Among the Yearning Masses

I'm thinking that, here in the 21st century, communism is a relic. Like the industrial revolution, it's the underpinning for the way we think, but it has little to do with the realities of societies today. And those societies that cling to its quaint but oversimplified tenets are struggling to work free of them without losing too much face.

There is a different kind of populism emerging, one required by the necessity of impending ecological disaster. I don't think the sky will fall, but the oil companies will keep gouging you at the pump. In the big cities (and even the small ones), there are too many people and each one of them has a car; put them all on the street at the same time and you have a transportation system that no longer works. People sit on the freeways in L.A. at rush hour, moving at 5 to 15 miles per hour (if they're lucky), complaining about the situation, burning expensive gas while idling in the fast lane: None of them will admit that the system has failed, fails daily, and none of them would consider the alternative of mass transit.

In Los Angeles, in Southern California, eschewing mass transit is a matter of overwhelming fear: xenophobia. Everyone has become so used to the safety and comfort of a two-ton steel cocoon embracing them from home to work to shopping to recreation to home that they have lost the art of conversation with strangers. And the government spin machine has invested nearly a decade into making everyone paranoid and terrified of anyone who can be classified as "other" (we don't call it racism anymore, but that's what it adds up to). We have become accustomed to spending thousands of dollars each month to purchase and maintain vehicle(s), insure it/them, feed it/them gas in order to avoid those "others" and retreat to the comfort of our air conditioned mobile armor.

Mass transit takes too much time. It's too crowded. It's too dangerous. It's smelly: There is a list of reasons why not to take mass transit even now, when it can transport faster than a private vehicle during rush hours in cities.

But it's obvious, at least in Los Angeles, that the answer is not more lanes of traffic. The answer is effective mass transit that doesn't rely on the same transit corridors that automobiles use. Light rail, subway, even monorail would be an effective alternative...IS an effective alternative. I take it each workday from Pasadena to the Wilshire Miracle Mile. It's a round trip of more than 20 miles and takes less than an hour...until I have to climb on a bus and get into traffic for the last three miles, which adds another 20 minutes to my commute.

My transportation cost is $62 a month, and I put less than 3,000 miles a YEAR on my car. I fill the tank once every five to seven weeks.

Electric-powered mass transit is a real solution for the future. Ride the train soon.

(Was that fucking boring or what?)