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• Monday, January 5, 2009 05:35 AM

  Did you really just write this article?

  Dear Mr. Benjamin,

  Far from finding enlightment or even mild amusement, I found this essay in tortuous self-justification painfully irritating. You have a choice; we all do. If you do not live in an unpaved area where challenging routes are a regular/professional necessity, you did not need this SUV--not even with a pack of kids and a dog.

  Without having to go vegan and live fully off your own harvests, you, and everyone else, can make reasoned choices about what really constitutes need. Your children will bear the longterm consequences of that car and other products you consume. Just as importantly, any sense of moderation (which means much more than getting a good deal on your new car/appliance/gadget!) will be inherited from you.

  But, hey, at least now you can get them all to the ballgame while looking "cool," in a dinosaur kind of way.

  Instead of half-hearted hand-wringing with a wink or two, please expend your energy to push and help enact legislation that places the real cost of gas and SUVs up-front, so that we don't leave that environmental debt to our children. Yep, I am telling you to shoot yourself in the foot (you know, the one on the accelerator pedal).

  If all this seems rather harsh, please remember that as soon as you wrote this article (you did, didn't you?), you made yourself open to some pretty obvious criticism.

  —tammyps Read tammyps's other letters
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