apparently

Last week, having been afflicted with this recurrent thought all summer, I finally tried letting it transform into action. The thought was to thank people that are car-pooling, walking, biking, or busing on the busy street near our neighborhood school. My kids and I made signs, bought candy, and thanked people for 45 minutes last Thursday.

The motivation behind this quasi-protest is global warming, which is really becoming a subject that we as a group need to pay attention to. The interesting thing about global warming is that while there is stuff the government can (and should) do, there is a huge difference that individuals can make by merely altering our behaviors. We can wait for Congress to ask the car companies to increase the mileages that new cars get, and that'll be useful, but it'll take years. Or we can all start carpooling, and double the mileage we get starting right now.

Now, it so happens that encouraging good behavior is daily work for parents. I started to think how differently things work with kids when I can reward positive things rather than punish when things have gone awry, and wondered why we can't apply that to this urgent need for change.

The trickiest thing was finding a time when enough people were actually carpooling so that we could actually thank anyone, but there's a late afternoon, post-school, pre-rush hour time when the percentage of car-poolers was high enough (from 4:15 to 5 pm was our initial experiment). My daughter was deployed as a spotter, with her brother as an assistant and a bus-spotter, and a candy-hander; I held the signs up, made eye contact, yelled "Thanks for ride-sharing" and often bowed.

It was really fun, we had signs to let the un-thanked masses know where they can find passengers to share their cars with. I don't know if we will inspire anyone to carpool, but the action passed the first test by being pleasant to partake in, so we'll be back this Thursday.