C'mon, Western World--Move Those Legs!

Why do we Americans--and Westerners throughout the world, for that matter--have a penchant for getting in our cars in order to travel, say, half a mile (or a mile) down the road? Nearly everywhere I go these days, I keep hearing people complain about the cost of living or the status of their health, or both. Well, if we wish to start the process of becoming sensible, less overweight, and at least slightly more healthy, I'd suggest that learning how to get from Point A to Point B without necessarily hopping in our cars is one area on which we can immediately concentrate.

I bring this up because we live near an indoor fitness center, which many local people use. (I exercise outside.) We also live in quite a safe neighborhood, so it seems sensible to me for local people to walk the mile or so to the fitness center and then begin the formal part of the exercise process. Yet a high percentage of our fellow locals hop in their cars, drive the tiny distance to the center, and idle for minutes as they line-up to enter the parking lot in the hopes of finding an often non-existent open parking spot. Why?

Similarly, I tend to walk or cycle to the local shops, which are located a half mile or so away and are often packed with frustrated locals who insist on driving to them, which is followed by an attempt to find an open parking spot, and inevitably results in them getting uptight and frustrated in the process. While doing this, they use up gas, which costs them money, and they don't really gain any time, either. Sure, they get to the shops quicker than I do, but by the time they've negotiated their way into an open parking space, I've caught up with them. (If I leave home at the same time as they do, I find that I also often enter the shops at the same time as they do.)

It's one thing, I suppose, if one is buying an item that requires a vehicle for transport from the store to home, or if one must travel several miles to the shops; obviously, these are good reasons to use a car or ride the bus. But it is quite another thing if someone drives almost no distance whatsoever to the shops, which is born of laziness and culturally-motivated habit, and in the process honks one's horn about a half dozen times because of the actions of "other drivers" who are trying to inhabit the same general space as everyone else. Pedestrians, on the other hand, have almost no such problems. Cyclists don't seem to have these problems, either--and they don't seem to get in the way of cars, despite the occasional grumblings from drivers (who are really upset about little more than not being able to find their "perfect parking space") suggesting that they do.

I don't want to hear any justifications based on weather, either. I live in Minnesota, where yesterday's high temperature was 10 Fahrenheit (approximately -12 Celcius). I went for my jog outside. Hence, I don't accept complaints from ostensibly "tough" Midwesterners who pride themselves on "surviving long, cold winters" but who nonetheless cannot stomach a little cold weather, and therefore "must" hop in their cars in order to visit the local shops. (I consider the very young and the elderly to be exceptions to this, due to their legitimate health needs, of course.)

I am not a perfect person, to be sure--I most certainly have my moments of ridiculousness. But I find increasingly that sensibility has largely gone out the window for the Average Joe and Josephine American (and it's happening at alarming rates in Europe, too), to be replaced with pseudo-conservative and pseudo-liberal stances that are each the products of cultural commodification over independent-minded, individual sensibility. That is to say, nearly everyone seems to be projecting one inauthentic, trademarked, mindless cultural/political stance or the other.

This is due, I believe, to our inability to view our affluence in historical context, and indeed to our general unwillingness to engage with history whatsoever, except in a cherry-picked manner. I humbly suggest that little, gradual alterations in our daily routines--such as actually walking and/or cycling places on a consistent basis--will help people in the developed world to gradually find our way back to a state of cultural semi-sanity, and might also help us to perhaps eventually find ways of working with one another to find solutions to our pressing problems, both at home and abroad. My suggestion is certainly anything but a cure-all for our societal ills, but it might serve as a small part of making a real start.

Or, we can all drive our cars a hundred yards to the local bar or coffee shop, and complain about "liberals" or "conservatives," and then get in our cars and go home again, frustrated at one another, and, if we're willing to admit it, at ourselves. I think the Western world is far too valuable for us to continue to behave like that.