"Rolling Coal" on our Future

 

Truck "rolling coal" Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

A few years ago, I was teaching students, and a few boys were bragging with the usual braggadocio of post pubescent males about "rolling coal" on a biker with their big diesel truck. Rolling coal is a practice where one manipulates the truck to blow black smoke from its tailpipe or stacks while accelerating. To do this while driving by someone not inside a big, expensive truck, preferably on a bike or walking is considered the height of entertainment among a certain segment of the truckerati. Illegal in some places, it seems to be a favorite hobby of young, testosterone filled young men around the Bakken oil patch. Big trucks emitting black plumes is so common that I don't think most people think twice about it around here. Though, when I am away and return to the streets of Williston, I am made aware of the offensive olfactory areas that are truck filled streets. Even in a car, the tasty, toxic air gets sucked in if one is sitting behind or adjacent to one at a stop light. If there was ever a place for electric vehicles, it is in getting rid of toxic road air.

Having been on the receiving end of this practice a few times, it is obnoxious as well as noxious. Just sitting next to a big truck spewing diesel exhaust on a bike is another reason I often ride the sidewalk on busier streets. Roads are not only dangerous for bikers, but the air can be toxic. Nothing beats a mouth full of black diesel soot as a truck blows by you.

I keep thinking of the practice of rolling coal as a metaphor for our current moment.  America is acting like a big, expensive diesel truck as the richest nation in the world driving on and over the rest of the world. Instead of picking them up for a ride, we are going to roll up our windows and drive right by, spewing as much black soot all over them. We might even run them over or throw them out of the truck we are so belligerent toward anyone outside our comfortable truck cab called the United States. As the top oil producer, historical greenhouse gas emitter and a nation of untold privilege and wealth and out of control individualism, we are the fancy, jacked up truck with no humility. 

 Trump is a big, expensive, diesel belching truck of a man and the current moment where regulations, restrictions and any mitigation toward pollution or climate change is being thrown out the window. He and his group of child-like 30- to 80-year-olds are driving over and past the rest of us walking or standing along the road as the big, dirty truck drives by and sprays us with toxic effluent. The truck keeps on driving, fueled by burning the future, while the vast majority are stuck. The few who are allowed inside the truck will breathe fresh air in cool temperatures and drive on until they run out of the fuel that is the future...however long it takes. Then, they will be stuck like the rest of us, breathing poisoned, increasingly hot air in the unstable world made by our current intent to roll coal on the future.