Turtles and PIrates

One of the fun parts of a forty-five minute commute is reading bumper stickers.   Bumper stickers are billboards, advertising their drivers souls.  You can read so much about a person from what they want to show others.

For example,  here's what I saw on a late model car this morning:

"I brake for tortoises"

I'm not sure how many tortoises one will find on Providence Road in downtown Charlotte, but I'm sure if there are many tortoises there, they are grateful for the this driver's kindness--though, I suspect the drivers behind him would not be. 

What really made this bumper sticker memorable was the other sticker the man had in the rear window of his car. It was a skull and crossbones, the Jolly Roger, which proclaimed to the whole world "I am a pirate, or want to be."

Now, as I understand it,  pirates were about he most bloodthirsty, greedy, selfish,  destructive,  callous, uncaring, and downright evil people who ever walked the earth. That was why the "golden age" of piracy lasted so short.  After these scurvy dogs burned, killed, raped, and pillaged their way across the seven seas for a couple of decades, the nations of the world hunted them down and killed them.  Most of them wound up dead by the sword.  Others were hung.  Blackbeard's head was displayed for years a trophy in Williamsburg, after he murdered countless men, women, and children.

So why would a pirate care about killing a turtle?  I could not imagine Blackbeard or Calico Jack Rackham on rattling in a carriage over the cobblestone streets of Tortuga or Port Royal or Charleston yelling at his his carriage driver "Avast ye scurvy dog! There be a turtle on the road!"

Yet here we have a car in modern Charlotte with a vehicle bearing the Jolly Roger and a declaration to brake for turtles.

It seems to me that this sentiment is a microcosm of contemporary society that we borrow what we want from many ideologies, molding ideas to our liking, while leaving out the essential nature of them all. We remake good things and evil things into pale, harmless parodies of their nature.  Bloodthirsty pirates become harmless amusement park rides.  Vampires and werewolves become romantic heroes.  Our founding fathers become dancing cartoons on commercials.  Ecological concerns about the value of animal life becomes a declaration that if we see an animal in the road, we won't intentionally crush it.  We water down good and evil, and mix them together into a pallid stew.

The problem with our contemporary, symbol-based society is not that we do not have standards or dreams, but that we have too many of them.  We care about many things, but none of them deeply.  We turn history into slogans, and causes into fads.  Ultimately, we make our own reality and morality in our own image, using bits of older and deeper thought. Rather than being challenged by ideals such as environmentalism or religion, we we change them into something small and manageable and ultimately harmless. Like our image of pirates, good and evil are reduced to an occasional masquerade.

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