Think of how much less planning for your daily life is entailed in knowing there's a car sitting outside, and whenever you want, you can go ten miles or a hundred. No concern: just go.
One of our occasional readers, who prefers not to contribute in writing, has suggested that we will be reliant on rental cars, probably mostly electric ones, for much of our travel in the future, because paying for and maintaining private cars will become prohibitively expensive. And Jim Thill from Minneapolis wrote in an entry below (Fri. Nov. 28) that in the future people who are not rich won't be able to drive much at all.
Lots of people are suggesting that we will return to more public transportation, maybe buses and trains, where we'll have to bump elbows with droves of other humans. All of this will require a readjustment in our national psychology. We are a footloose people, trained by time and circumstance to be free roamers. We can do it with minimal exposure to all those other idiots out there. Now, they may cut us off in traffic, but we don't have to listen to or see and smell them in the confines of our little mobile cubicles. We can keep them at arm's length, the distance between the car window and the little sliding door from which a hand delivers a Big Mac.
As we wean ourselves from private cars, I'm seeing a nationwide attitude readjustment in the works, made necessary by a rising of tensions when we rub against each other more often. How can we accept the idea that in order to get a bag of groceries we not only have to endure all the fools pushing wheeled baskets through narrow aisles, but now we have to get on a bus and sit next to an alien who smells like some strange food. Are we going to accept traveling to the Grand Canyon in the same space with some guy from Yonkers who's snoring like hell in a seat behind us? Someone else's rotten kids running between the seats? A bigot propounding fascist thoughts across the aisle? Someone else passing gas? Are all the routines of our lives to be shared with strangers, herding around like tourist groups in Hollywood? Yikes!
And remember, we'll all have guns!
2 comments:
"All of this will require a readjustment in our national psychology. We are a footloose people, trained by time and circumstance to be free roamers."
True. And we can also be trained for something else as easily as we were trained to drive around. The automobile-centric mobility that we enjoy today has only been with us for a few decades. Before that, all this running around was simply not done. My dad would have been 63 this year. In his youth during the 1950s, the big event of the summer was the UP State Fair in Escanaba, about a sixty mile one-way drive. They seldom drove that far and they almost never went farther. Thirty years later, when I was a youngster, we went to Escanaba at least once a week and drove to Detroit or Chicago or farther at least twice a year. My kids (ages 3 and 1) have flown to Florida and California multiple times, while none of my still-living grandparents have ever been on a plane in their 80-some years. The change that can happen gradually over a generation seems huge when viewed in hindsight.
When I consider how short the life span of the internal combustion engine has been, it is startling. It began with a grandfather's generation and it may end with the grandchild's. And yet, a whole universe has been built around it -- a whole way of life. It is within the life time of many of us that the world has become so incredibly mobile. And we may be within a decade of seeing that all end.
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