It was a summer night, just like this. We had a bar-b-que. All the neighborhood was there. It just felt like the right thing to do, I guess.

Everyone was doing it. So we went along for the ride.

Not long after that night, I noticed I was getting strange looks at traffic lights. Like I was doing something wrong. Mostly it was strange people in little foreign cars and those funny looking hybrids with lots of bumper stickers.

It didn’t hit home at first, but after a while I began to understand. And I began to dread climbing into the truck to pick up the kids from school to shuttle them to soccer practice.

Then the price of gas went crazy. That really messed things up.

Between the cost to fill the tank and the angry looks, I don’t know if I can take it. We want to trade the Hummer in on something that’s better on gas, but none of the dealers want to give us anything for a trade-in.

Last Saturday, after we drove a hybrid, the salesman asked us if we were thinking about trading a car in - he didn’t see that we had driven up in the H2 - and he spit his coffee out (on the kids!) when we told him.

It was quite an uncomfortable scene.