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Mean People Suck!

©2004 David Boyne

Who invented the bumper sticker? An American, no doubt. Bumper stickers are intrusive and asinine, as are people who use cell phones in restaurants.

I can't imagine some person in Peru or Japan or Finland thinking, "I'm going to print a terse message on opaque weather-resistant material with an adhesive backing and slap it on the bumper of my car!"

Bumper stickers are legally and socially sanctioned graffiti, since you deface only your own property. I could be wrong but I suspect that when a person slaps a bumper sticker on their car they are engaging in a desperate act of trying to make an indifferent world pay them a moment of attention.

I've had two bumper stickers in my life. The first one I made in my high school graphic arts class and slapped on my wreck of a 1965 Mustang. It read, Save the Wolf, and it had an image of a howling wolf that I had pirated from a Paul Winter Consort album.

When I was 17, and felt compelled to tell the world (or at least whoever was behind me breathing the noxious exhaust from my Mustang) to Save the Wolf—what was I really saying? How could the words on that bumper sticker have "saved" even a single wolf? I suspect that bumper sticker didn't have much to do with saving wolves and was, in fact, as is everything in life, about me.

I was telling the world something about me, myself, I. But what?

Did the bumper sticker I had made tell the world that in my junior year in high school I had read Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf nine times, as well as every other academic or popular work on wolves that I could find? Did it tell anyone how I had gone on an all-meat diet for months, just to see what it was like to eat as a wolf would eat? (Note to Dr. Atkins's estate: I lost weight!) Did the bumper sticker mysteriously reveal that, in biology class, as I stared out the windows daydreaming, I was fantasizing of walking out of school, hitch-hiking to Alaska, amassing mounds of camping gear and grub—including some strange life-sustaining thing Jack London's books called pemmican—and hiking into the Arctic wilderness to spend my life in the company of wolves? (Note to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's estates: Why couldn't you shitheads have chosen a fantasy of going off to live with the wolves?)

Recently I purchased the second-ever bumper sticker of my life…

Read the rest of Mean People Suck, and 8 more hyper-personal essays, in the ebook Happy Accidents!

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