By Piper Bayard

Bumper stickers. Sort of like Bathroom Readers for the road. I wonder sometimes if people even think about what they put on their cars. Take this popular one, for example:

image from cafepress.com

image from cafepress.com

Why stop with random acts of kindness? When did the goal for kindness get lowered from “habit” to “random”? How lazy is that? This assumes I’m normally a jerk and need to upgrade to “random” kindness, or it lowers the bar from “habitually kind” to “randomly kind.”

And how about the second half? An act of “Senseless beauty.” What the heck does that even mean? Beauty is a noun, and the word “senseless” means “with no apparent purpose.” Since when does beauty need purpose? It is not an act, but a subjective experience of aesthetic appreciation of something external to ourselves.

Perhaps a more meaningful bumper sticker would be “Consistent acts of kindness and experience of beauty.”

Another favorite is this preachy beauty:

image by pbyrne, wikimedia commons

image by pbyrne, wikimedia commons

Can someone please tell me why the people driving the cars with this bumper sticker are always the first to flip off others in traffic and keep “competitors” from merging?

Then there are the politically preachy bumper stickers. “Wow. That bumper sticker really changed my mind about the upcoming election!” . . . Said no one ever.

And, of course, no discussion of bumper stickers would be complete without  the honor student bumper stickers.

image by cafepress.com

image by cafepress.com

image by zazzle.com

image by zazzle.com

image by zazzle.com

image by zazzle.com

And my personal favorite . . .

image by zazzle.com

image by zazzle.com

Seems like a few folks have their egos a bit tied up in their kids. All of this glorification of children on bumper stickers makes me want to answer with this license plate that I saw last week at Costco.

image by Piper Bayard

image by Piper Bayard

And Costco has just the lime cilantro chili sauce for that.  🙂

What are some bumper stickers and license plates that stick out in your mind?