By Jerry "Clapso" Avissato
Spring 2000
SO-204 (AKA Mr. Rogers Neigborhood)
Professor "Buck" Rogers (It is the 21st century)
Term of Surrender Paper
Part One
I had just gotten off the bus and was walking toward my home, when from behind me came an awful screech. You've heard this chilling sound, I'm sure. The sound car tires make when someone slams on the brakes. The sound that followed was of sheet metal bending. At first, I thought nothing of it. I thought it was just another insurance headache for someone else. Then I heard the woman's cries! I looked back and saw her lying in the road writhing in pain. I rushed over to do whatever I could to help her. Although stunned she wasn't bleeding and seemed quite capable of movement. I was relieved that she at least didn't look too badly hurt. The driver of the car that hit her rushed out, lay down next to the woman, and held her so she couldn't move. "I'm a nurse," she said. I was relieved that someone with the skills to handle the situation was at hand. I motioned to people driving, hand to ear with thumb and pinky extended, which meant I needed a phone. The man in the first car in line rolled down his window, cell phone in hand. I told him to call 911. I stayed around till I heard the sirens, which meant that help was arriving. I asked the nurse if there was anything I could do. She said no, so I left in the hope that everyone would be all right.
This kind of scenario plays itself out everyday, all over the world. The number of people killed by automobiles is around 50,000 per year in the US alone. The number of people injured is much higher. Why do we allow so many people to be killed and injured for the use of an item that I can only describe as a burden? The car is the worst example of obsolete technology, poorly designed and used, that I can think of. Whenever I get into a discussion about cars, someone will always say, "I need my car!" I have never owned a car, and I can tell you from experience, you not only don't need one but you can live a better, healthier life without one.
Beyond the awful and obvious risks to life and limb cars create. There is another facet, which perhaps in the context of death will seem small by comparison. That is my contention that cars separate us in a way that makes our day to day lives more stressful. By this, I mean that people zooming around in steel cages are less connected to other people. I call this "Auto-Disconnect." It's a small thing, the human touch I experienced as a child growing up in a neighborhood where everything was walking distance. This closeness is all but gone in our 75-MPH world. Many of us now spend more of our waking hours in our cars then we do in our homes. We drive an hour to work, a half hour to the mall, even the movie houses that used to be in every neighborhood now have to be driven to. We build further and further out from our cities, which means we have to drive longer and longer to get anywhere. The more highways we build, the more people drive on them. This creates more traffic jams, which stress people to the point of braking. We have even coined a term for this: "road rage." In some instances people have been shot over minor "fender benders."
We have all experienced being on a long line at the supermarket. People get a little hot under the collar and mumble, but no one ever gets shot. Take these same people put them in cars in bumper to bumper traffic and you get, at the very least, foul gestures and shouted expletives. I believe the difference in behavior is attributable to the fact that when you're standing a few inches from another person, you're more connected to them. When you're surrounded by steel armor, as in a car, on the other hand, you can fail to see that what you're really dealing with is another human. We become, in a sense, the machine. We are a disconnected group of raging Cyborgs intent on getting to the next parking lot as fast as we can. Damn everybody else!
Even when we go on vacation the supposed relief we need from the daily stresses caused, in part, by our reliance on the automobile we have to have to rent a car! I lived in South Florida for two years. The traffic is bad in the summer, but in the winter, the place is one big parking lot. I overheard one man say he couldn't wait for his vacation to be over so he could relax. When I asked him what had him stressed he replied "the traffic here is terrible and I had to park a 15 minute walk from the beach!" When I told him the hotel he was staying at was only a five minute walk from the beach and why didn't he just walk from there he answered "What!? In this heat?" He then pointed to the Rollerblades I was wearing and asked if I knew how dangerous they were. I asked why he thought skates were dangerous and he replied "I'm a Chiropractor, I see two or three patients a week with injuries from skating mishaps." I asked how many patients with injuries from auto accidents did he see. He said "that's different, people need their cars!" So blind was he to what the real cause of his stress was, he failed to find relief from the natural beauty surrounding us. We were sitting beneath a corpse of palm trees that rustled from the gentle kiss of a mild ocean breeze. The waves played up on shore just a few yards from us making that swooshing sound that always calms my frazzled nerves. The gulls hovered over an ocean so blue it almost hurt the eyes to look at it. However, all the good Doctor could think about was the traffic he had to deal with. So sold was he by the advertising which promotes car use as a freedom supplying activity, he was unconscious of just how chained to his two ton death machine he really was.
Another example of Auto-Disconnect in a natural setting happened to me many years ago. A group of friends and I took the "Dayliner" boat from Manhattan to Bear Mountain State park. Once there we proceeded to climb the parks namesake mountain. It was a nice one-hour climb through the woods and I looked forward to the imagined reward of the mountain top vista we would find on the peak. My leaf-speckled reverie was destroyed as the electronically reproduced sound of "The Scooter" Phil Rissuto uttered "holy cow they got him at third!" This was merely the prelude to a round of yelled curses and the phrase "what the hell were ya thinking calling the steal with two out Billy!?" as I rounded the peak, I left the woods right into a parking lot! One of my friends shook her head and said "we aren't in Kansas anymore Toto." The Auto-Disconnected Cyborg that was angry with Billy for calling the steal sat on a vinyl and aluminum lawn chair the size of a Barkalounger. His black and white portable sat on the hood of his rust-bucket '69 caddy and the power cord ran through the car's open driver side window to, I guess, the cigarette lighter. His bloated fingers fiddled with the old coat hanger antenna as he mumbled about the poor reception you get in wilderness like we where in. Wilderness indeed! My little group stood in disbelief for a second, then silently slunk down the suddenly small hill and back to the boat. The irony of these types of experiences is symbolized best by a person in California who owns the worlds only "Chia" car (snuck that one in on ya Professor Hoffman). This man soothed the Auto-Disconnect he felt by camouflaging his car with glued on grass seed to create a movable lawn.
You may be asking yourself about now what alternative do we have to the car. The answer is Public Transportation. One of the real joys of living in a city like New York is the Subways. You can get anywhere you want to go in NYC on the subway. It's cheap, fast and reliable. You also will find the cure to auto-disconnect there. In a community setting like the subway, most people become more polite, we are more connected to one another. People strike up conversations with complete strangers. Instead of the get out of my way mentality of people in cars, on the subways there's a sense that we are all going the same way. About now some may be thinking smaller cities like Utica can't afford to build subways. That's because these cities use their transportation monies for road building and upkeep. If we developed the political will to do so, we could convert the transportation budget to include less roads and more public transportation. On a more easily done personal level, the easiest way to relieve auto-disconnect is to walk more and drive less. Instead of going to the supermarket to pick up a few things, walk down to the local store, if you have one. Instead of driving the kids to the Zoo on a Saturday, take the bus. Instead of renting a car on your next vacation, find out about what public transportation exists at your destination. My simple recipe for more community and less auto-disconnect is: walk where you can, take public transport where you can't walk, use your two-ton death trap only as a last resort.
Part Two
Now I hope you will forgive me for switching gears, (pun intended). I've heard that there are some readers of my work that wish I would use a more conventional framework for my writings. Such a framework, in sociological circles would include citations of other people's work in the APA style. My first reaction to such is that my work is intended to break out of the conventional thinking that such frameworks, it seems to me, bind professions such as sociology to. As a case in point, I will cite the following:
Skolnick and Currie, (1973:13) "Conventional social problems writing invariably returns to the symptoms of social ills, rather then the source; to the criminals, rather then the law; to the mentally ill, rather then the quality of life; to the culture of the poor, rather then the predations of the rich; to the "pathology" of students, rather then the crisis of education." I took the above quote and its APA cite below, from the text book, Eitzen and Zinn (2000:7). How this quote relates to the subject of this paper is simple. The Chiropractor I wrote about earlier saw traffic as the problem, when in fact traffic is a symptom of the over use of what is the real problem, Automobiles. Eitzsen and Zinn (2000:7) goes on to quote: Liazos (1972) "By overlooking institutions as a source of social problems (and as problems themselves), observers disregard the role of the powerful in society." Liazos (1972) goes on to state in the cited quote which I'm condensing: "�exploitation by the corporate world." The Chiropractor was under the spell of just such institutions. He, as I stated earlier, couldn't see the problem, for the symptom was blocking his view. He was conned into believing he needed his car by the corporate world (Automakers, Oil companies, and their Advertising Agencies). The Government which is in the pockets of these companies uses our tax dollars to subsidize these companies. More and more of our federal, state, and local budgets go for highway spending. We spend billions to keep a military presence in the Middle East to insure a steady flow of oil, most of which is burned in automobiles. We are ever ready to spill the blood of our young men and woman in uniform, just so we can drive our death traps to the 7-11.
Do these citations add anything to the paper I'm writing? I will leave that up to you the reader. It is, in fact, the way I prefer to write to not cite and to simplify my concepts. I let the reader take from my work what they will. I don't see the need to clutter my papers up with references. I could have very easily inserted the above references into the body of my work. I didn't in order to illustrate the second point of this paper. That is that there is no need to follow function with a prescribed form. The function of this paper, and all of my other writing, is to invoke discussion. I don't write to convince the reader that I'm right. I write to inform the reader of what my thinking is on a matter. I fully expect some readers to agree with my contentions and others to disagree. I also prefer to add an element of entertainment to all my writings. This, along with simplification, makes my writing more approachable and, I hope, enjoyable. How does this type of writing fit in a sociological context? For that, I cite Mills (1959) "It is not only information they need - in this age of fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need - although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination."
This "quality of mind" points to the essence of what I believe my writing style is. By using anecdotes, I link sociological concepts to my personal life. I hope that this leads to the kind of "lucid summations" that Mills described. I also intend to use the entertainment aspect of my writing to give people that otherwise wouldn't pick up a sociology book a taste of what this discipline has to offer. Specifically insight into how we effect society and how society effects us. If I were to write only conventionally formatted papers they would, at best, be used by experts in the field, if at all. I seek to write works for a broader audience. I look forward to discussion on any of these points.
Read, Think, Speak, Write, Be!
References:
Skolnick, Jerome, and Elliot Currie, 1973. "Introduction: Approaches to Social Problems." In Jerome Skolnick and Elliot Currie (eds), Crisis in American Institutions. 2nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 1-17.
Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca Zinn, 2000. Social Problems. 8th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Page 7
Liazos, Alexander, 1972 "The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts and Perverts." Social Problems 20 (Summer)
Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.