Anyone involved in the debacle that was central New Jersey’s morning commute today knows that it was horrendous. The rain came down like a flood and visibility was all but nonexistent. So what would you do in such a situation when you had to go to work in this weather? Clearly, if you were a moron driving a white, Acura SUV this morning you would be riding everyone’s tail and swerving in and out of traffic! Look, I don’t know what this asshole in the white Acura was trying to accomplish, but I watched in my rear view mirror as he zoomed in and out of the two lanes of traffic until he reached where I was on the road. And then, almost unbelievably, this guy came to within less than a foot of distance between his car and mine. Seriously! Who does that when you’re driving in a torrential downpour? An idiot does that, that’s who…

Almost as bad was this woman driving in a little Volkswagon Cabrio. I’ve never driven a small VW so I don’t know how these things handle in that type of rain, but this woman had her emergency lights on and was cruising at about 30 miles per hour. If I had a direct line into her car I would have said, “Hey, honey, you create more problems than you solve when you do that!”

Look, I understand that some people are horrified of driving in the rain. It can be a very scary event. In my mind, you have two scenarios when it’s torrential outside – don’t drive at all or, if you have to drive and you get caught in a monsoon, pull over and wait for it to die down.

But for the love of all that’s good, don’t put your blinkers on and smoothly sail away at 30 miles per hour on a major, two-lane highway when everyone around you is going at 60 – 80 miles per hour. If you don’t “know” that doing this is going to create major problems, you probably shouldn’t have a license in the first place.

This article coincides with a special report that I just finished reading from The Economist talking about garbage and how to cleanup the garbage on the planet. The main lesson to learn from all of this is that everyone needs to be more aware of what they are throwing out and, to a greater degree, where their garbage is going. In other words, if you choose to throw a can, plastic bag, or piece of cardboard in the garbage as opposed to recycling it, that singular act alone is not enough to put us in a bad situation. One person, one can – we have enough room for that in our landfills. But what happens when all 25,000 people in your town do the same thing…or all 5 million people in your state? What if all 300 million people in America toss out one can per week? What about two cans? How many sodas or beers or other canned/bottled beverages do you have in a week?

The picture becomes a little bit clearer, I hope.

However, it is amazing that we are creating such a vast amount of “space junk” in the higher and lower atmospheres. And this isn’t stuff just floating around out there; this is stuff that is going at a few thousand miles per hour! Imagine being on a spaceship and all of the bravery that shooting up into the atmosphere takes, but then getting up there and having a stray nut or bolt (or an entire dead satellite) smash into your spaceship at two thousand miles per hour. Unreal.

This is an issue that someone really needs to get on top of – space needs to be cleaned up.