Sheri and I bought a new car a few weeks ago, a 2016 Ford Fusion, and the license plates arrived in the mail a few days ago.
I hate it.
I love how this car looks. The idea of placing these terrible looking license plates on it pains me.
I don’t even understand these plates. They were evidently created to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of the War of 1812. According to my calculations, that was four years ago.
Why am I receiving these plates four years after the fact? Getting these plates now is like getting a graduation card four years after you graduate. Then again, at least said card would probably have a few bucks in it. The opposite is true with these plates. We had to pay for them.
I could care less about the War of 1812. As far as wars go, it’s one of my least favorite. The British were the bad guys. I love England and British culture. I would rather not dwell on such a dark stain in our history when Americans and the British were killing each other.
It was 204 years ago. It is time to move on.
The Star Spangled Banner is one of the worst songs ever written. The high-pitched notes and the ridiculously complicated lyrics make it one of the hardest songs to sing. Ordinary people cannot even sing it. What kind of national anthem is it when most citizens of that nation are incapable of singing it without their voice cracking?
As bad as the short version of the song is, the extended “deep cut” version is even worse. The full version even includes a bit about slavery:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave
That section of the song was a warning to lowly paid day labors and slaves tempted to take up arms and fight on the side of the British.
The song was written by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner and a co-founder of the American Colonization Society, an organization aimed at sending all non-slave black people to Africa. He is treated as kind of a Big Deal here because he was from western Maryland. That fact that Francis Scott Key lived here in western Maryland should not be a focus of pride. He wrote a bad song and wanted to send black people to Africa. Excuse me if I do not celebrate his existence.
This license plate just looks bad. The artwork looks amateurish. The fonts are ugly. It should not be the default plate for vehicles registered in Maryland.
That license plate IS rather ugly. Maybe you should get veterans plates, instead.
I do wonder if they want people to get special plates so they don’t have to use these awful looking things. I was surprised to see just how many special organizational plates there are. The dealership dealt wth the DMV, we just paid for the car and then received the plates in the mail.