Sick Transit

Transit is a self-destructive system, and a poor replacement for what preceded it. Flora and fauna have given way to pavement and automobiles. The former pair may have been a brutal system with chaotic rules of its own, but it seldom, at least, saw one party suffer without a corresponding benefit. The latter pair is merciless, and that without life; the automobile is created for the pavement, the pavement for the automobile, but when the act for which they are created is performed, both deteriorate. Why resign ourselves to the perpetuation of something that must crumble, and indeed crumbles from the very point of its creation and as a necessary effect of the fulfillment of its function?

Surely some will argue that if this disintegration is certain anyway, then any movement to diminish the system is superfluous, or at least not particularly pressing. Well, I part from environmentalists in that it is not the future with which I am concerned but the present. There is nothing else, after all. I resent the constant maintenance and rebuilding and repaving; this continual self-indulgent production of ever greater fleets of trolling, rolling, racing, defacing, hurtling masses of metal and glass are an affront to all living. Why must we, those of us living in this particular timespan, which began with the mass production of dino machina in the 1920's and shows no sign of ending any time soon, why must we accept our fate as the sole sufferers of this physical and psychological intrusiveness?

Aesthetic value is another issue altogether, though the visible difference between mother nature and the current dino machina that reigns as her replacement affects one more strongly than any words. ("Words are only painted fire. A look is the fire itself." Mark Twain)

Your thoughts again: "Does that say psychological?"

It does indeed. More to come.