Car sales...

Today is August 8th, which will go down in my book of history as the day AFTER Barry Bonds surpassed Hank Aaron as the all time home run leader. The 6-2, 235lb left fielder is 43 years old. Its too bad his career and record has been tarnished by doping charges.

Nonethess today also marks the day Pam completed the transaction of her car sale. Ok you may be saying, "big deal" with a sarcastic tone, but what you should be saying is "big deal" with a very serious tone! Mobility is a very huge thing to Americans. Its in our culture to have personal vehicles and our cities are designed around the fact that every American over the age of 18 most likely has a vehicle and over 60% of households have 2 or more cars. Unfortunately for us, American society is designed around a post world war II idea of suburbia. With all the GI's coming back to the states housing was a large concern. The solution was to create small communities, outside of the city, with a pattern of houses and a couple different floor plans that are easily constructed and attractive to a particular social group. The automobile enabled this model to become true because people could then commute from the burbs to their jobs instead of having to live near them. Americans have been tied to their vehicles ever since.

So what...so what is wrong with the suburbs? Whats wrong with personal vehicles? Social segregation. As technology grows our world becomes smaller and one would think that the number of interactions becomes greater but this isn't necessarily true. I think what technology does for us, is simply enable us to communicate with anybody, anywhere in the world. Whether or not we actually do communicate with them, is another story. Because of the way our communities are setup, the only communication across social groups that we recieve is at work, politically and for our kids, at school. Without communication we cannot learn, adapt, and accept other social groups, lifestyles and cultures. I think this produces a strain on our communities, and hampers growth of cross social and cultural relationships. Our current community setups allows for easier living but hurts our culture in the long run by greatly defining the lines between people as opposed to greying them out. Everyone around me at the store, on the roads, at the gas station, serving me food...well they might as well be robots.

So we will be down to one vehicle. This will save us money and require us to increase our communication. We'll have to plan a little bit more, talk about transportation a little bit more, and possibly move outside our comfort zone a little bit from time to time as we go someplace using public transportation, or a bike, or just plain walking. In these times however, I will try my best to embrace the discomfort as an opportunity to slow down and watch the kids laughing on the playground, day dream a bit, and maybe even smile and say hi to another person as they walk by...

Bye bye Honda CRV. I've only known you for a few months. Your front seat seems like its loose and the brakes seem to have warped rotors. The hum of those all season/winter tires almost put me to sleep many times. I'll miss the sheer coolness of being able to thrown 2 bikes in the back, our camping gear and just going! Make me proud with your new owner...

-Travis