Panther whose name I forget was arguing with David Horowitz about paying reparations for slavery. The Black Panther’s argument was ‘pay’ because he was ‘owed.’

I don’t agree with that. I never enslaved anyone. I don’t owe anybody a damned thing financially, except for the insurance policy on my car. But the fact is that I wasn’t even listening to the Black Panther really because I was too aghast at what Horowitz had said previously.

Who is David Horowitz? Why, he’s only the best speaker to ever come to UMass two and half weeks from now on behalf of our benevolent Republican Club. He’s also an archconservative who used to be liberal. It’s like being a traitor, only it turns my stomach more.

He was on the television arguing that blacks should realize just how good they have it in America now. Then, like a young boy getting touched properly for the first time, he trotted his most important statistic: blacks in American earn fifty times what their counterparts earn in Africa. Then he’d sort of paused, like this was his truly clinching argument.

My brain stopped working temporarily.

I thought I’d misheard him – I checked his (www.cspc.org) website and found the following quote: ‘American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.’

‘Gasp,’ says me.

Maybe I’m tooting my own horn here, but I’ve taken a few classes about that continent and I don’t ever really remember hearing a statistic involving blacks there earning a great deal of money. I remember things like, the average wage is equivalent to three hundred dollars a year or something close to that.

Horowitz’s argument was that blacks should be happy because, on average, they’re making fifty times that – that’s right, $15,000! With a family of four in tow, that’s below the poverty line. Woo hoo, go blacks.

Are far as Horowitz is concerned, blacks have gotten enough. Hell, slavery probably wasn’t all that bad, considering that blacks are doing just fine and dandy for themselves today. ‘They,’ in some sort of pluralistic sense, should quit their bitching.

Let’s face it, the greed is like foot and mouth disease in Europe – anything can get it and it’s pretty damned hard to get rid of. That argument those two individuals we’re having? It was simple greed. The Black Panther wanted money; it’s the most immediate way to right a wrong in this world. Horowitz wanted to keep his hands on his money; it’s the simple rich man’s argument. He shouldn’t have to pay other people. It’s the conservative nature of being cheap.

What’s the solution to our crazy capitalistic collection of colonies (alliteration gets you places, kids)? Is there an answer to the reparations argument? Is there an answer for why people buy insanely expensive cars when they could get good cheap ones?

Argh, frustration, confusion and questions, they reign supreme. If making policy in this nation was easy, if solutions weren’t tough to find, we’d have answers for everything, but we don’t. Part of growing up is realizing that sometimes, there are no answers.

Reparations shouldn’t be paid, but slavery shouldn’t be forgotten, nor should its effect in society ignored. My Subaru is always going to be better than that SUV, but I’ll never get chicks the way the New Jersey guys do.

Blacks are going to have to continue their uphill struggle in this country. I’ll just get to wherever I’m going faster, cheaper, and less cool. And when I get there, I still won’t have any idea how to change that.

Sam Wilkinson is a Collegian Columnist.
Photo bendee: Sam Wilkinson