STALLED REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

by Neville Raymond

We’ve all been there. Our blood pressure rising. Our pulse beating hard. Our tempers flaring. Wedged in by lines of cars, in front, in back, on either side. Our daily hopes, dreams, goals put on hold as we inch along by fits and starts to our destination.

Have you noticed how many of us cope with this? Better still, have you noticed how we are told to cope? What do the experts advise us to do, as our 100 mph cars sit stalled in 1 mph traffic, and our nervous systems, designed to drive in an easy-going state of calm alertness, run at full tilt on frustration, irritation, impatience, and rage?

Get comfy. Make use of that adjustable lumbar support in the driver’s seat.

Breathe slowly, deeply, inhaling and exhaling from the diaphragm.

Put on soothing piece of classic music. Be transported by the latest audio book.

 
 Well, I don’t know about you, but these new-age coping gems leave me cold in a traffic jam. “Whenever you start cursing the traffic,” says one pop psychologist, the author of Urban Mindfulness, “remember you are the traffic. You have to recognize the situation is everybody’s fault – and nobody’s fault.”

Truth is, I have to do no such thing. The traffic is not my fault – my fault is that I have to be some place in a city with a monumentally irrational and absurd system of public transportation. 

If we are going to talk fault, why don’t we start with those criminal conspirators who hijacked our national transportation policy from under us in the mid-1930s and 1940s and plotted behind our backs to buy out our then state-of-the-art system of mass transit in city after city (along with the priceless rights of way that went with it) and toss it on the junk heap? 

Am I not totally within my rights to curse a sick, ineffectual and toxically wasteful system of crony capitalism that is happy to waste billions of man-hours and billions of gallons of fuel, decade after decade after decade, as long as it adds billions of dollars to the corporate bottom-line?

After all, who doesn't know by now that mass transit did not die a natural death? It was ambushed and brutally murdered for financial gain. Big Oil and Big Auto put their heads together and conspired to rip up all the light rail systems that had already been installed in cities like Los Angeles. 

A federal jury convicted them of it in Chicago in 1949. And we are still paying the terrible price. Imagine how we would be zipping along if we had used that incredibly valuable real estate to build up a high-speed mass transit system over the years, instead of allowing General Motors and Standard Oil to reduce us to a nation of vehicular basketcases by fostering our overdependence on the internal combustion engine.

Did the city fathers who rolled over for them give a bug’s whisker about the consequences? 

According to the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the longer your commute, the greater your risk of recurrent neck or back pain.  Not to mention high cholesterol and obesity. 

Did the city fathers who sold off our common wealth think about what a giant pain in the public back or the neck it would be, if they kowtowed to the interests of corporate America, instead of looking out for millions of their citizens?

Swedish researchers at Umea University found that a daily commute of 45 minutes or more increases the likelihood of divorce by 40%, with the highest risk during the first few years of marriage.  As the greedy oil executives ripped the heart out of mass transit, forcing us to sit in gridlock for the next half century and beyond, did they think about the strain that they would be putting on families – on marital relationships – on all the time that parents never got to spend with their children, because their could not use a swift, dependable form of transport from home to work and back again?

Of course not. They were too busy gloating over their sky-high future profits. Because of the inevitable congestion that built up over the years from smashing the nucleus of what could have turned into a high-tech world-class system of mass transit, idling California drivers waste the most gas of any state – 38 million gallons in one year alone – and put $160 million in the coffers of the oil companies.

And what about the corporate lobbyists who forced Congress to pass trade legislation allowing agribusiness to swamp Mexico with cheap exports of grain.  Maybe you don’t want to spare a dime for a homeless man. But can you spare a thought for how the forces of 'globalization' drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers off their land, forcing them to declare bankruptcy and head for parts in North America to survive – and how this flood of immigration brings our freeways to a grinding halt morning, noon and night?

What about how the U.S. national security state’s appetite for tyrannical regimes in Central and South America, and Asia widens the gap between the rich and the poor and savages the livability quotient of countries around the world? Where are all these poor people supposed to go when their countries are sold out from under them? 

Not to worry. Corporate America will gladly hire these immigrants at bargain-basement prices and pack our cities and factories with cheap labor. That way the corporatocracy can drive down our living standards to Third World levels, instead of working to lift up the rest of the world to First World standards.

And finally, what about the runaway capitalism of the U.S. automobile industry. At a time when our highways are clogged to death, what do you see when you switch on your TV? A commercial for another car. A car that has the magnificent backdrop of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls all to itself, instead of sharing the roads with millions of tried, bored, frustrated and irritable drivers.

So here we are, choking on our own exhausts, unable to budge for all the automobiles that lay siege to our quality of life. And capitalism takes pride in ramming yet one more brand-new spanking model car down our throats with all the latest electronic gizmos! 

Is gridlock the surest sign of capitalism run amok or what? Given that there are too many cars on the road, at what point does it cross our minds that perhaps we should rein in the untrammeled mass marketing of automobiles? Or should the rest of us continue to be resigned to losing another minute, another hour, another week, another year out of our lives so that GM or Chrysler make another buck?

If these culprits don’t turn your stomach – and goad you in turning your car into a rolling command post for economic revolution - don’t bother doing any breathing exercises or listening to audio books. You are probably so brain dead or heart dead that you may as well just lie back and accept your car as your mobile coffin.