12 12 / 2008
"
It’d be great if we were planning and consolidating trips, car pooling, walking, riding our bikes, or taking the bus to places we used to drive to without thinking about it.
If more and more of us we’re choosing to live within a short hop, skip, or a jump from our jobs, the stores, a downtown or a village square. If instead of automatically heading out to the Home Depot or the Wal-Mart twelve miles away for a light bulb or a bottle of shampoo, we were paying the extra forty or fifty cents at the local hardware store or supermarket eight blocks from the house. I’d be thrilled if what’s happened is that we’ve realized as one what a giant pain in ass driving has become in most places, how much time we’re wasting sitting in the car, how much aggravation we’re causing ourselves sharing the roads with idiots, morons, drunks, and sociopaths, how frustrating it is to find a decent parking spot, how maddening it is to come back to it two minutes late and find a thirty dollar ticket on the windshield, how just plain dangerous it is to strap ourselves into these thin metal boxes and hurl ourselves down the highway in rain, sleet, snow, and ice at sixty miles an hour just to get somewhere really don’t want to be.
It’d be a great leap forward, an epoch of collective enlightment rivaling the Renaissance, if we’d come to the conclusion together that nine times out of ten it’s just not worth the trip and we’re much happier, healthier, and richer in pocket and spirit for staying put.
How beautiful it is to dream!
"
Yeah.
