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After spending a month in Texas, I decided I had better post a little reflection about my time there. It wasn’t as bad as the title suggests; that’s just a take off of the phrase spraypainted on a wall down the street from my hotel (”Who put the shady in shadyside?”). Anyway.

You always hear that lots of people drive SUVs in Texas, and it’s true. It’s not like they get a lot of snow down there. Maybe the rain justifies the buying habits, but I’m not sure it rains enough to justify higher SUV rates than a place like Omaha or Pittsburgh where it actually does snow. I guess the car companies cater to their buyers preferences: Houston has more Hummer dealerships (3) than in the Pittsburgh and Omaha metropolitan areas combined. What do you need a Hummer for in Houston?

This trend is frustrating, but in and of itself not enough to warrant a blog entry. My problem is that Texas is pursuing an aggressive advertising campaign called “Don’t Mess With Texas.” The idea behind the campaign, as I understand it, is that if you litter, your friends and family will call and leave tons of messages on your answering machine berating you for “messing with Texas.”

Callousness aside, the frustrating element is that people only consider it “messing with Texas” if the result is something you can see. Yet SUV drivers are messing with Texas every time they use a gallon of gas to drive 13 miles (source). Instead of, “Hey, you dropped something,” dontmesswithtexas.org should change their slogan to “Hey, your SUV is polluting our clean air and ruining our environment.” Maybe it would work as well as their anti-littering campaign.