Where the Hell Is the Outrage?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. Here's one possible explanation from 2001:

The author is a transit and cycling advocate who lives in Los Angeles without a car. On purpose.

http://www.newcolonist.com/rr11.html

(snip)Now, community is one of the great pleasures of life, and we do it better than any other creatures on this planet. No other animal, for example, can use symbolic language to communicate with its fellows; no other arrays itself in an ever-changing second skin of emblems as do we when we don our clothes; no other has developed so rich a variety of social poetry as we have. We are the kind of critter that likes to chill wi' da homies; we are the back-fence gossip, the park bench raconteur, the streetcorner poet; we are the village idiot and the absent-minded professor feeding pigeons together in the public square; we're the handshake at a busy corner or the hand that helps an old lady onto the bus. But, ever more so lately, we are…alone.

What is your life these days? Do you wake up in the dark bedroom of your suburban house, dress hurriedly, stumble into the attached garage, strap yourself in the car even before you open the garage door with your remote, and roll out onto the streets alone in your glass-and-steel coffin, headed numbly to your underground parking structure and your cubicle? Maybe you'll drop your kids off at school on the way (your kids who do not know who lives around the corner); maybe you'll pick up breakfast at Jack-in-the-Box on the way to work (giving your order to an electronic grill, inching your car ahead till a plastic-coated hand reaches toward your window with the "food&quot ; maybe you'll watch TV tonight, because it's all you've ever done every night since you started working. Maybe that's your life these days. If you're in America, it probably is. You live alone with your family, and all the burdens of your humanity fall on the three or four of you alone.

No wonder there are so many divorces nowadays.

For seventy years or more the vast right-wing conspiracy has been telling us that we can be happy only in a little separate house surrounded by a moat of grass in a quiet suburb where everyone minds their own business. For seventy years or more they have been telling us that true freedom means driving everywhere alone in a car, that true security means sweating ever longer hours in a little gray cubicle at work, that true fulfillment comes from buying ever bigger television sets and watching ever simpler shows and ever-more-complicated commercials. For seventy years or more they've been telling us that the touch of a stranger brings a shame worse than death, and that the pinnacle of creation is four nervous people fighting over which meaningless TV show to watch on Friday night.

No wonder our country has the highest appetite for recreational drugs of any on this earth. ..