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From talking to a few parents, the SUV craze is at least in part due to the perceived additional safety given that everyone else on the highway is driving a giant car. Probably stuck there. In fairness, my most frequent form of transport is a rather large bus.

This goes back a long way. Even when I was a kid, I routinely heard other parents say they felt better with “a lot of steel” around them, not tooling around in some little tin can. In that sense, SUVs are just replacements for the full-size land yachts that everyone loved in the 50s and 60s. As it happens, I’ve always suspected that the safety/comfort argument is largely a pretense for people who just like to drive big cars, but it’s a hard one to kill since there is, after all, a kernel of truth to it. Other things equal, a big, heavy car really is a bit safer than a small one if they hit each other.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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