April A-to-Z: A Celebration of the Automobile! (If You’re
the Devil)
“But there
are positive things also,” said the Journeyer.
“About cars?
Are you sure? Like what?”
“Like
convenience. Like access. They allow us to get places efficiently. We can do
more. We can get places we wouldn’t have time to otherwise.”
Those things
are all true of course. And they are also all bad.
Everybody
driving around in cars is either doing so in order to solve problems which are
only created by the existence of cars in the first place, or they are driving
in pursuit of something they shouldn’t be pursuing.
Captain Vino
once objected to my criticism of long term regional planning around expansion
of highway infrastructure and the ghastly proclamation from an idiot politician:
“Cars are never going away!” by claiming cars were necessary for such noble
purposes as his visiting his young daughter in a town sixty kilometres away;
seeming unable to grasp that without the pre-existence of cars and car culture
he never possibly would have ended up in this circumstance. His friends, his
baby-mama and his daughter would all have lived in the same village as he, the
precise experience of somewhere between 97 and 99.9 per cent of humans in
history.
We live in a
society almost completely absorbed in artificial needs. The existence of cars
has allowed people, in their confusion and standard-norm insanity to imagine
that their needs are best met beyond their own locality.
This “car culture” breeds profit-driven priorities of centralization; the basis for corporate culture. For thousands of
years people met all of their needs in and around their own village or on their
own migratory path. This has always been possible – and – mentally healthy (I
will get to that explanation in another post if not here).
The natural
human appreciates and loves their neighbors, instead of regarding them with the
repressed resentment which belies the ugly suburban attitudes and architectural
trends of the day: smaller stoops and
front yards and larger walled-in backyards. The modern home is more a
stronghold than a dwelling. Cars have made neighbors an optional feature of our lives. And overwhelmingly we tend to decline them as we whiz by them in favor of function-specific neighborhoods such as the super mall; the crown jewel of the auto's reign over our society.
Everybody’s
busy busy busy… without grasping how artificial the vast majority of their
business is. Most of our “needs” are imagined. We seem to need them because
everyone around us seems to need them. The more we have the more we want.
Technology, as predicted in the past, has indeed enabled a standard 2-hour work
day. There is no doubt about it. But no matter how much technology improves
efficiency we will keep working the eight-hour day – come ten hour with overtime
born of slave mentality, reputation mongering and greed – come twelve hour with
travel time. Because we’re blindly absorbed in ideas of capitalist competition
which is pure unbridled insanity and contradictory to life itself if you stop long
enough to think about it (again I'll elaborate in another post).
Our needs
are so much simpler than we imagine and much of them – the need to contemplate,
learn (real learning – the acquisition of wisdom, not factoid collecting) and
creativity – are wholly overlooked due to our constant distraction and
addictions.
The car
enables us to stay permanently distracted and permanently busy because we are
insanely enslaved to greed and ego - to our vast detriment. The car brings too too much within our reach while we fail to stop and really look at the things around us; and so we never take the time to discover the remarkable essence of the supposedly simple things in our presence. We never learn to see things - or people - or ourselves - for what they - and we - really are.
Without the
car and it’s unlimited access we would be far more inclined toward (and have the time for) the great
human necessities of regular solitude, mindfulness, observation and deeper
processing of contemplation. All of that is quite present in the prominent philosophical, poetic and religious texts of the world by the way – if you look
for it.
The intelligence
levels of average western citizens has been dropping alarmingly. We’re breeding
cities jam packed with functional morons; instinct robots deeply disconnected
from their potential humanity who imagine they are intelligent or cool or special or successful or normal
because the inventions of our ruthlessly clever (and ruthlessly unwise) elite have
mechanized us with iPods and cell phones and automobiles (and yes – my own
laptop) which FEEL like our own extensions; which FEEL like something to our
individual credit and which in no way are. They are chains which bind our minds
to the matrix. And the thing about being an instinct robot is – our FEELINGS
are almost always corrupt; almost always a placebo to lull our weak consciousness
into dreamy comfortable submission, while our actions go about destroying us:
our society, our planet and our arrested evolution. Because, of course, our instincts have barely evolved in the last hundred thousand years while technology has taken over the world and evolved our circumstances a millionfold.
You and I and everyone we know are Xboxes running on Pong software and this problem is in fact at the root of every problem you can imagine - from war to global warming to racism and to all the rampant - practically ubiquitous - superstitions which warp our minds and society into a whirl of delusion, vanity and accusation;
You and I and everyone we know are Xboxes running on Pong software and this problem is in fact at the root of every problem you can imagine - from war to global warming to racism and to all the rampant - practically ubiquitous - superstitions which warp our minds and society into a whirl of delusion, vanity and accusation;
And now I must apologize. I am very tired (three hours sleep last night) and mentally sluggish. I've failed to contain the scope of this post and with no brain left with which to further edit it into something more fair and manageable to read, and the deadline upon us, I must now surrender this beast and collapse in bed.
With regrets,
FWG/New Day Rising
A Robin buit this nest in the corner of Pan's back deck. She's become quite comfortable with human and canine presence and allowed us front row seats while she fed worms to her four babies. Incredible. Yeah, I should have got a picture of that instead of waiting til they were napping. Look, this isn't National Geographic, okay?
