The Car Has Killed Society

I believe that the car has killed society. Roads and cars have put great distances between people. Friends and families live farther apart today than ever before in human history. It's really sad.

200 years ago, the a family would have lived, worked, and wed in the village/town they grew up in. The old style town/village had everything one needed. The livery, the general store, the postmaster's, the telegraph office, etc. You met people on town. You drank together and played cards together at the local watering hole. You helped one another load carts with supplies from the livery and general store. Families all got together at harvest time and other holidays to potluck and dance.

Fast forward 100 years. Streetcars, local grocery stores, barbershops and schools. Everything could still be found in a neighbourhood/town. A street had old guys outside sitting, smoking, playing backgammon. Ladies shopped together and had their hair done together. Kids played baseball and kickball outside after school. Stores still gave credit to the regulars of the neighbourhood.

Fast forward 50 years and you arrive to the suburban generation. Familes packed up and left the cities for the "safer" more sterile outskirts of town. There with pristine lawns and white picket fences, families lived in peaceful tranquility, safely away from the smog and the noise of the city.

Yet there was a price to pay and we are still paying it today.

1 - Mothers/women are left at home all day. They bake, take care of the kids and push the stroller or walk the dog around the block once a day to break up the monotony of it all. They have no one to talk to, and no one to get good advice from, save for the occasional call from their mother in a distant city and Oprah.

2 - single people suffer too. They have money and success. They are climbing the corporate ladders. Yet each and every night, unless they bring someone home from the bar, they arrive home to a dark, empty house. It's a lonely life.

3- Neighbours hardly know one another. People are wary of one another. Wary of their own kind. We don't know the names of the people two doors down. The only time we talk to our neighbours right next door are when they are loading up the pickup to go to work or out mowing the lawn or snowblowing. Some communities have BBQs but even those are only once or twice a year at best.

To get through our boredom and depression we take pills, drink to excess, and take on various other addictive behaviours: shopping, sex, partying, etc.

We need COMMUNITY. We need to be ALIVE. Take out the roads, get rid of the cars. We need street cars!

Zoning bylaws? We need to change them. Why can't every suburb be given a grocery store, a barbershop, a school, a community centre, and a pool hall? No more wide cul-de-sacs and endless rows of cookie cutter homes. We need variety. A korean grocer, a laundromat, a local sports club, a Greek barbershop, and so on.

Please people. Let's get back to community.

A great book:

Affluenza by Oliver James (the more $ we make, the more unhappy, lonely we are)