"Could I see your driver's license?"

So said my bank teller about a month ago, while I was picking up a money order to pay ye olde rent. In yet another example of the cultural expectation that every adult citizen drives regularly, we have allowed driver's licenses to become our society's primary form of identification. In reality, though, it's nobody's business whether or not you have earned driving privileges unless you happen to be behind the wheel of a motor vehicle on public roads; asking for a driver's license when we mean to ask for identification is another slight against non-drivers, and another reminder of the automobile's hegemony in our lives. To say "I don't have a license, here's my ID" feels like admitting some failure, or at the very least some aberration that sets you apart from polite society.

Furthermore, it can have rather inconvenient practical consequences. My last driver's license was issued right around the time that the state was switching over to the new, super-secure design-- and they were having severe production backlogs. I applied for my renewal in late September, a month before the expiration date in late October. I figured that should be plenty of time, as prior plastic bits from the DMV had arrived to me within a week or so. Wrong-- I finally got the thing in early December. During the entire time I was walking around with an expired driver's license, I kept calling the DMV about the status of my renewal, and they kept giving me the same answer: "Oh, don't worry, if you get pulled over you'll come up as valid in the computer." Never mind that I couldn't bank or buy beer. (I actually started carrying my passport, but I feel bad for those in the same situation who didn't have a passport.)

So on that particular day last month, when that teller asked that same lame question, I decided that my answer henceforth would be "no." I left the bank, went to Rite Aid, got my photo taken, and sent off my application for this:

This is my passport card. It's only valid for land and sea travel to the US' nearest neighbors, trips that I can't say I take very often, but it's also a valid government-issued photo ID that fits in my wallet. If anyone other than a traffic police officer asks to see my ID, this is what they're going to get, because whether or not I can drive is none of their damned business. I hope to help normalize the use of non-driving identity cards, because we're hopefully going to see more non-drivers, and they're going to need them.