The bumper sticker caught my eye as I passed by. “Gambling: Stealing from your family.” The driver of the car looked stern and disapproving like the father figure in an old Norman Rockwell painting.

I imagined him as a no nonsense disciplinarian teaching family values in an unflinching manner based on long held principles. No gray for this guy; everything was obviously black and white. His car was a Crown Victoria, a big reliable, safe, American car.

I haven’t done the math, so I can’t be sure, but it appears to me that driving around in a big gas guzzler takes about as much from your family as the average person spends on the lottery. But driving a gas guzzler is easier to justify than buying a lottery ticket, especially for an old school kind of guy.

I love bumper stickers. They say so much about us; so much more than we are usually trying to say. There is an odd thought process involved when we are willing to deface our vehicle to place a sound bite on the bumper and then drive around and let the world judge our true value to humanity by the contrast between those words and our driving habits.

I’m sure I’m not the only guy to have been run out of my lane by someone sporting a God Bless America sticker on the rear panel of the minivan. And we all are amused by someone who displays a multitude of political one–liners across the rear of a sensible hybrid. Like they are trying to tell us everything about them as they drive by.

I’ve been chased to the curb by someone on a cell phone merging into my lane while proudly displaying one of those clever COEXIST messages. I recently saw a pickup with a sticker saying SECEDE and sporting a picture of Robert E. Lee, the one guy on the Confederate side who was adamantly opposed to secession. Today, I swear I saw a Kennedy Johnson sticker on a car made since 2000.

For a while we had dueling Darwin stickers. The Protestant fish came first, followed by a fish with legs, trumped by a fish with “truth” branded on its back devouring the fish with legs. I haven’t seen an update lately but I’m sure the local 7–11 has something brewing.

The primary reason Southerners will never, ever accept car pooling on a large scale is the love affair we have with our vehicles. All of us, with few exceptions, want to be the driver. We want to control the music, how much trash litters the backseat, how fast we travel, and by what route. The automobile has become the last solitary place where we can be ourselves and not answer to anyone else about our choices.

So it stands to reason we will display our political and lifestyle beliefs or at least those with a catch phrase. For only $3.99 we can proudly proclaim our complicated political stance in one sentence.

The best part is we can speed away and not have to argue the validity of our viewpoint. No one wants reasonable opposition to mess up a strong opinion.