A 17th-Century Philosophy of Car Repair

Even beaters need a little love.

When I was 19, the windshield wiper motor on my first car quit. I refused to replace it.

I’d be damned if I was going to pamper a faded old Chevrolet when I was working for $2.30 an hour.

My clothes were threadbare. My shoes were lined with corrugated cardboard. For the price of the motor, I could buy new shoes, a pair of jeans and two shirts.

I would never have actually done that. But I could have.

I figured that at some point, I could economically acquire a used motor from a junkyard. Until then, I wasn’t going to spend a dime on what I considered an automotive accessory. A frill.

It was my car, and I’d maintain it or not maintain it the way I pleased, dammit.

Then it rained.

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

It’s hard to drive when nature is pelting the windshield with impunity. 

I refused to give up. Before the next storm, I tied heavy twine to the wiper arms and threaded it through the vent windows so I could pull the wipers back and forth by hand.

It worked well enough for me to kind of see through the windshield, as long as I kept the speed under 25 miles an hour, it didn’t rain too hard, and I didn’t make any turns. 

On a dry day when I had neglected to remove my rigging, a cop pulled me over. He looked at the wipers. Then he took a long look at me, as if regarding a rare but primitive specimen.

Finally, he said, “That’s an ingenious solution that would not occur to most citizens.

“Most normal, responsible citizens. Ones who would not threaten innocent life to save $40.”

He went on to say that I deserved a life sentence in the penitentiary or perhaps to be hung by the neck until dead. But about the most he could do was write me an equipment violation ticket.

That would cost as much as fixing the wipers, so it might just prolong the impressively horrifying situation I had created, he added.

“As it is, you just get a warning ticket. I’ll read it to you, because I suspect you may need that kind of assistance.” 

When he left, I had a choice. I could replace the motor or defy the warning, wagering I’d never encounter the cop again.

The decision came at an opportune time, philosophically. I had been reading in school about the social contract theories advanced by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They basically held that people live together in accordance with an agreement, sometimes implicit, establishing rules of moral and political behavior to prevent society from collapsing into anarchy and chaos.

Steering a car with my elbows in the rain while pulling a rope line back and forth seemed to fall on the side of anarchy and chaos.

I put in the new motor. It felt luxurious to turn on the wipers.

There are times when we are just plain wrong. It behooves us then to make amends and move on, if we can. 

So, even though you may have insisted corona vaccines were against your principles, go ahead and get one now that you can see how dumb that was. 

And if you lost an election, be a grownup and concede.

If you got caught lying on social media, just apologize and tell the truth.

You don’t have to buy Twitter.

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