S️chool Essay

I This is so cancelled

Name an encapsulation of modern society's endless propensity towards greed. Online shopping? Health insurance? Tiktok? Try roads.

What is it about us that makes expansion, conquest, and economic growth so desirable? From Europe’s colonization over the world to a rampant consumerist culture birthed from capitalism, our impact, as people, particularly in the western world, has been remarkably negative.

Is it humans’ right to terraform the land into whatever we want? This is so philosophical but I quite like seeing the big picture. It would be a hard pill to swallow, wouldn’t it, to say that everything we’ve done post-industrialization, however beautiful, was unethical. There are a few ways to see it, a spectrum, but generally- I find that people are so self centered, as a species. Me me me me me. So I’ll do a little white knighting for the insect population and the fungus and the dead elk on the highway, because Chevrolet is raking in their hard earned cash. Also, why should we let cars into our historical developments (those being, cities and towns built before cars came about)? What a way to disrespect our ancestors' hard work, by paving over it carelessly, oftentimes tearing down buildings to install a highway.

When the interstate highway system was constructed in the 1950’s and 60’s, it was brought about to connect the country, at high speeds and with little regard for the people it displaced, the animals it killed, the toxic fumes it enabled. The common man may not have been bothered by these adverse effects, were he not directly in this path, as suburbia expanded to the benefit of middle or upper class, typically white car owners who never had to live near a highway. Maybe the early car haters were right, though many ended up a victim of their allure.

II El problema es el Capitalismo

The idea that in an ideal society each person has their own car is Ludicrous. There is no reason why we dedicate so many precious resources toward this ideal. The metal, cloth, plastic, etc would have been better used on literally anything else. The tar and gravel should have stayed whence it came.

Why the individualism? When you remember that selling hundreds of millions of cars will make that much more money, of course using the apparatus of government to incentivise car ownership is a good idea. Henry Ford, an avid bicyclist, gets money signs in his eyes, his tongue emerges green. There are f-150s on every street corner, christ almighty.

“But people need to get around”, naysays the naysayer. To that point: Trains exist. In fact, the institution of Amtrak has more integrity than any single city planner who decides to just add one more lane. If believing that people should not have to own a car to function in society makes you a socialist, then golly, sure, why not.

III Roads are an assault on the senses.

And here I’ll illustrate why, in all 5 delicious channels.

Sight . A grey monolith of asphalt, dozens of feet wide, cut into by neon yellow markings, surrounded by similarly ugly signage, and god forbid, billboards. Don’t get me started on billboards*. This design is intended to be utilitarian but in the big picture is incredibly wasteful. Why the HECK should a typical road be four lanes. It makes sense from the point of view of the car owner, the most pampered creature in this nation. In many cases, four lanes, 40 feet of space, is not substantial enough for these people, because their darn cars are 20x bigger than them. And why the HECK are cars so big, anyway, and continue to grow? Because people are afraid of car accidents, somehow.

*It is bad enough to take something as beautiful as nature and pervert it with ugliness in the form of roads. That at least carries some justification, however much baggage they really carry. It is an entirely different kind of evil to ADVERTISE within it. Why are we not allowed to text and drive, but huge, wordy advertisements are a-ok. Especially electric billboards, which aside from being horribly gaudy, pile on to the energy we use which is already dastardly enough. And all this so that companies can get tangentially higher brand recognition. I feel like this is not so controversial, for billboards do very little to justify their existence.

Sound. Living next to the highway means that even in the middle of the night I can hear that filthy, degrading ‘woosh’, every few minutes. Cars are annoying! It's worse when you can hear their engine, better when you can hear their music, drowning out the sorrow. What a miserable thing, that our world is interrupted with this dreadful hum, like tinnitus. We’re giving the Rabbits and the grass and the sunflowers tinnitus. And god forbid they honk! Ugly and annoying? Pick a struggle!

Smell. Cars love causing global warming, they can’t get enough. Almost as much as the freaks that make money off them. Indeed, coughing and sneezing because there are dinosaur particles in the air is normal and accepted because instead of figuring something else out, we decided to go full ham on the oil situation and now every living creature on earth has to pay for it. Gas, motor oil, plastic components, it's all the same sludge.

Touch. Recall from Benjamin Franklin's boyish experiments that light colored surfaces reflect light, while darkness absorbs it and transforms it into heat. That heat, multiplied by millions of acres=yeowch! By the way, deforestation also removes the natural deflection against that dreaded co2 emitted by cars, if you're one of those people who care about that kind of thing.

Taste. I’m not saying that I have a better sense of design than the department of transportation, but, as I heavily implied above, the highway system lacks a vital art nouveau influence.

IV. Where should cars be allowed? Nowhere. We let cars (Foul, perverse, wasteful) go on any old land, despite its sacredness. Does untouched land become less sacred when corn is planted upon it? When people build their homes upon it? Never? That's for you to decide. But the federal government decided that we will forbid corn on these certain sections of land, almost arbitrarily. ”National Parks”, they're called, but never accessible enough. So they let automobiles into Yellowstone for the first time, which invited all the ills of car travel, including, but not limited to: Roadkill, Gas Stations, Parking Lots, Tire Particulate, RVs. Why did the wildlife species in the national park cross the newly developed road? To get to the other side obviously, but it, much like its unprotected brethren, was not anticipating such a thing to exist. That's my joke today. LOL.

There is no reason why 15 minute cities and public transportation should be a political issue. It's literally for the greater good of the people that life is made easier as it pertains to transportation. We might as well allocate $1 to make it so that the already filthy polluted, destroyed, exploited world we’re in is still even a little bit habitable in 30 years. It is okay to put untouched wilderness on a pedestal because that's all that remains of the old. There are party balloons in the mariana trench, there is road through each forest, each empty prairie with a thriving ecosystem that is plowed over with concrete and pesticide.

V. But cars are sexy?

Recently I found myself gawking at an old car. It brought to life why come our society has chosen this path: look at them! That sleek exterior, leather details inside, a little wood paneling. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. It's so sad to think of all we have lost in the favor of these hulking metal machines, literally and spiritually.

You do not benefit from cars. You might benefit from A car, and that's the point. Transportation has been set up in a manner that is ineffective for anybody that is not in A car and therefore cannot benefit from its spoils. This stark naked inequity should shock people, yet many are blind to it, insulated from the world in their climate controlled pod. They’ll figure it out. Buy buy buy, own, rent, do whatever but if you choose not to partake, we’ll make life hell. This is why I care, and maybe why you should also care? It is just as human to walk on the legs that Satan gave you as it is to invent an overly destructive industry and pollute the only planet suitable for habitation. Not that that matters of course.

And they're not even good for people! Maybe SOMEBODY likes that they have to drive their kids 15 minutes from their dumb new construction suburban house to the school district, because it's just too darn dangerous for the kids to walk themselves, They’ll get in an accident. We don’t know our neighbors.

Kill everyone now. Is what I would say, but that's slightly ignorant. Maybe we could just, I don’t know, give a harkening of a crap about what we’re doing. People seem to be waking up to the Shein clothes and the pacific garbage patch and the inherent inequity that allows us to eat mango in the dead of winter.

The age of car dominance will end, it must. Whether it takes 50 years, or 1,000. Same goes for every other useless industry, ideology etc. We haven’t even gotten started.