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| http://bzfd.it/1GUWZmk |
The one weapon worldwide that warring people always reliably count on against "evil" America is our supposed lust for oil and petroleum products. Speaking as someone who walks downhill daily as part of her commute, I can assure you that there is no such person, at least not how it's portrayed overseas as an excuse for violence and murder.
Americans use transportation regularly because one of our states, that land called "Texas", may be the size of your entire country and then some, which is difficult to envision if you've never been. When I lived and worked briefly in Germany, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a newly-elected Californian governor. The next day, my studio-mates in the atelier tried to use it against me, which was baffling, because I lived in New York City. I tried explaining it to them, but without an illustration like the one you see below, it's almost incomprehensible to a Euro.
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| The distance from Berkeley to New York City is 2,900 miles—driving time of 42.5-48 hours. |
It felt like my time in Denver, when I tried (in vain) to explain to the designers and editors around me how many people we watched die, live on t.v. during the 9/11 attacks, because they also tried to dismiss it immediately. America is so vast, it is a state of mind that's much bigger than other countries on the globe, which makes it unknowable to anyone who hasn't seen it or tried to travel across it. Freedom, like being American, isn't a state or ethnic group; it's a choice.
When I explained to my German co-workers that I would have to fly on a plane (or two, or three, depending on fares and airline hubs) for SIX HOURS just to reach California from New York, I could see an "Aha" moment spreading through the group, which was solidified later on in my trip when an editor and I blithely mentioned we were driving to Amsterdam for the weekend. They were shocked and scared beyond belief by such a journey as ours (and by beautiful women, too!), until we once again mentioned that we could drive for hours in New York and still remain in our home state.
To us, driving a mere 2-3 hours to be in another country is so easy and ridiculous a hurdle to accomplish, we cannot imagine NOT doing that regularly. Same thing with the English language: if you had to fly for 10 hours just to get to another country, you'd probably use less languages, too, Euro. Trust me on that. Anyway, English has become the lingua franca for world business and trade, which makes sense to me, because New York City is the capital of the world.
Writing that is still no excuse for gluttony, just because you may like shiny new things. I love good design and classic American cars as much as the next person, but to pull ourselves out of this mess, we have to buckle down and conserve. This means you! I really liked the German system of limiting car usage and petrol to orderly days of the week divided by neighborhood, like so: on Mon-Weds., these streets conserve fuel and cannot drive, so my co-workers biked as part of their daily commute instead, to a train equipped with bike racks.
"Petrol" is considered a very expensive luxury in Europe overall, which is the right idea to have, because the cost of using too much gas is a price we can't afford to pay anymore. Think about the melting of the polar ice caps, and you're already there. Same with your air conditioning running at full speed whenever you feel like it, because you're overweight and always overheated. Fuck that! Staten Island has already experienced crippling power outages and it's not even August (the hottest month here), yet.This world needs to go on a diet, and not a Texas-sized one either. We need to change the world.
