Defusing Manufactured Guilt About Driving

Common sense mixed with good humor is the best way to sell conservative ideas. Another good practice is to alleviate the guilt many people wrongly have over purely preferential decisions such as whether or not to own an automobile. These are two reasons why this article by Colin Kingsbury is so worthwhile and timely. First excerpt:

Here’s the truth: Going car-free is considerably easier if you are happy spending a relative fortune to rent a small apartment in an ultra-high- density neighborhood; enjoy one of a limited number of well-paying jobs in a downtown office; rarely need to move anything larger than a week’s supply of Lean Cuisine frozen dinners; and are happy within the confines of your neighborhood. Just imagine commuting from Dorchester to an office park on Route 128, or wrangling two children and a week’s worth of groceries onto a bus, which many less-well-off Bostonians do. Only a few neighborhoods — mostly Beacon Hill and the Back Bay — have the density to support the kind of mass-transit network and local retail presence to make car ownership largely irrelevant the way it is in Manhattan. No, in Boston, a voluntary carless lifestyle is only realistic for the young and childless with the luck of working at a well-paying job near a T stop. In short: yuppies. They’re the very same people who subscribe to locavorism and sneer that food in this country is far too cheap, but have no clue what it’s like to raise a family in a dodgy neighborhood or take the bus to a low-paying job across the city.

We regulars over here at Est Quod Est laugh at the references to Zipcars and locavores, and the usual suspects show up in the comment boxes with visceral overreactions based on politically correct talking points. I tried to leave a comment over there, but after going through the tedious registration process and clumsy interface, it was partially vomited by Boston Magazine's locavore webserver. So here it is:

The comments on the piece demonstrate the relentless liberal utopian attack on sensibility. Colin K. mentions what everybody already knows, i.e., if you don’t own a car you pay more for other services and limit your available choices, on balance. So he is called “ridiculous”, “selfish”, “immoral” and “worthless” by those commenting. We are treated to brilliant statements such as “Bikers are sexier than car drivers. We just are” and “His perspective is so obviously flawed, baseless, and immoral, that it is not worth a rational person's time to criticize him.” These overreactions mostly serve to prove his point.

These kinds of articles serve a high purpose because they help alleviate the guilt which is brought to bear on a sensible populace which, without the constant PC drumbeat, would see nothing immoral about the responsible use of an automobile. It’s a little sad that we need them to be written, but that is where we are.

I invite all of you to read the comments and notice that the only variation in the "arguments" against freedom to drive is the intensity of the invective. That is all they have left.

Again, what I really love about informative and clarifying articles like this is that they help the undecided among us see the folly and the control freakishness of the left. Colin's paragraph about who really screwed up the cities drives the point home, and is not even dealt with by the angry commenters. Probably because they don't have a response.

It wasn’t cars that devastated cities, but urban planners with a terminal excess of confidence in their own genius. The midcentury notion that the world ought to be segregated into vast tracts of exclusively residential, commercial, or industrial zones linked by multilane highways is now rightly regarded as a radical and myopic shift from how cities previously grew — slowly and organically, boasting a combination of homes and businesses. Livable cities are, above all else, places where people can pursue the sort of life they want, and for the vast majority of people, that includes a car.

Most people see the sense in this. There is room in the world for bikes and cars and people who own either or neither. And the central planners should all get real jobs and just leave us alone to work it out, instead of screeching and regulating everything.

Even so, the politically correct institutions (media, universities, etc.) have an advantage because they conscript the language of morality to voice their assertions. Most conservatives don't do that, unless they are weaked-kneed and looking for mainstream media acceptance. People want to be perceived as good citizens so they go often comply with the liberals' distortion of freedom. Hopefully the next feat of a man as successful as Kingsbury will be to discover a car gene which at least 98% of us have. But if he does I wouldn't hold my breath for a Nobel Prize.