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James Howard Kunstler opens up
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
It's a rant, but it's a good one:
It was interesting to note over in England how many people were out enjoying themselves in the public realm, with other people. By public realm I mean in the streets, the cafes, the pubs, the parks, the riverside promenades and other places explicitly designed for humans to enact their hard-wired social proclivities. Everywhere I went in Oxford, Cambridge, and London I was amazed at the hordes of young people so obviously enjoying the company of groups of their friends, and what a contrast this was to the current culture back home where you hardly ever see anything but a couple, or perhaps two couples, out in a bar or restaurant, and where the Starbucks cafes are filled with solitary individuals, and the streets are for cars only, usually with lone occupants. It was also startling in England to see groups of old people walking together in the streets or sitting on a blanket in the park, because in America old people have been conditioned to go about outside of home only in cars. Today's older Americans have spent their entire lives in a car-obsessed culture in which walking is seen as uncomfortable at least and at worst socially stigmatizing, something only winos do.
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