Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I’m recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP:
On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change.
Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon offsets probably don’t work as well as one might hope, I decided that there was no way in hell I should be driving (my hybrid) to the nursery. I consulted Google Maps and discovered that the nursery was precisely one mile from my house — a reasonable walk so long as I didn’t get a big bag of manure — and, surprisingly, that the “driving route” Google recommended (not the obvious driving route) would make a really nice walking route, as it skirted a park and followed streets lined with shade trees.
As I readied my wheeled urban grocery cart (sometimes referred to as “the old lady cart”), my six-year-old asked if she could walk with me, even though a mile sounded like a long distance to her. It was a beautiful day, and there was no particular place we had to be later, so I agreed.
My child chattered about school and nature and sibling relations as we walked. I really was listening, but I was also thinking about the intersection near the school with the four way stop, where an alarmingly high proportion of the cars blast right through the stop signs without even slowing. I was thinking about ongoing and often heated discussions in which public school partisans and homeschool boosters were arguing about what kind of education kids need and whose duty it is to provide it. I was thinking about how very dry it’s been in California this year, and whether there’s a sensible way to recycle our bathwater to water our plants without sloshing it all over our carpets. I was thinking about how to explain Memorial Day to a six-year-old who, lately, is freaked out by human mortality, and whether that explanation could possibly omit the ever-growing body count in a war that I think is pretty dumb.
Because we were pedestrians, walking past houses and yards and apartment balconies and patios, we were drawn into waves and hellos. We read the “Happy B-day Pop!” sign, smelled the grills, stuck our hands out for the doggies to sniff. Out of the climate-controlled metal cocoon of the car, we could not escape the fact that we were connected to the other people in our path, the other people in our community.
And I wondered, as we paused for my child to propel herself on a swing, how we have gotten ourselves to the point where the default is for us to see ourselves as individuals floating free of connections to others.
Unless the scores of drivers who habitually ignore the stop signs near the school are evil, I can only think that, snug in their cars, they have entered a state of consciousness where other people don’t exist. We pedestrians are invisible, mere blobs of paint on the backdrop of their ultimate driving experience. Or maybe they are not quite this tuned out, and they’ve simply decided that their interest in getting to their destination without delay trumps some hypothetical pedestrian’s interest in being able to cross the street safely. (That the police response to reports of drivers blasting through the stop has been, “Sorry, we just don’t have the resources to enforce it” has not left me with warm and fuzzy feelings about how this organ of the “community” prioritizes the interests of some of its smallest members.)
Do drivers in a hurry owe it to anyone to stop at a stop sign?
In my neighborhood, the majority of the motor vehicles are minivans, SUVs, pick-up trucks. My hybrid marks us as weirdos. If I were to tell a neighbor that I felt it would be wrong to drive my gas efficient vehicle two miles when I could walk it, they might well keep their children away from me and my crazy ideas.
You have a right to drive whatever you want, wherever you want, don’t you?
[Actually, since this time last year, a lot of folks have introduced themselves to ask how happy we are with the hybrid, to take a look at the size of the trunk, etc. Maybe it has to do with the $4/gallon gasoline?]
In the homeschool vs. public school discussions, I have wondered if there might be a cost to the public schools if too many parents opted out and devoted their time and efforts to teaching their kids at home. But many parents have noted that homeschooling was the option they pursued after significant time and effort spent trying to get the public schools to deliver the education their kids needed had not succeeded. You have to do what’s right for your kids. You can’t sacrifice your child to an ideal. I can’t be responsible for saving your kids, since I have my own to look after.
I know that we have to pick our battles, and that even having done so our energy is not unlimited. Even Cindy Sheehan hit her wall. She made protesting for peace her life’s work, but the war continues and she’s been attacked by the right and the left for her trouble. Sheehan’s public protest is over, and she’s left with her private grief at the death of her son. Probably, she’s also left asking herself whether she was foolish to hope that other people would feel connected to the death of one soldier and the grief of one mother.
I don’t understand how it has become so easy to deny it, but I know in my bones that we are all connected. If your kids come to love learning or come to despise it, it comes back to me (and would even if I were not teaching some grown-up kids at the public university). What you drive, whether you leave the tap on, how far your produce is shipped, all have an impact on the air and water and land we have to share.
Whether you feel that your obligations extend beyond yourself and your family impacts whether we can even have anything worthy of the name “community”.
We are all individuals, and we have diverse interests and agendas. But none of us come into this world alone, and I fear the extent to which we seem headed for navigating it as if we were on a solo mission.
I can’t make you care about my interests. I don’t want to make you do anything. But even if you can’t see them glinting in the sun, there are strands that connect us. My choices have consequences for you, and yours for me. So I choose to resist the cocoon, to see our connectedness, and to try to act accordingly.
Thanks for your post. It seems to me that many disagreements on issues derive from wanting society to move forward either as one entity or smaller sub-groups. I think addressing the issue of ego, like Buddhism does, could open up others to the idea of connectedness.
Not sure if you are comfortable on a bike but we have found that using a child trailer (like a Burley) is great for getting groceries.
You poor souls, having to pay 4$ a gallon, let’s see: 1,50 Euros / liter * 3.785 * 1.50 $ to the € makes it about 8.50$ a gallon over here in Europe.
So we take public transit, bike, use “Hacken-Porsches” (Porsches for your heels) and walk. And yes, you see an entirely different perspective on foot.
Walking around the neighborhood is an excellent way to connect to your neighbors. Having a dog that needs walking is a good stimulus.
About cars – I think people in cars definitely identify virtually everything outside their cars as objects. Everything from pedestrians to other cars becomes simply an obstacle to be gotten around.
Here at college (across the continent from home) I don’t have a car, so I’ve made a point of exploring as much of the city as possible by foot. As a result I feel like I know my adopted town a lot better than I know the town I grew up in. I’ve also learned that I can carry a lot of groceries by hand–three or four bags in each hand, and a backpack full. Who needs cars?
Not the main point, but you are using your laundry water in the garden, aren’t you? Our washer drains into a plastic garbage can, where a submersible pump is triggered by the presence of water, and pumps it out through a hose into the garden. The only maintenance required is to clean lint out of the pump intake occasionally. Also, it probably isn’t a good idea to use laundry water on food-producing plants.
Here I mean to address both this post and the previous, related post. You’re emphasizing development of a sense of community at the level of individuals, achieved through day-to-day interactions. In the last post you mentioned the concentration on economic incentive structures to promote stable water consumption, and lamented,
“[S]omehow we seem to have drifted into a place where people feel like they can do whatever they want to do — free from criticism — as long as they can pay the tab. Could it be that folks see the free market (or whatever sort of market it is we actually have) as a system of ethics?”
I share, I think, your concerns, including the desire for us all to at least respect each others’ (reasonable) interests. But, I think this respect can not be addressed simply at the level of our ethical duties to each other as individuals. There are two fundamentally distinct levels of questions of justice within a society: those that regard how we ought to treat each other day-to-day, and those that regard what the terms of our cooperation will be within which we go about our day-to-day interactions.
I don’t think it’s a mistake to pursue the right incentivizing structure (not that you’ve said it is), but I do think it’s a mistake to forget that the choice of incentivizing structures is not merely an instrumental question, but is itself a moral question. We express a sense of community by picking just terms of cooperation, including but not limited to rules that regulate the sale and distribution of water. We enable the development of a sense of community at the level of individuals by choosing the right terms of cooperation.
Rawls puts the point this way:
Excellent post. I just started walking the 2 miles or so to my school/work, trying to save gas (and my car’s mostly dead anyway). It’s amazing how cheerful it makes you to walk, stopping for coffee in the downtown and saying hi to people. But the people in my lab still look at me like I’m crazy.
A good post that just inspired me to purchase a cheap bike to keep at work. I live much too far to bike to work, but could easily bike to lunch and campus — thanks for the helpful poke in the side.
Your point about allowing yourself to be connected to all (or at least some) of the people you encounter each day resonated with me. But it’s pretty hard to do sometimes, I think because most of us learned from our parents not to talk to strangers, and women also learn (on top of that) to be careful about interacting with unknown men.
Janet,
Have you read about the European experiments in doing away with street signs (including stop signs)? Paradoxically, it seems to make neighborhood streets safer, because drivers are forced to pay more attention to what’s happening around them—pedestrians, bicycles, etc.
An article about it is here