No Man's Land

It's probable that some other automotive outfit will swoop in and keep the Fremont plant producing cars. Indeed, while it is vehicular production and my bias against cars is crystal clear, I still prefer to see actual manufacturing in our country...I would prefer living in a city where locally produced, high quality items trump the importation of cheap shit 11,000 miles away.

I'm Elk Grovian. To live here mandates car ownership. Indeed, my family owns three. I don't have an aversion to cars per se, my aversion has always been that my America has spent the last seventy years building cities that thrust compulsory ownership to the forefront and that every damn thing you do from buying a pack of gum to having afternoon tea with Grandma requires driving.

Here in Elk Grove we've outlawed the corner store. While this has supposedly prevented adjacent housal unit values from falling, prevented the supposed forty five vagrants from occupying its berms, and prevented the supposed thirty seven child predators from bagging a sure catch, it also forces everyone to drive, say, to the corner clusterfuck at Franklin and Laguna. We smartly placed two supermarkets facing one another, miles from everyone. Competition. One six lane road intersecting another six lane road...a pedestrian's no man's land. No one in their right mind would walk the 2.3 miles to that intersection, navigate the crosswalks and buy their pack of gum.

So everyone drives. Everyone encased in their own steel carapace, with no human interaction with anyone else during that activity, an activity that consumes ever more of our time and resources precisely because of poor urban planning and deference to the automotive gods.


The bus ride home today was filled with active discussion, everyone talking about how tomorrow e-Tran is going to cut four of our buses on our route-- at the same time we stranded two passengers downtown because the bus was chock full. Chock full. Can't imagine what tomorrow will bring. But the point here is that there was actual human/neighbor interaction with one another, something totally void with solo-occupant commuting.

Take away this public option and even more people will suffer socially, less able to interact with others. The more iPods, iPhones, Boysenberries, Blogs and Blueteeth penetrate our society along with more physical separation because of the way we build our "communities," the less we grow as a people and the more apt we are to suffer from the ills of individualism. Just look across your street -- do you even know the names of half the people living near you? If your "neighborhood" is similar to mine then it's also a no man's land, full of people unwilling to interact, drving their rigs into their garages at the end of the day and emerging at dawn to repeat the cycle -- never engaging with one another. Perhaps that's what we want; I'll accept that to a degree but we can't exclusively live in our cocoons, we have to interact. I think we would only become better as a consequence.