Just Slow Down and Take a Breath

[beechnut79]

(02-13-2022, 12:00 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-10-2022, 09:23 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Just a friendly reminder that it would be hard to imagine today's womanhood being able to put up with returning to what in its heyday was known as the Suzy Homemaker role. Most of today's women are too well educated for that, and for them the idea of going back to Suzy Homemaker seems comparable to returning to the days when women couldn't vote.

As far as an era in which changes can be made, they can be done in any turning. In the era of hiatus and regression there were vast changes in both technology and philosophies, I will admit not all for the better. One key area where the regression comes in is in the area of workers' rights. We should move form at-will employment to a just cause model. But will we? There doesn't seem to be that kind of consensus despite some  movement such as Fight for 15. Amazon has become a near monopoly by treating their workers as livestock at best, vermin at worst.

Where fossil fuels is concerned, one poster recently stated that we might first need to abandon the car culture. Not to long ago I read where in only about 12 percent of the US can one get by fairly well without a car. If you are anywhere within "the other 88" you will have significant difficulties. And besides, the nature of the spread out landscape makes is not cost effective to run public transit in said areas.

The pandemic has hastened the idea of putting innovative ways of working to the test, most notably remote works paces sans a physical office. Such flexibility might even result in more folks being determined to follow through on a plan or project and do a great job. We also can achieve greater work-life balance if we work to work smarter not harder.

You have made many posts and private messages over the years asking when will we get beyond auto dependency. I don't know where your most-recent comment was.

I used to wonder that too. Mass transit is more efficient, and car culture creates urban sprawl and danger to pedestrians.

But cars can still have their place if they are no longer fueled by polluting fossils. They could one day allow us to explore and tour our beautiful lands again and get away and slow down.

But we don't even have that benefit of cars anymore. And the horrific trucker revolt in Canada against covid restrictions and spreading elsewhere makes clear to me that even more than car dependency, it is truck dependency that I deplore and wish we could get beyond and liberated from.

I wrote this comment today to a post I made on my facebook page: 

I am pretty much against truckers anyway. I wish we would go back to trains. They are much more fuel efficient and financially efficient. I don't know why they declined, except to benefit the car, tire and gas companies. Trains should do the longer trips, and trucks the local ones. And truckers should go work for railroads. It sure would ease this situation; you can't park your own train and block a city or a bridge with one. The truckers are individualists; they shout "freedom" as if freedom means care not a fig about others getting sick or losing THEIR jobs because YOU decide to block their roads.

I used to enjoy long trips in my car or my parents' car. The interstate highways were built in the late 1950s and 1960s and were supposed to be a great leap forward in infrastructure and show that we as a nation could do things collectively. No more. They are ruled by the truckers. You can't drive on the interstate without a truck slowing you down or speeding up and tailgating you, and then you take your life in your hands and pass trucks over and over, or tremble while they speed pass you. Accidents have increased. The interstate highways belong to the truckers now because we diminished our railroads and depend on truckers so the truck and car companies, tire makers and gas companies can make their profits and so truckers can work as lonely and angry individuals. So much for a pleasant tourist trip to a park or an interesting city.

We are now approaching the half century mark since the big gasoline shortage which first called into question America’s love affair with the automobile. I don’t really believe that we still have a love affair with it these days as it is more like a money draining beast of burden. During our postwar marriage to car culture many give their cars (mostly female) pet names such as Miss Linda B. A name someone I knew gave to his car. Don’t hear that sort of thing much anymore, just as there are far fewer popular songs with female names as titles.

For years many have predicted that by 2015 high speed rail would surpass both private car and airplane. We are now seven years beyond, and HSR is not even close to that status, at least not here in the US. Do you feel it ever will become dominant here?

And, where truckers are concerned, you may though be a fan of perhaps the most famous trucker of all time. He was best known for something entirely unrelated.