Hypocrisy

I'm sitting here staring at the children's book Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? and thinking about my own hypocrisy.

Earlier this week I read that scientists are now predicting that the polar ice cap will disappear completely during the summer by the end of the next decade. This will not necessarily contribute to a rise in sea levels (unlike the rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctica), but it serves as an especially dramatic indication of the growing danger of global warming. And it doesn't bode well for polar bears and other arctic creatures.

Yet I drove my 9-month-old son around for over an hour today, merely to allow him to continue to nap in the car. My only, poor excuse for this was that (1) he'd had a somewhat rough time sleeping last night, and (2) it was frigidly cold outside, so I didn't want to take him out of the car for a spin in the stroller.

How do I justify this behavior? I don't.

I'm also thinking right now about what I saw yesterday at the corner of Hayes and Divisadero. A cheap fast-food chicken place, not Kentucky Fried Chicken but similar: at 4:15 in the afternoon, at least twenty-five people were waiting in line to place an order. On the window, a simple ad: "99 Cent Tuesdays: drumstick and thigh." It happened to be Tuesday. People were lined up out the door and partway down the street. If anything indicates the dismal economic times we're in, that does.

And yet, a few minutes later, I was at Andronico's buying expensive takeout food because I was too tired to cook.