A small anti-green manifesto

We live just over a mile from our elementary school. All through kindergarten, we drove TH to school. The bus just seemed too unfamiliar, a territory we couldn't send him into with no map whatosever. We can't walk to school because it is separated from our neighborhood by a four-lane, divided highway. Yep, we live in Texas.

In first grade, we put him on the bus because he could ride with his younger brother Dubya, who attended his final year of preschool in the same building. That proved to have its moments, which included one incident in which a fifth grader accused TH of calling the older child's developmentally disabled brother a "retard." I got into it with the bus driver over that--she had publicly humiliated our son because of this accusation--assuring her that this was a word no one had ever used in front of our son, one he'd never heard, one he still hadn't a clue about even after this incident, one he's never uttered since. She averred that she and "the supervisor" would watch the videotape of the incident and determine whether or not what I was saying about my son--and what my son himself was saying--was true. It was. TH still does not lie. He just doesn't. He can't even pull off a practical joke because he's so utterly incapable of keeping anything to himself, much less dissembling.

In second grade, we were on the bus for two months before much sh** hit the fan, involving demands from other parents that our monstrous bully of a son be removed from the bus, from school, away from their kids because he was beating them and pinching them black and blue and other terrible, awful things. Turns out, those tales from the Bus Brothers Grimm were simply untrue and that in reality, our son was the one being pinched to the point of bruising, being spat upon, snotted on, threatened with an army of "killer space robots." I realize that there is no such thing as "killer space robots," but still.

One offer for "fixing" this problem was that our son could be placed in a seat at the front of the bus, just behind the driver. Given our previous experience with the observational and auditory processing skills of said driver, we declined this proposal. We did so also given that this resolution would have singled our son out when he was patently not the problem.

Lately, we've been getting urgent, rational arguments in the school newsletter from the principal about having children be bus riders. Saves energy. We don't sit in the car line, pumping poison-laden fossil fuels into the air around the school. We (theoretically) don't pollute as much (although I'm skeptical of this--we all know what buses do) if we ride the bus. These are all relevant arguments. And honestly, it'd be a lot easier to stuff him and Dubya onto the bus in the morning and to sit around the house eating all those bon-bons in the afternoon, waiting for the bus to drop them off. But I don't. I spend what is probably a total of almost an hour in the transport to and from school.

And, as I've mentioned before, as much as I want to be environmentally aware, as much as I believe in my grandparents' generational precepts of "waste not, want not," as much as I subscribe to "recycle, reduce, reuse," I cannot sacrifice my son on the altar of the greater good in the name of being green. I'll be as brutally, coldly selfish as any Hummer-driving, McMansion-dwelling, lawn-watering and fertilizing, parking-lot paving, McDonald's consuming, private-jet owning, recyclable paper-tossing, plastic-bag-using, car-idling wastrel in these great United States of ours if it means not subjecting my son to a daily social torture that he still cannot successfully navigate.

So, I still drive him and his two brothers to school in our dusty green Honda minivan every morning, and I pick them up every afternoon. Hey, it's kind of like a little bus, right, one that transports three people to exactly the same place? And it's green, too, just not in that cool environmental way. And there's the added bonus that I have no intention of threatening any of them with imminent harm from my army of killer space robots. Well, at least not on most days.