Today I did something I don’t normally do. I drove around the exurbs of this godforsaken city. A lot. An appointment took me over hell’s outer acres. I normally have almost no commute, so I can’t complain about having to endure traffic. (My aggregate monthly commute miles are less than most people’s daily.) But one thought did strike me: What exactly are all these people doing and why are they doing so much of it?
True, I was one of those people, but I was just visiting. Sitting in traffic is one of the biggest wastes of time since penguin baseball without the ensuing bragging rights. Which leads me to think that anyone that believes mass transit is going to solve this problem needs to put the bong down. People are annoyed to the point of shortening their lives and wasting breathtaking amounts of time, and still volunteering to do it each day. We need something bigger than mass transit to get a handle on this one. I think the appropriate buzzword here is paradigm shift.
I’m not climbing on the global warming/anti-hydrocarbon economy/save the earth soap box. Also not talking about anti-capitalism; I’m a market champion to the point of being Libertarian. There is something bigger at work here. Humans weren’t meant to live like this. And by “like this” I mean spending inordinate amounts of our waking hours going back and forth to sit in little boxes to earn money to buy stuff. Somewhere along the line means and ends became inexplicably intertwined. When you break the chain of habit commanded by existence and think about it does this feel right to anybody out there?
I’m not espousing a return to the mythological “Good Old Days”. (Any time you hear someone use the term “Good Old Days” be wary. It’s a loaded term wielded by those that can’t envision a future worth creating.) There are parts of this modern world that are very much worth having. Mrs. Ares advocates something between neo-Amish and neo-luddism. I think that mightiest of modern writers got it just right:
Ares
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