One of the strangest things about this society is that people don’t recognize sidewalks as utterly dystopian.
how much of the world has been removed my life by imprisoning me on the pavement, yknow?
there was this excellent drawing for an article about the dangers of cars in urban areas but i can’t find it. it was like the roads were gone and instead were bottomless pits and the sidewalks were these narrow paths along them. the cross walks were really flimsy rope bridges implying the possibility of death crossing them.
it says a lot about a person’s mindset when you point out that cars kill more people, and animals, than guns do and they reply with “but cars are useful in everyday life.”
they’re not useful. they are necessary. every new technology introduced as useful and labor saving quickly becomes a steel cage that reshapes the entire life of the people who use it and even those who don’t use it.
my friend never owned a car or learned to drive. he lived in a major city with decent public transit. didn’t stop someone speeding on a road from killing him while he was in the crosswalk.
one of the interesting ideas Paul Goodman had was to bury all the roads on Manhattan underneath elevated terraces. i can’t find the images but if you can find an old copy of Communitas there are some sketches in there.
basically ban or bury the car from the city should be something high on the agenda of liberals but they rather freak out about guns.
There’s so many dumb smug comments on this post
Like it’s really interesting to see what you’re allowed to critique or analyze about capitalist society and what people will ridicule
Reading the replies to this thread really just made me hate the left more than I already did. Like imagine listening to a critique that is less a direct assault in the concept of sidewalks, and more of an abstract critique of how and why dominant society structures our common spaces (in this case sidewalks) which in turn influences how we interact on an interpersonal level and even entirely on an individual basis.
By the close of the 1920s, automobiles had claimed the lives of more than 250,000 children and adults in the United States. In New York City, temporary memorials were erected in Central Park to commemorate the dead, as if casualties of combat. Automobile drivers were uniformly painted as villains in newspaper editorials, a menace to civic well-being. Cartoons depicted them in full reaper regalia, armed with sharpened scythes. The phrase “jay driver” prefigures its more common counterpart, appearing in print as early as 1905. (A 1907 headline in the Albuquerque Evening Citizen reads “Jay Drivers Imperil Life Each Hour in Albuquerque.”) The growing tension between motorists and pedestrians had larger class implications. While motorists tended to be men of means, the pedestrians they sought to displace were largely working-class. Andrew Mellon, during his tenure as secretary of the treasury, instituted a landmark tax reduction strategy, lowering the top marginal rate from 77 percent to 24 percent. The combination of lower taxes, flourishing markets and weakened unions led to prodigious levels of inequality. The chasm between rich and poor reached its pinnacle in 1928, with 23.9 percent of all pretax income channeled to the top 1 percent of families. Even with improved methods of production, automobiles were still out of reach for millions of Americans. As James J. Flink writes in “The Automobile Age,” “The automobile trade journals were agreed in 1923 that ‘illiterate, immigrant, Negro and other families’ were ‘obviously outside’ the market for motorcars.”
“Privileged Sport”
here’s the illustration @kropotkitten mentioned, by illustrator karl jilg:
