Dirty cars would lead to nation of lawbreakers

I’m usually a law-abiding citizen, but last Friday I broke the law and a state trooper caught me.
I wasn’t aware that I was breaking the law when the trooper pulled me over on Interstate-39, shortly after work with my wife and kid in tow. I knew I wasn’t speeding and I knew all my lights were in working order, since my car was in the shop earlier that day and several bulbs were replaced that weren’t working.
So when the trooper asked if I knew what I was doing wrong, I had to tell him that I honestly didn’t know.
“I can’t read your license plate,” he told me.
In other words, I had a dirty car.
For someone like me that strives to follow all rules, yet live on the edge of them, hearing that my license plate was so dirty that it wasn’t readable was a huge letdown.
Why couldn’t the trooper have said that I looked superbad and he was just making sure someone kept me in line?
That would have been cool.
Or why couldn’t he have just been a little mysterious and said nothing except that I should wash my car?
It could have been a cool little puzzle that we brought to the attention of everyone we know to help us solve it.
No – he had to tell me that my plate was unreadable.
Even when I’m breaking the law, I’m not that cool.
The only case of a law-breaking incident lamer than mine that I can think of is O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco car chase where all the participants went slower than the speed limit and nearly the entire country watched.
I thanked the trooper after he let me go with a warning. I told him that I appreciated the fact that he was doing his job and making sure he was keeping the roads safe.
I wanted to add that dirty cars don’t cause accidents, just the dumb fools that sometimes drive them. But my wife was sitting next to me and she always makes it clear when I need to keep my smart alec remarks to myself.
My wife is a little smart alec herself, though. After the trooper left, she told me she was hoping I had been speeding, so she could give me a guilt trip like the many times I have given her one for speeding.
I have not washed my car since this incident. I washed the license plate, making it readable, but I’m not a big believer in car washes. A clean-looking car is nice for the day it lasts, but cars are meant to get dirty, and they will continue to get dirty, especially in the winter. I wait until I know the salty road season is over early in the spring, and then I pay to clean the car for the first and only time in the year.
Maybe I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it be better for the environment and our groundwater supply if more people used the car wash less often.
Then again, we’d probably need a bigger police force to make sure our license plates are readable. A nation of dirty cars would be a nation of a lot of lawbreakers.