Monkeyfist.com
Kill Your Car: Celebrate World Car Free Day
Thursday, 21 September 2000
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Kill your car. It will certainly kill you, or some little kid in the street, if you're not careful. The American automobile, powered by an internal combustion engine, is a blight. To serve corporate ends, after World War II, and in a fit of red-baiting, nuclear paranoia, America covered itself with an ugly, racist, corrupt interstate highway system. It sundered communities and cities, locked us into damnable patterns of urban segregation, and, perhaps forever, cast American urban culture into an irrational obsession with the automobile (and irrational disdain of public transportation).
Even if you don't care about any of this, then maybe you care about your daughter's daughter's son? Our American obsession with the automobile is one of the chief causes of global warming, and that's a problem that may end up most costing those who we say we love the most. Just yesterday Al Gore, who's supposed to be the environmentalist's choice for president, warned, in a priggish fit of juvenille pique, that there would be serious consequences if OPEC didn't stop "taking advantage of the American consumer." Well, hell, Al, it's their oil isn't it? We don't have to be obsessed with the car, do we?
Al Gore perfectly symbolizes the American
penchant for blaming others for problems that are, if we only
had the will and political health, amenable to our
attempts at solution. Don't like drugs? Ignore American demand
levels and consumption patterns, let's blame the Colombians,
the Mexicans, all of Central America, etc. (In fact, that's
too easy: don't ignore American patterns of demand and
consumption, ignore white demand, and then punitively
obsess about black demand; it's called ethnic cleansing
American style.) Don't like paying more than a buck a gallon
for gas? That is, don't like paying anything close to the
real price of gasoline? Blame the crafty, untrustworthy
Arabs (and subvert the democratic aspirations of Iraqis,
Indonesians and Nigerians in favor of stable (and
kleptocratic) regimes that are friendly to American oil
companies); if they're doing something we don't like, it must
be their fault, not ours.
Do you see the pattern here? Whenever things don't go just right for white Americans, we tend to blame others, particularly if those others aren't white. (And far too often our "blaming others" leads to really nasty stuff like wars, embargos, support for dictators, undemocratic global tyrannies, etc.)
Okay, so maybe there's not a lot you can do about the so-called Drug War. But there are things you can do about the American obsession with automobiles. Seek out places to live that have sensible public transit systems. Refuse to commute an hour to work one-way. Move to where the work is. Telecommute. Start a carpool. Ride a bike. Walk. Take the bus.
This is Kill Your Car: Celebrate World Car Free Day <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/664>