|
However, the epitome of cluelessness in this little survey for me is the exibit C, the article published in The Wall Street Journal titled The War Against the Car, by Stephen Moore, a member of this newspaper's editorial board (WSJ online requires subscription, but the article can be viewed here). It is really worth reading in its entirety (quoting a paragraph or two will not do it justice), if one wants to appreciate the degree to which we as a society have cut ourselves loose from the realities of the world. However, I still would like to comment on the two closing paragraphs of the article:
"The good news is that environmental groups and politicians aren't likely to break Americans from their love affair with cars -- big, convenient, safe cars -- no matter how guilty they try to make us feel for driving them. Instead they are using more subtle forms of coercion. The left is now pining for a $1-a-gallon gas tax to make driving unaffordable. Washington has also wasted over $60 billion of federal gas tax money on mass transit systems, yet fewer Americans ride them now than before the deluge of subsidies began. When the voters in car-crazed Los Angeles opted to fund an ill-fated subway system, most drivers who voted "yes" said they did so because they hoped it would compel other people off the crowded highways.
To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable -- it is our exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways. We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us there."
It is quite clear that we, Americans, are suffering from an acute form of hystorical Alzheimer's desease, for which we may have to pay extremely dearly. We forget that "the end of history" as proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama, turned out to be a dangerous fantasy in the early XXI century. Apparently, many of us feel that we can always get what we want, if only our governing bodies develop the right policies. We have no appreciation for the specialness and uniqueness of our current transitory historical period, during which we still have options, and we mindlessly let this period lapse and thereby foreclose those options forever. We don't understand that ruthless competition for resources is much more common and much more fundamental as a driving force of history than, say, our cherished notions of democracy, human rights, and public welfare. We don't realize that investing into the infrastructure alternative to "big, convenient, safe cars" that we have such a strong love affair with today is what may save our economy from total paralysis in historically very near future, allow it to regroup, and thereby give our civilization a chance to fight another day. We think that our political and business leaders will solve these problems for us -- well, guess what -- our political and business leaders read Forbes and Wall Street Journal, and make public pronouncements in the spirit of the above argument by Dick Cheney. We are an infantile civilization that may be foreclosing its chance to grow up.
| |
