An old story…. of big changes. The impact of the auto on community, life. I will let it stand alone:
“So it goes. It couldn’t last forever, it was unsafe, but it’s hard to see something like that ‘end’. I knew Ernie, and he lived there his whole life, over 80 years – the *only* place he *ever* lived. Scores of decades of watching that huge city turn into nothing but him. Not long before he passed away, we had a chance to chat at length (as we were prone to do), I asked him what he thought was the biggest change during his lifetime. Ernie said, ‘The automobile. The car’.
‘These roads are all the same. The major highways, the roads – Sacramento or through Wilbur’s hills – are identical. Nothing has changed. It’s just that they’re blacktop now. Before, when you were drawing a carriage with a horse, you would amble back and forth between these hills, and when you saw another human on their cart being drawn by a horse… you damn well stopped. You spoke to one another. You see them from miles off, and you couldn’t just whizz by. You stopped, and you talked – about the direction you were going, the direction you were coming from – but you connected and you spoke. It wasn’t kindness or community, it was simply what you did. To not do so wouldn’t have been rude or bad – it would have been unheard of.’
‘Then the car – the auto. All of a sudden, people are moving faster, people are gettin’ to where they’re going, and there wasn’t time to stop. There wasn’t a need to pull over and chat – you’d stop the car, roll down the windows – it just wasn’t the priority. So that change was bigger than the auto – it altered communication. We don’t connect, or care to. Our community of humans got pushed aside so we could get where we were going. It never was the same.’”