david robertsI've said this before but the most pathetic thing about current RW culture wars is that they are defending a lifestyle -- giant SUVs, highways, strip malls, fast food, suburbs, poisonous/deadly consumer products -- that is 100% a creation of late-20th century corporations.
It's not some authentic just-folks small-town Mayberry life. It's a life of shitty, dangerous, disposable junk, foisted on these people by multinational corporations, and they're out defending every bit of it with their lives, like f'ing chumps.
One universal truth about the forces of reaction -- at any time, in any country -- is that they are being relentlessly exploited, manipulated, and grifted from above by people who don't give a shit about them, and they never seem to care.
The Big Daddy tells them to get angry about light bulbs, they get angry about light bulbs.
Actual small-town rural life maybe involved a rifle for hunting. Now reactionaries have been convinced by gun manufacturers, through their quislings at the NRA, that a true authentic American lifestyle involves owning multiple military weapons. Just absolute chumps.
And the *actual* life they've been granted by their corporate masters is bleak & depressing AF, so white men are experiencing ongoing pandemics of drug addiction, loneliness, violence, abuse, & suicide. Yet all their rage is bent to defending the products those masters sell them.
To my point. This is so dystopic. https://twitter.com/MobileHarv/status/1613519792027074561
Harvey J. Miller @[email protected] on Twitter
“A woman is afraid that her granddaughter’s 1/4 mile walk in a “fairly safe suburb” is dangerous because of the people who work to facilitate that suburban lifestyle. Americans are afraid of the wrong things. https://t.co/rtCQsneTRI”
They fled cities into suburbs to feel isolated and safe from poor & brown people, but now they're even prisoners in their suburban homes, because walking around outside in suburbs means a gauntlet of poor & brown service workers! Gotta keep the kids inside, attached to screens.
Meanwhile, in Dutch cities the same 9yos routinely go to and from school, run errands, & go to see friends, all without parental accompaniment, thereby developing crucial skills (autonomy, wayfinding, decisionmaking) that will help them later in life.
That's because of good infrastructure: walking is safe & transit is plentiful & there are always plenty of eyes on the street & the people you live near are accustomed to seeing you around. The result: happier, more resilient kids. https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-many-social-and-psychological#details
The many social and psychological benefits of low-car cities
A few years ago, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett and their two children moved from Vancouver, Canada, to Delft, a small city in the Netherlands where 80% of journeys are taken by foot, bicycle, or public transit. Their new book, Curbing Traffic, is about what it's like to live in a truly low-car city, and how other cities can capture some of the same benefits.
Now, do Americans live in isolated suburban castles, afraid to let their children walk a half-mile outside, forced to drive their kids in polluting cars over unsafe roads to go anywhere, because of some spontaneous expression of their preferences? That's just what they like?
Preferences are only legible in the presence of choice. Do most Americans choose where & how roads are designed & built? What kinds of land use are & aren't legal? What crops are & aren't subsidized? What's made affordable to them & what isn't?
People who love what they've got but never had a choice to have anything else are not expressing a "preference" so much as Stockholm Syndrome, or more charitably, system justification -- the propensity to deem the system you're born into right & necessary. https://www.volts.wtf/p/why-social-change-is-so-excruciatingly
Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult
When we look across the broad sweep of human history, what needs explaining is not times of rebellion and upheaval, but the much more common periods of unjust rule facing little resistance. Why do people so often internalize the ideologies upholding systems under which they suffer? Why do they fail to fight back? Psychologist John Jost has an answer. I talked it over with him.
If Americans were given a real, actual choice to live in places that would make both them & their children physically & psychologically healthier, I bet lots would take it, but they're embedded in a system that has made that choice impossible & convinced them it doesn't exist.
nikolawannabeMany people who live in rural areas live there because it's where their parents could afford a house 20-30 years ago. Family infrastructure while raising kids is more important than good transit, assuming said quality transit could be found in higher density areas.
The only place I've lived where the transit was great was the East Coast. Everywhere I've been on the West Coast has garbage transit, so people drive everywhere instead, rural or city.
@drvolts transit and traffic in King County, WA was horrible. The education system is very likely significantly better than the rural county I currently live in, but I couldn't afford a place for my family to live there (with decent room for kids and office for work) and would have no family support. It just wouldn't make sense.
In California where I lived there were constant fires and severe drought. I'd never go back.