"You can take away my suburban house and my car when you pry my cold, dead hands from the steering wheel."
A few weeks back, I somewhat flippantly said "I have a crazy idea: Why don't we build more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and better public transit?" (as a solution to some of our environmental issues) and the FIRST reply to it was Because many people don't want that. followed by a rant about how this person in specific doesn't want to live that way.
So I replied:
This seems to be more or less the default norm for most Americans on the internet, a thing I noticed a lot of years ago when a place-based discussion would go something like "I really like the city I live in currently for x, y and z reasons" and someone living in a different city would more or less say "WHY ARE YOU MALIGNING MY TOWN???????????????"
Ummmm.
They weren't. They weren't even TALKING about YOUR TOWN.
The phrase affordable housing apparently is one that should come with trigger warnings because if that phrase gets used, it gets strong reactions from people who have visions in their head of what that is supposed to mean and it almost never has anything at all to do with what I am trying to talk about.
Unfortunately, searching for better ways to talk about such issues has accomplished essentially NOTHING because even if you describe what you are talking about -- a la mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods -- it gets essentially the SAME result. A lot of Americans just have some idyllic suburban lifestyle embedded in their mind as the only humane, tolerable answer and talking about any other options seems to just trigger a PTSD-like reaction on topics that I have trouble imagining involve PTSD.
In the US, our housing issues and our attitudes and policies concerning transportation are inseparable. America is very car-centric and most Americans are very against changing that fact.
As far as I can tell, Tesla did one thing right: They decided to put up charging stations so people with electric vehicles weren't tethered to a certain distance from their house, with their house being the only reliable means to charge the vehicle.
Beyond that, it seems to be sort of a stroke of a good luck that Tesla is selling an idea Americans WANT to buy: The green-washing of our car-centered lifestyle.
Given how Elon Musk has single-handedly flushed more than half the value of Twitter down the toilet in just the first six months of owning it -- to the tune of more than twenty billion dollars in lost value -- I have trouble imagining Tesla is successful to any degree due to him having good business sense or something like that.
No, I increasingly feel that Tesla is evidence that Americans would rather die than fix their infrastructure issues and change their lifestyle.
Right now, I'm stumped as to how to proceed forward. I'm not actually anywhere near as "naive" as people routinely think I am -- in my late thirties, I joined a new forum and people were shocked to learn my age, telling me they thought I was some young, naive go-getter based on my initial comments -- but I'm feeling sort of naive at the moment.
I'm not actually anyone who wants to stamp out cars entirely or even forbid them from some parts of town. I very much want to find solutions that allow for people to have a real choice -- to let Americans decide for themselves if they WANT to own a car and mostly drive everywhere or NOT.
That means for me, the goal is to promote OPTIONS, not try to stamp out ONE option in order to promote another, BUT -- and it's a big but -- the kinds of reactions I very routinely see in online discussions (and even in-person meetings when I have attended such) means it's exceedingly hard to promote that idea because other people routinely knee-jerk react like "You can take away my suburban house and my car when you pry my cold, dead hands from the steering wheel!" for ANY suggestion that something other than a suburban house is something we should try to build for SOME PERCENTAGE of our housing.
I've been doing this a lot of years and while choosing my words more carefully isn't actually a complete waste of time (never mind what I said a few paragraphs back), it's shockingly hard to get past this entrenched American attitude and I do sometimes fear that it's a lost cause and will not be solved -- not because it can't be solved but because housing and transportation are things created by people and the American people mostly seem hellbent on NOT allowing it to be genuinely solved at any kind of scale of the sort we really NEED for it to not be essentially lip service to a claim that we want to fix our environmental issues.
I guess if you are actually reading this blog in hopes of finding solutions for YOUR community, the takeaway should be that if you want to see change, you need to be prepared for this and find some way to address it. Because if you can't find some effective means to get past this knee-jerk, strong emotional reaction that almost always involves outright rejection of ANY options you suggest, you will be dead in the water before you even open your mouth.
So I replied:
I'm sorry but how did we leap from more such neighborhoods to gun to your head in specific to move there against your will?And, you know, I WISH this was like some weird, one-off bizarre outlier but it's not.
This seems to be more or less the default norm for most Americans on the internet, a thing I noticed a lot of years ago when a place-based discussion would go something like "I really like the city I live in currently for x, y and z reasons" and someone living in a different city would more or less say "WHY ARE YOU MALIGNING MY TOWN???????????????"
Ummmm.
They weren't. They weren't even TALKING about YOUR TOWN.
The phrase affordable housing apparently is one that should come with trigger warnings because if that phrase gets used, it gets strong reactions from people who have visions in their head of what that is supposed to mean and it almost never has anything at all to do with what I am trying to talk about.
Unfortunately, searching for better ways to talk about such issues has accomplished essentially NOTHING because even if you describe what you are talking about -- a la mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods -- it gets essentially the SAME result. A lot of Americans just have some idyllic suburban lifestyle embedded in their mind as the only humane, tolerable answer and talking about any other options seems to just trigger a PTSD-like reaction on topics that I have trouble imagining involve PTSD.
In the US, our housing issues and our attitudes and policies concerning transportation are inseparable. America is very car-centric and most Americans are very against changing that fact.
As far as I can tell, Tesla did one thing right: They decided to put up charging stations so people with electric vehicles weren't tethered to a certain distance from their house, with their house being the only reliable means to charge the vehicle.
Beyond that, it seems to be sort of a stroke of a good luck that Tesla is selling an idea Americans WANT to buy: The green-washing of our car-centered lifestyle.
Given how Elon Musk has single-handedly flushed more than half the value of Twitter down the toilet in just the first six months of owning it -- to the tune of more than twenty billion dollars in lost value -- I have trouble imagining Tesla is successful to any degree due to him having good business sense or something like that.
No, I increasingly feel that Tesla is evidence that Americans would rather die than fix their infrastructure issues and change their lifestyle.
Right now, I'm stumped as to how to proceed forward. I'm not actually anywhere near as "naive" as people routinely think I am -- in my late thirties, I joined a new forum and people were shocked to learn my age, telling me they thought I was some young, naive go-getter based on my initial comments -- but I'm feeling sort of naive at the moment.
I'm not actually anyone who wants to stamp out cars entirely or even forbid them from some parts of town. I very much want to find solutions that allow for people to have a real choice -- to let Americans decide for themselves if they WANT to own a car and mostly drive everywhere or NOT.
That means for me, the goal is to promote OPTIONS, not try to stamp out ONE option in order to promote another, BUT -- and it's a big but -- the kinds of reactions I very routinely see in online discussions (and even in-person meetings when I have attended such) means it's exceedingly hard to promote that idea because other people routinely knee-jerk react like "You can take away my suburban house and my car when you pry my cold, dead hands from the steering wheel!" for ANY suggestion that something other than a suburban house is something we should try to build for SOME PERCENTAGE of our housing.
I've been doing this a lot of years and while choosing my words more carefully isn't actually a complete waste of time (never mind what I said a few paragraphs back), it's shockingly hard to get past this entrenched American attitude and I do sometimes fear that it's a lost cause and will not be solved -- not because it can't be solved but because housing and transportation are things created by people and the American people mostly seem hellbent on NOT allowing it to be genuinely solved at any kind of scale of the sort we really NEED for it to not be essentially lip service to a claim that we want to fix our environmental issues.
I guess if you are actually reading this blog in hopes of finding solutions for YOUR community, the takeaway should be that if you want to see change, you need to be prepared for this and find some way to address it. Because if you can't find some effective means to get past this knee-jerk, strong emotional reaction that almost always involves outright rejection of ANY options you suggest, you will be dead in the water before you even open your mouth.