A Better Way to Hate Each Other

This makes so much more sense than racism, homophobia, or antisemitism!

I don't know about you, but when I look at American society, I'm bored to tears hearing the same old hateful whining that's been going on for decades - nay, centuries:

• People with white skin are better than people with brown or black skin!

• It's weird and bad to fall in love with a person of the same gender!

• This religion is good and pure, but that religion is wrong and dangerous!

• Somewhere in the country, someone is getting a break I didn't get, and that means I got screwed!

To these haters, I say: oh, wah, wah. In the Year of Our Lord 2023, we should all be over such ridiculous tropes. We've been hashing over this stuff for hundreds of years. This is such stale, boring, and downright unoriginal prejudice that we can hardly be expected to cling to it, especially when it's all fear-mongering nonsense to begin with.

But even if everyone who believed such dreck simply dropped their poisonous ideologies - if people just hung it up, finally - they’d still have the same amount of hostility, with nowhere to direct it. Even I must concede that such free-floating hatred needs a target. And anyway, Americans need something new to hate.

So I present to you a much better way to go about hating our neighbors, siblings, physician’s assistants, and co-workers: Let's just hate all the people who have their gas caps on the passenger side of their cars.

That's right. I submit that driving a car with its gas cap on the passenger side is a sign of full-fledged, clinical insanity. Such people cannot be understood, and therefore, they cannot be trusted. But since we can't ship them all out to live on Garbage Island and we can't just flog them to death - stupid human-rights violations! - the least we can do is to hate them. Virulently.

What good is a gas cap on the passenger side, anyway? In America? Where we drive on the right and sit on the left?

By one estimate, 78% of cars in the US have gas caps on the left side, as is only correct and proper. That means most of us are operating vehicles created with at least a minimum standard of sanity. But that also suggests that 22% of us are out here operating one- or two-ton projectiles that have seemingly been slapped together with only a whistle and a prayer! And they see nothing wrong with that!

Unlike one’s skin color or gender, driving a vehicle with the gas cap on the passenger side is a choice. Most cars, if we believe the above statistic, are not made this way. Therefore, we must assume there exists an inexplicable cohort of the population that doesn't give a rat's ass where their gas cap is. Such thinking is, of course, lunacy, and it's clear that we should hate these people.

The reality of the situation is thus: When your gas cap is on the driver's side, you can drive up to a gas pump and easily get as close as you want. It's easy to gauge the distance from the nozzle, it's easy to simply toss an empty cup or candy bar wrapper into the trash can ahead of you, and while you wait for your car to fill, you can easily reach the squeegee to freshen up your windshield. The whole gas-getting exercise goes off without a hitch. You're locked, loaded, and back on the road in no time. And when you drive away, a quick glance into your side mirror will confirm that you have, indeed, properly replaced the gas cap and closed the door.

But if you are forced to pull up to a pump on your opposite side, because your gas cap is located on the passenger side of the vehicle, your experience may be different. You are likely to park your car within a single inch of another vehicle, oriented straight at you so as to fill a tank on the driver's side, leaving that driver pinned in and stuck until you yourself pull out. And when you do park, you don't know how close you really are to the pump. You may have to reach excessively far, or you may have to compress yourself flat against the vehicle as you fill up.

If you want to squeegee the driver’s side of the windshield, you'll have to drip the filthy thing all over the ground (you'll accidentally traipse through the drops of it, getting your shoes all gross) and across your hood to do so. You can't quite reach the trash cans. And you have to get out and walk around the vehicle both to begin and end the process. What a needless inconvenience!

And perhaps most crucially, when you drive away, you cannot merely glance at your side mirror to verify that the cap is on and the door is shut.

Who would choose to live this way?

I can only assume that people willing to put up with such nonsense in order to show off their whips are idiots, and dangerous idiots, at that. No one can penetrate their thought processes; no one can come to understand or predict the next crazy thing they might do. If these people are willing to walk all the way around their cars every time they go to the gas station, they might be willing to do anything! Who can say?

I don't think it's a stretch to say that drivers of cars with gas caps on the passenger side are the most underestimated threat to the very fabric of American society.

So, now that you understand the seriousness of the threat posed by such vehicle owners, let's leave BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and folx of other generations and religions alone! Actually, we may still be bothering some of them. But this time, let's only bother them - and anyone else with such a cursed vehicle - based on the gas cap’s location on their cars.

Join me today in training your hatred on drivers of vehicles with gas caps on the passenger side!