Driving, Part Two: Cars Are More Important than Life Itself
When we meet in person, most of us wear social veneer, feigning politeness, using the manners our parents and grandparents taught us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. A quote from Goethe that I write frequently on the board for my students is: “Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.” We’d all be in a world of hurt if we didn’t use manners and feign kindness even when we don’t feel like it (especially when we don’t feel like it). But the simple truth is that being cut off inside a car removes the necessity for this – or seems to do so. For this reason, I have long felt that driving reveals some greater truth about how humans feel about other humans (as well as non-humans) in this world.
In cars there is an anonymity and an illusion of being isolated from others that leads to a greater emotional truth. People cut each other off, honk angrily, speed senselessly, text dangerously, curse loudly, and often fail to acknowledge or even perceive the existence of others around them. These are behaviors that most people would never exhibit face to face, but I would argue that perhaps our driving selves are closer to our “real” selves. When we drive, no one is faking it. Deep down, despite how we present ourselves in person, once inside a car our real self kicks in, and everyone really is that rude and self-destructive and dangerous and senseless and insensitive to the existence of others. In drivers there is also the occasional kindness or display of intelligence or common sense or consideration of others – but this seems disturbingly rare.
I’ve written about how others sometimes angrily blare horns at me if I don’t pull out fast enough. But probably the person who angrily blares a horn at me would be nice to me in person. The difference is that shut off in our cars, no one sees me as a human being. I’m guilty of it, too. In several “anonymous” driving situations when another driver showed anger toward me, and I had no idea who he or she was, and I knew I would never see that driver again, I will admit to making unmistakably clear hand gestures.
As I drove my long commute back and forth from college every week for several years between 2003 and 2007, it struck me that any particular busy road is a microcosm, a kind of snapshot, of the state of humanity. Cars place us into juxtaposition with each other in the worst possible ways (i.e. in a potential instrument of death), and driving as an act is purely democratic and random, throwing together people of all walks of life, all socioeconomic statuses, all temperaments. The results of this experiment do not seem encouraging to me. There are times when people are kind or are actually paying attention to others. But there seem to be many more times of unmindful and uncaring behavior. This, to me, does not bode well for humanity. If in the simple act of driving a car we cannot show consideration for one another, I see very little chance that we will ultimately pull together for the many different complex solutions that will be necessary for the survival of the human race on this planet – solutions that would require collaboration, tolerance, and consideration of others.
On the other hand, I suppose it is rather miraculous that we don’t have more car crashes than we do, or that we haven’t already managed to obliterate ourselves from this world in a massive nuclear holocaust. Maybe the fact that we are as selfish and unfeeling and uncaring as we are and that things aren’t worse is a marvel worthy of celebration.
Similar to the fact that when I was a teenager I thought I’d drive a Harley Davidson, I actually rather admire the art and beauty and sport and love of cars. And similar to the fact that I love Breaking Bad, a show that could not be further from my own sensibilities, I’m actually quite fascinated with anything to do with cars, a mode of transportation that could not be further from my own sensibilities. For example, I love the British show Top Gear. So, I don’t have a problem with cars per se, and I don’t think the problem is the cars. The problem, as usual, is the people. I’m not a car-hater, but a misanthrope.
For me, as for most people in this world, a car is simply a manner of conveyance from one place to another. The reason for this is that, like most people, I don’t have the purchasing power for it to be anything other than that. I don’t have the option of buying a luxury car or viewing a car as a luxury item. Despite my age, the best car I can afford on what I make is still the car on the very bottom rung – the one typically considered to be a “starter” car. This is the kind of car that better-off people buy for their high school kid, or to be the second car for the wife to pick up some groceries in. At my age, I’d hoped for better, but it’s better than nothing.
But though the car I own (or nearly own if I ever finish the payments) is one of the cheapest cars available, it nevertheless commands the largest part of my income, and is therefore a far more powerful force in my life than I would frankly like for it to be. If you are much richer than me, perhaps you have much more in your life than a car. But I don’t have a place of my own, and my car is by far my largest asset, and my biggest bill is by far my car payment. In my miniscule budget, my car commands quite a lot of my resources. When a car dominates your resources so centrally because your resources are so small, it also exerts great power – indeed, disproportionate and unjustifiable power -- over your life.
Not only can cars kill whatever we hold most dear, but even accidents without loss of life can have a tremendous impact (pun intended, I guess). The one accident I have had in all my adult years totaled my car. I was not at fault, nor could the most masterful defensive driving or quickest reaction time have prevented the accident. The other party was an elderly gentleman in a large pick-up truck and he ran a stop sign, T-boning me on the right. As the old saying goes, fortunately, neither of us was seriously hurt.
However, an accident and the loss of a car can have other major ramifications on our lives. My life at the time of that accident was terribly complicated. I had moved from Raleigh to Aberdeen, North Carolina to teach high school. I had no desire whatsoever to teach at that level, but felt at the time like it was my only option to try to earn a living. I did not yet have my teaching license, but was enrolled in the NC Teach program, doing the parallel entry training. I desperately needed work, and sent my resume out all over North Carolina, landing a job at a rural North Carolina high school. But the entire venture was doomed from the start.
Forced to make a quick decision – the semester started less than two weeks later – I moved to the area not knowing a single soul. Friendless and alone, I started my job and did not gel with my colleagues at all. They banded together with prefect rapport, and I was clearly the outsider. They did not like me. I was teaching in a rough high school with some very challenging students, and the students were crucifying me, too. I was not doing anyone any good – my colleagues, my students, or myself.
When my car was totaled (only two blocks from the high school on my way to work one morning), it took me out of work for a few days for my bruises to heal – but it also put about $17,000 of insurance money in my pocket, covering the combination of my totaled car and my hospital bills. When I tried to return to work, the time I had missed had made me even more the outsider to both the teachers and the students. It was clear by that point that I could not possibly make up the lost ground and the lost time; this high school was not the place for me. It was also clear that $17,000 was more than enough for a ticket out of there. Basically, the accident was the largest and final factor that justified my making a break for it.
In some sense, because my car was totaled, that accident rammed me halfway across the country, from North Carolina all the way back to my hometown of Indiana. It was like the proverbial hand dealt by fate. Though I got a respectable insurance pay-out on my 2004 Toyota Corolla, this is also when I learned that if you had a dependable car that could have gone 200,000 miles, and it only had 40,000 miles on it at the time and had been excellently maintained, and it was paid off to boot, insurance does not even remotely begin to recoup you for your loss. I still think with stinging regret about how I could still be driving that car right now, payment-free. As it is, I got a new car, saddling myself once again with payments, then took the insurance money and used it to move back to Indiana and to renovate a place to live in the old family stead, and was able to find suitable work teaching college. I can still feel the reverberations of that accident; it had a tremendous impact on my living where I do, and in so many ways accounts for where I stand today.
It is difficult to escape our cars and the powerful hold that they have over every aspect of our lives. But it is possible from time to time. I had the pleasure of visiting Mackinac Island in Michigan last summer. This was the first vacation of my entire life that I had ever gotten to choose for myself (another ramification of having very low purchasing power), and one reason I made that choice was because I was fascinated to see what a culture without cars would be like. Granted, I also wanted to be without the stress of dealing with a car while on vacation. I’m not overly fond of the sensation of constantly driving around lost in an unfamiliar location – to me it takes away much of the pleasure of even bothering to go on a trip.
So yes, this car-free vacation was of great interest to me on many levels, and my instincts were spot-on, as on a personal level it was the most enjoyable vacation I ever had. But it wasn’t just that I didn’t have to get behind the wheel of a car and deal with all the stresses of navigating an unfamiliar place. It was that there was something special about being in touch with the full environment of the island during the entire vacation and about never having to shut myself off from other people inside the cage of a car. Dependent on either my own two feet or horses, there was never a moment that I felt physically isolated. This sense of interaction on Mackinac Island is without a doubt one of the main factors that makes the experience unique and pleasurable.
In season, the main drag on Mackinac really bustles. The town itself is sort of multi-layered back into the hills. Visible from afar (from the water) is another level above the buildings along the main street; this level is made up of large houses as well as the fort. When on the island itself, one primarily perceives the main buildings of the town, but in fact the town stretches back for some distance. Along the main drag are major hotels, eateries, and shops, accessible right off of the harbor. At either end of this busy route are quiet inns, private residences, open views of the lake, and sleeping quarters for staff. Here the traffic thins out, as it also does further back in the town in the “inner layers” of specialty shops, businesses, small inns, and more private residences (winding back to the palatial Grand Hotel, sitting high on a peak, visible from far away and from the lake).
There are porches, too, on Mackinac Island. Lots and lots of porches everywhere. Small porches, big porches, long, short, covered, uncovered, stacked one atop another. Porches facing the water, and porches facing the street. And from these porches, people interact with everything that’s going on in the street. And in the street, the traffic is always bustling as soon as you hit the main stretch of town, and you almost can’t move in it. And by traffic, I don’t mean cars. I mean bikes, carriages, horses, and people afoot. People pour in along the throughways coming in from the ferries. Many of the workers on Mackinac come back season after season. Even if they don’t, they quickly become acquainted with one another. And since no one is shut off in cars – workers and residents and visitors to the island alike – there is a lot of interaction. It’s more than interaction. It’s camaraderie, repartee, and rapport. People interact at all social levels and all physical levels – above the street, on the street, even below the street. From every nook and cranny, people interact with each other. They interact with each other even from the many different stories of porches, all the way down to the street below and back up to the tops of the buildings.
I’m sure this sort of culture exists in other parts of the world besides this particular resort culture on Mackinac Island. But Mackinac Island is within my reach since it’s not far from where I live. My life remains circumscribed and provincial, and I haven’t seen most other parts of the world. But in the part of the world where I live, car culture is certainly everything, and if you don’t have a car, you can forget ever getting anywhere.
But evidence seems to suggest that a lack of cars can have the impact of making us all more in touch with each other, more charming and companionable, as on Mackinac. This is common sense, to be sure, and is also backed up by a sizeable amount of sociological research. Consider, for example, the traditional European square, where people interact freely and cars still don’t trespass. More communication with one another and less sitting behind windshields and metal doors means better socialization and less suspicion of one’s neighbors. Some studies have demonstrated lower rates of crime where there are healthy spaces for human interaction and economic activity with no cars present. This makes good sense. If being in contact with one another compels us to behave, and if being behind the glass and metal of a car makes us feel even in some small sense as though we are cut off from others and from the environment, and that the car is an extension of our ego, and that we can do as we please without repercussions, this is a potential recipe for disaster.
Cars are of course legally considered to be weapons since they can quite easily be used to kill people. Hit and runs occur either on purpose or by accident. Either way, little to no responsibility or regard is taken, and the victim(s) is no less dead. Of course, most deaths on the road are unintentional. The loss of life from these countless numbers of automobile accidents doesn’t even bear thinking about.
Even more commonly killed by cars than people are of course animals, both wild and domestic. If there is a dead animal in the road and I am on my way to work, I try to make sure I don’t look at it too directly or focus my vision on it. It takes everything I have just to walk into a classroom, so if I’m also walking into the room upset, it’s not a good way for me to start. I won’t write about most of the times I have observed animals killed by a car. In grad school, my colleagues mocked me (I suppose the more polite term would be “teased,” but really, they were mocking me) because I couldn’t even stand it when animals were harmed in one of their stories being workshopped. They seemed to find my pain over this to be uproariously funny.
I make no secret of the fact that I am far closer to animals than I am to people. If driving along in our cars any of us were to see a human child in the road getting hit, of course we would all stop immediately in horror. In contrast, many people don’t react at all the hitting of a dog or cat. Yet the way that I perceive animals and hold them in my heart, they are like children to me. So to watch while someone else continues to run over an animal, without even slowing down, is an unspeakable horror to me.
One day I was driving on the innocuous roads of my hometown. (Innocuous except for the fact that for some reason in North Vernon we have no left turn lanes anywhere we need them and what left turn lanes we do have tend to be in places that we don’t need them. That’s our thing, I guess.) I was thinking about nothing much. I teach so much freshman comp that I don’t really have to prepare or think about it much ahead.
When teaching freshmen, my major goal is not to teach them anything (though if I’m lucky, I might do a bit of that), but within my small power to do anything I can to help students feel more reassured and less alone. This is probably not due to any resemblance to Mother Theresa on my part, but because so much of the time in my life I have felt alone and have needed reassurance, but there was usually none to be had. I figure that maybe there might be times that others might need this as well. Even the most confident individuals have moments of insecurity and fear and self-doubt, and moments when they are afraid to speak up or to find out if others are feeling the same things.
So I was thinking about nothing much. It was an evening class, and I was on the road a bit after 5:00 p.m. in what passes for thick traffic in my small town. I was several cars back, stopped at a red light when a cat unwisely ventured out into the crosswalk in hopes of making it across the road. The light turned green.
I watched the drivers in front of me and saw their faces. They saw the cat in front of their wheels, but they went anyway.
It’s a human idea to die with dignity, I guess. But surely every form of life wishes to die as painlessly and quickly as possible, and it seems to me that this is a kind of dignity. This death was neither painless nor quick and it was without dignity on the part of anyone involved. It involved convulsions and a face of the purest terror and pain I have ever witnessed, an attempt to escape and cling to life, and the failure at it.
We make scathing comments about people who hurt or kill animals for no reason – but the only difference in this instance that justified these people’s actions in their own minds is that they were in their cars. The human-engineered stoplight turned green, and somehow this superseded compassion for other life forms trying to live in this world with us, or for their right to life. There was a very simple choice presented to these human drivers – the choice was to press the accelerator or keep their foot on the brake. To get out of the car to help the animal or to drive on.
Would people have acted more compassionately if not in cars? It’s almost moot since the cars themselves are the weapons, and so without them, there would have been no death. I think there can be no doubt that cars at their worst act as a kind of armor that keeps in all that is worst in human nature, and keeps out any better influences. But, no – more accurately, this is simply humans acting at their worst while they happen to be inside cars. Cars are just the excuse, the justification. I’m very much afraid that the selves we display when inside a car are our true selves. Feeling protected from other eyes, cut off from better influences, people just don’t care. It is only pressure from society, from peers, from the opinions of others who we know we may see again, or who we are encountering face to face, that keeps us acting decently. If the many different aspects of the modern world that shut us off from others (not just cars, but online classes, Facebook, TVs and so on) are perceived as giving us permission to act badly – if these act as temptations to let our darker natures take over – that’s perhaps a good argument in favor of making sure we maintain face to face contact in this world in all the ways we possibly can and that we don’t let the world get any more impersonal than it already is.
After the drivers had decided the cat’s fate, I pulled around the corner where there was a parking space, stopped, and ran over to see if I could help the cat. But of course by then, it was far too late.
I got back into my car and drove the rest of the way to my teaching gig. I turned the car off and sat there in silence, my mind replaying how people looked as they had driven on. Seeing, but not caring. Isolated in their vehicles. Cut off by glass and metal, and so perhaps feeling less culpable. I thought about how I didn’t ask to be born into a world with as little compassion as this one, and didn’t want to be. I thought about our arrogance and abuse of the idea that we are more important than other life on this planet, and about the human decision that it is more important to make the car go forward because the light is green than to save a small life. I thought about the sheer indolence of what had happened – that it was too much trouble to stop the car and jump out to help another. I wondered how we keep going on despite all the thousands of incidents both big and small that make us lose all faith. I thought about the absurdity that for sheer survival – to earn a paycheck and put food on the table – even if we don’t wish to do so, we’re forced to drive around in loud, metal vehicles of destruction that kill both animals and people. All of this sounds ludicrously like Mad Max. Despite the apparently shiny surface to this world, maybe it is.
I went inside to teach, and before we started the class, I did the only thing I could do – I told my students about what I had seen and what I felt. Some did not care, some pretended to but didn’t, and a few felt as I did. For a few moments, I felt somewhat less isolated and alone. Maybe they did, too.
