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| Click the month (above) to read the latest entry.
I raise my right hand to try my best to not ride in a car this year 2005. In this diary I will try to explain why and how. I cannot separate the act of riding in a car in the United States from complicity in the war in Iraq and in global warming. A ride in a car is a bomb aimed at innocent civilians. A ride in a car is a rising ocean erasing ancient civilizations from coasts and lowlands. When I ride in a private car I am complicit in the genocide, I have become the bomb blast. I do not want this killing, this world-ending in my name, so I will pledge to avoid cars, so I will pledge to avoid rides. I will make a quiet pledge to a carfree 2005. I doubt that I will ever make it. I realize I have lost before I have begun. I doubt that I am capable of something so crazy. I know that I am not stronger than the culture, from the crushing culture, the culture of tons, the culture that I feel pushing down on me pulling out on my arms and legs, stretching me and luring me into the upholstery. The culture that flashes automobile commercials at me almost every other minute of my waking life. The culture that puts cars in my dreams, where they run over my memory and kill the squirrels and rabbits and flowers, and the people, with their car-stench, with their burning and their shouting, with their wheels and steel around necks and choking. I cannot separate the offered ride home from the suicide bomber blowing up the roadblock, igniting his mind in the tent full of troops. I cannot separate my frown in the back seat comfort from the change in the weather, from the ice sheet of Greenland cleaving into the ocean like an iceberg in a martini. I cannot, and so I must not. I can feel it start to form inside me like an insanity, like a sentence from a judge. I will attempt to not ride in a car this year, I will force myself to avoid car trips at all costs. I will make a crazy stab at my own Quixote. I will oppose the culture with my particular madness, I will challenge it and myself. I will not accept the ride - I will take the bus or I will walk or bicycle. The others may be perfectly comfortable with their silent complicity in the death, in the destruction of earth and life and water, but I will say no. I will say that it is not worth it, that my decadent comfort is not worth the war that garrotes children, that leads minds far more nuanced than mine to strap themselves with explosions for something greater than their own beginning and end, for a world that revolves after their eyes have closed, for a world that is further away than next week and the price of gasoline. I did not accept the offered rides last night, cold night, night of January Minneapolis. The temperature was ten below, was further below with wind chill, but I walked seven blocks to the bus stop, but I walked eight blocks to the bus stop and waiting. I was not the only one walking. There were others walking, maybe some of them were walking to their cars, maybe others were walking home or to the bus. It will be difficult to do this. It will be impossible to do this, but I am going to try. Already it is easy. I do not own a car. I have never owned a car. I have never even had a driver's license. It is a heavy weight in this culture. The stress, the pressure on you to drive, to participate, to destroy. The normal is the car. Without a car you are less than a man. Without a car you are something other than woman. Without a car you are not complete as a human being in this land, in this expression of belief, in this accumulation of wealth and habits. I am not a true citizen, I am not a citizen in the same class as others, but I also do not contribute to the brilliant blindness of exhaust and bombs that they do. I do not contribute to global warming or the war, or I contribute to them to a lesser degree. Because of these two catastrophes, because of these strong barometers of our collective carelessness. Because of our moral blindness and our complete confusion. This war that is now so clearly a war for oil, and that everyone who is addicted to this oil is just as much to blame, just as much as our president and vice president, is complicit, is guilty of the blunder. There is no way to separate a car drive in the United State to a death in Iraq. They are bound as tightly as a bullet to its chamber. Starting that car up across the street with explosions, the fire of spark on gasoline, the combustion in that engine, is the combustion that shoots the ancient earth of Babylon into the sky, is the same explosion that kills entire families, women and children. The combustion that your shiny silver key turns begins breeds the deaths of thousands. A driver in the United States turns his key, turns her key, and starts the war machinery that blows up the Middle East. Our car culture is the murderer of culture in Iraq. There is no way to separate the family outing, the job commute, the joyride across the icy parkinglot, with the rising ocean levels, with the strange flux of our global atmosphere. No way to separate a trip down the driveway from the decimation of species, from the slow weather drift of habitat that so many animals and insects will lack the guts to cross. There is no way to separate the trip to drive-thru McDonalds from the melting ice of the Innuit, from the death of species, from the eating habits of coastline. My act is so silent it kills me. My act is so meaningless it is useless. But despite my quiet insistence, but with it at my side, I will make this attempt to say to hell with cars, will try my best to curse them when they are offered, to try something else, to avoid them, to get out of them, to keep them out of my dreams and stories that I read. It will be impossible, but that is no reason to think that I cannot start, that I can't even make the attempt. So many others do it all the time. So many others do it for their entire life. I am crazy to do it in this country, but I am not the only one. I feel like I am the lonely one, but that is only some kind of delusion. The news reports today from Iraq say that the current government of that country is considering a three-day driving ban around the upcoming January 30th national elections. The ban is being considered to crack down on car bombs, the practice of filling a car with explosives and suicide-driving it into a target. It is interesting that cars are being used in such a way. A car bomb is an extrapolation of the very nature of a car itself. A car uses explosion to create its power, to create its movement. A car uses a controlled explosion, igniting a highly flammable liquid in a closed space to create its own version of transportation. Explosion creates energy to move a car forward. Even if there are no extra explosives placed in the seats or in the trunks of a car, a car is a car bomb. The oil that is the focus of our greed is the explosive substance that we blow up our cars with. The oil that caused the war, that we are so addicted to, is running out. To keep up our stash of it, we need to resort to desperate measures. The car bombs on the roads of the United States are just as capable of destruction as the car bombs in use in Iraq. Perhaps they are even more destructive, because the reliance on them by the citizens of the U.S. has driven this war into being. The dependence, the addiction, the helplessness in the face of the depletion of their fuel, has given us this war. A car driven in the United States is the cause of the war. A car driven in the United States is the shadow of that killing car bomb in Iraq. We need that car ban in the United States as much as the government of Iraq does. We need to stop our car bombs before they continue their war on the rest of the world, and its dwindling supplies of oil. A personal car ban is nothing compared to the crushing accumulation of oil greed in the U.S. My personal car ban means nothing. It only means something if it can be the example that sparks others into making their own personal car bans. In these days of subzero, it is easy to see that we cannot stop the worst, that we have no control despite our intelligence and technology. If a cold mass of air wishes to deposit itself atop the middle of the country, it will, despite freezing pipes and septic systems, despite our dreams of sun and heat. Even cars start with more difficulty, even their tires slip on the ice. It is cold outside, but an anti-fur activist wouldn't be caught dead wearing a coat made out of animal fur. No anti-fur activist would dare wear a coat made out of baby seal hides to an anti-fur protest. And yet it does not seem odd that people drive cars to protest against the war in Iraq. This should seem odd because the oil that their cars burn was responsible for the war that they are arguing against. The war was started for them. But the anti-war protesters do not think this way. It might seem like cognitive dissonance to me, but it seems more like insanity to everybody else. Car transportation is so deeply ingrained in the U.S. lifestyle that to pull it out and examine it separately is not something that any normal person would do. To believe that one's personal driving habits has anything to do with war and with climate change is generally believed to be insane. I must be insane. I must have some kind of insanity to feel this way. I am the definition of insanity – I am so completely opposite the normal psychology of these times. I cannot separate my own time spent in a car with the immense problems at the root of this piece of technology. I am insane because I connect the turning of the key and the igniting of the engine with the extraction of the fuel that fires it forward. I am insane because I see the war that made that oil possible in every tank of gasoline. I am insane because I connect the exhaust from that tailpipe with the dire forecasts of global climate change. If there were any such thing as truth, the insane would be the drivers. If the normative is to be so disconnected then it is abnormal to see these connection. Of course I am not insane. My problem is that I am not addicted. I am not addicted to a car, to cars, and so I can see these connections that seem so obvious to me, and so I am sensitive to the cognitive dissonance of a war protester driving to a protest. I can hear the scrapes and tears of that attempt to start up a car across the street. I can hear the violence that someone needs to twist out of a key to get the violence of internal combustion going on such a cold day. I can hear the screams that come from that reluctant engine. I can hear the screams that come from all over because of what that engine does. I've been getting around lately on the bus. That's what I do here this time of year. Of course the bus burns fossil fuels too, maybe the gas is straight from Iraq but it's probably not; not that that even matters. I ride the bus with many other people, so we're not wasting fuel at the rate of a single person in a car. If everybody, or almost everybody, got around on mass transit, we wouldn't be in the fix we are today. We wouldn't have to go to war to secure a supply of oil. We wouldn't be putting as much CO2 in the atmosphere and making so much global warming. If public transit were considered important we would have more rail transit here, which is more fuel-efficient. Steel wheels on rail take much less energy to move than rubber wheels on asphalt. Rail transit runs on electricity, which could be generated by wind or solar power or with hydro, and coal could only be used as a last resort when the wind blows out and the sun is hidden and the water runs low. In my mind, it takes a certain level of selfishness to drive a single occupant car. It takes a certain willingness to damn it all, to blank the future, to drop your scruples. First of all, the small engines in cars are not very fuel-efficient. Maybe 10% of the energy in the oil they burn is harnessed to actually do the work of the car. The rest is released, much of it to do the work of global warming. A driver weighs maybe 10% of the weight of the car. If you put these two 10 percents together, you see that a car uses about 1% of the energy it burns to actually move its driver. This is about as inefficient as you can get. This is certainly a mode of transportation that in no way can be considered sustainable. The larger engines in buses are more fuel-efficient, plus they carry a larger load, so not as much energy is expended to move a single person. If you run on rail you are even more efficient, and trains running on electric have the option of using many different options for their energy needs. Calgary, Canada, for instance, runs its two light rail lines on power generated by a wind farm. These rail lines carry 200,000 riders a day, and this in a province where one of the leading industries is petroleum production. A week ago Friday at a computer demonstration at the apple store, the trainer asked me if I had any difficulty finding a place to park. When I told him that I took the bus, he said that he was afraid of riding the bus. I didn't ask him what he meant by that, but I wondered what he was afraid of. Was he afraid of the other people on the bus? Was he afraid that his ego wouldn't let him share the ride with others? To me, the great fun of riding transit is riding with other people. When you ride the bus or the train you are often in very close proximity with others. Sometimes things are quiet, sometimes people talk. But you share lives; you share your life with the lives of people who you might never run into if not for transit. Transit is a broadening experience, like travel should be. I learn from my co-riders, I learn about what is important to others, what folks are talking about. I learn from the silence too, from the looks on faces, from the way people sit and stand. It's a kind of school; it is an important part of my adult education. When the weather gets warmer, I will ride my bicycle to get around more so, but when I do that I miss the daily dose of humanity I get riding mass transit. Yesterday I walked across the Third Avenue bridge. There are few things that I do that make me feel more that I am alive and in the world than that experience, the experience of crossing the bridge on a very cold day. Actually, it was getting warmer. The weather that was moving in was blowing in gusts that bent the wind chill down low. The wind was blowing against my back and right side, so it was not as bad as it could have been were it blowing straight into my face. I was walking far above the river. The water down below was roaring over the apron on its way to the falls. I don't always notice how loud the water really is when I cross this same bridge on the bus. I kept my head down to warm my face in my scarf, but when I looked up I could see my destination, the east bank of the river and the city buildings there, getting bigger every time. As I got closer to the other side, I passed another man walking in the opposite direction. He was the only other person I saw on my walk across the bridge. This man had his entire face covered with a mask for the cold, and I thought that I was stupid for not doing the same, but I have eyeglasses that tend to fog up when my mouth and nose are covered, so I leave them open and just try to dip my face into the scarf wrapped around my neck. I was losing my face to the wind and the cold, it was going away in the long walk across the bridge. I made it across on my own power. That was my satisfaction, that was my gladness. I made my scissors steps to cut up the distance, despite the numbing cold and the wind that blew it thru me, despite my height above the river and how my vertigo tugged me down like I was dropping. It was as close to an adventure as I would get all day, even tho it only took me ten minutes to cross. That's about nine minutes and fifty seconds longer than it took all the car drivers, the dozens or maybe hundreds of them that passed me by in both directions as I made my adventure across the bridge in the weather, in the cold. They were as insulated from the experience, the weather and the world, as I would be for the next nine hours in my windowless workplace, until I left my job and the night was all around. The outside world had changed in the meantime with some snow and it was warmer as I waited for the bus that would take me almost all the way home. It is inauguration day. Bush starts his second term today. I heard about the "Not a Damn Dime" campaign to show your protest of the Bush inauguration by purchasing nothing today, no food, no goods, no gas. Many people will do this. They won't even buy gasoline today. But wouldn't a stronger signal be to not buy gasoline any other day this year, any other day the next four years? After all, every tank of gas you buy makes Bush's campaign war chest more powerful. Every tank of gas you buy makes the war in Iraq and the planned wars into other oil-rich nations more necessary. We are a nation of addicts scratching and clawing for our fix, and all those folks who won't buy a tank of gasoline today will have to fill up tomorrow or the next day, of a few days after that. A more powerful protest is to go carfree. To reject completely the very product that made Bush into the fierce strange force that he is, that gave him all his wobbly power. The last time I bought gasoline was in 1992. I bought a gallon of gas for a lawn mower. Now I have a push mower. Today I will push my bus pass into the fare slot for my bus ride. In a way, that is buying something. This afternoon, in order to go to a video shoot I have planned, I will have to put an extra 50 cents into the fare slot in order to ride the bus during rush hour. I will have to spend that money today. And sometime in the future I might even have to buy some gasoline, maybe in another thirteen years, maybe sooner, tho I will try to avoid it. I encourage others to do the "Not One Damn Drive" protest all year long. Don't get in a car. Don't even think about it. Separate yourself completely from the war and from this president. I do not know much about meditation, but I do know quite a bit about waiting at a bus stop. Eyes frozen at the street a block up, standing tall and in position by the sign. When the weather is nicer I will read while I wait, but on days when my hands get this cold I stand there and erase my mind. I do not count the trees and telephone poles, I just aim my eyes at their collision point in the future, in the envelope from which the bus will enter. Sometimes I will look down to check the security of my feet. To look down at my boots on the sidewalk with the snow nearby. Then I will look back up at that point in the distance, the curve in which the buss will turn into my sight. During the day I see the white bus body edge around that curve. At night I see the certain familiar set of lights, the headlights and the lights for the route sign. If I spent too much time looking at exactly where I was I could get more than a little disturbed. After all, a lane of cars is going by quite fast, and quite heavy. When the caribou used to run in their migrations, the ancient peoples used to step aside and give them plenty of berth. They didn't stand on the curb with the understanding that the racing caribou would stay in their lane. They were just as disciplined as our modern cars. There is something hardwired in me, perhaps it is hardwired in others, too, that makes my body want to move away from the street when it sees the herd of caribou racing cars approaching. When it sees their mad headlight eyes and grill faces rumbling toward me because they just must follow that certain path. I have an urge to step aside, to go away from them, far away. It's something about that lumbering size, and the unpredictability of their exact path, and of how those things will impact my safety. Cars are just not very safe. They are prone to accidents which lead to deaths. They are car bombs as soon as they have rolled off the assembly line. They are maulers and killers of human beings. Pedestrians are often killed by cars. Cars are dangerous. They do dangerous things to our earth and our landscape. They have twisted our collective minds in strange ways; they have made us think that parkinglots and conformity are beautiful, or at least acceptable. They have told us that a racing stripe and nothing else is as fine as you need to make your design. They have numbed us into standing on the curb as they barrel and scream by, as they mess with our ancient programming that tells us to step aside for the crazy mindless beast, to hide and get away before it bites you, before it eats you. I don't know much about meditation, but I do know that when I think these things I have not emptied my mind. I'll have to try harder. I'll concentrate harder at that point, at that curve, and wait for the bus. |
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