Loose Cargo

“We are stardust, we are golden …”

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Sorry, Joni, but let’s face it:  we are cargo.

A passenger is dragged violently off a plane to make room for late-arriving airline employees.  A mother is assaulted by a flight attendant confiscating her baby stroller.  A peaceful passenger is removed from a flight because, after a lengthy delay, he desperately needed to use the plane’s restroom. If we fly these days, we are squeezed into a space so small that our legs cramp and   been shrunken, and we’re fed tiny packages of nuts and pretzels.

But this isn’t a rant against the airline industry.  I’m an English major, and I tend to think metaphorically.  And these outrageous episodes make a great metaphor for what’s happened to us as people.

Those in the cockpit consider us cargo. Now cargo has value, of course. But it’s passive.  It must be stowed correctly, sorted by shape and weight, and carefully restrained.  And one package is pretty much interchangeable with another, unless it’s really valuable; then it deserves, and gets, special handling.  Sometimes it gets tossed around and damaged in transport; it’s all part of the process.  For efficiency, it’s cataloged, classified and crated, stored like with like. 

Kind of like us.  Politicians see us as separate voting blocs:  Urban middle class, Rural working class, African-American, Latino, Jewish or Roman Catholic or Evangelical, etc.  Marketers divide us into “lifestyle segments.” Our habits are assessed and analyzed, increasingly efficiently, and we’re crated into a convenient box until they need to open us up and use us.  And increasingly, we’re doing it to each other.

We’ve become Amazon when we should be Etsy, a mass commodity rather than a boutique craft.

Well, I for one, am tired of being considered a package.  And I suspect it’s the same with those who are part of Black Lives Matter and the Women’s Marches and even those who voted for Trump.  We deserve, and we should demand, to be treated with dignity and respect on this flight we’re all on.  We have much more in common than those who exploit us would have us think; we need to recognize and assert that.

“…and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

The Home Front War

Remember October 7, 2001?

It’s a date that should live in infamy, but probably doesn’t for most of us.  It’s the date the war in Afghanistan started—and it’s still going on, over a decade and a half later.  Early on, the United States dropped a huge bomb on a cave complex where Osama Bin Laden was thought to be hiding.  The other day the United States dropped an even huger bomb on a cave complex where ISIS is believed to have been hiding. Plus change, plus c’est meme chose.

Operation Enduring Freedom.  I’m not sure about the “freedom” part, but the “enduring” is right on.

Now that’s not yet up there with some of the other wars in Western history, like the Hundred Years’ War or even the Thirty Years’ War, but it’s getting there.  And its twin, Operation Iraqi Freedom, drags on as well, with a spillover into neighboring Syria.  But it’s far, far longer than any of the previous American wars (except maybe the Indian Wars of the 19^th Century).  It’s lasted so long that it’s become the norm.  And you have to wonder what that’s done to us, the ones who ignore it at home.

Without legal justification or any stated objective, we fire missiles into Syria, a country we’re not even (supposedly) at war with.  We drop the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on Afghanistan and refer to it, with a disturbing overtone of pride, as the “Mother Of All Bombs” (the phrase itself a nod to the beginning of the Iraq War.)  A few people take to the streets in protest, but soon go back home.  And we dutifully make our comments on Facebook and Twitter, and the people who already agree with us like them.  But increasingly we passively accept the firing of the missiles and the dispatch of carrier battle groups by the President without Congressional authorization or the slightest nod to the Constitution.  We’re a nation permanently at war, and we increasingly seem to be okay with that.

What has it done to us?  To be desensitized would be bad enough—but have the effects gone even deeper?

For over a decade and a half, we’ve sent our young people into an environment where the enemy wears no uniform, where the good guys and the bad guys speak the same languages and, from day to day, can become interchangeable.  An environment in which the ground underfoot may conceal an IED, where every building may conceal a sniper, where every car could be a bomb. An environment in which paranoia is a valuable survival tool, and suspicion of others a necessity.

And when they come back home, does that all spread to the rest of us?  Has their war environment become the home front environment as well?

All of the above was true of Vietnam too, and I vividly remember the bitter divisions between us that war brought, divisions that tore apart families split us into warring tribes and created a cultural bitterness that persists into the present.  But it seemed so much more apparent at that time; we knew it was happening.  Now it just feels like an inchoate simmering anger.  Maybe the real war started fifty years ago, and we’ve just become so used to it that we hardly notice any longer.

Can we survive decades of war?  

Song of the Closing Road

I heard a story once, probably apocryphal, about a guy who drove his new motorhome for the first time.  He set out on an interstate.  Then he set the cruise control—and walked to the back to fix himself a drink.

Very soon, that story might not have the outcome we all know it had.  Tech companies like Google, Uber and (reportedly) Apple, as well as traditional automakers including General Motors, Ford, and Tesla (or is that a tech company?  It’s so confusing) are racing to perfect “autonomous vehicles”—self-driving cars.  Already you may see test vehicles on the road, marked by any array of spinning sensors on the roof.

This could, in many ways, be a good development.  Let’s face it:  driving, in most urban areas at least, isn’t fun any longer; it’s become a stressful chore.  Immobile in traffic, breathing toxic fumes, worrying if the guy who just shouldered into your lane has a gun … who needs it?  Maybe it would be nice to program in your destination, sit back with a beverage of your choice, and read or surf the net, or even catch up on sleep.  And let’s face another thing:  a distressing number of drivers these days are distracted, intoxicated, or just plain inept.  A car that drives itself, always paying attention, always acting predictably—what’s not to like about that? But, as with all new advances, something valuable will be lost.  We won’t drive anymore.

Duh.

Okay, but think about it for a bit.  For over a century now, any one of us has had the opportunity to control one of the most powerful and, at the same time, deadly devices ever devised.  We have been behind the wheel of a multi-ton mechanism that can propel us at speeds up to and, in many cases, well over 100 miles an hour.  We take this power for granted, but it’s been one of the most important gifts of the industrial age.  And it may be coming to an end.

To turn 16 has been to assume a status previously granted only to locomotive engineers and steamboat captains and aircraft pilots.  It’s been a grant of independence.  To deny it is to engage in repression; just ask a Saudi woman.  To take it away is a cruel confirmation of decline; just ask an elderly or infirm person.  Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Route 66, Jack Kerouac, Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde … driving has permeated every aspect of our culture.  It’s not just the ability to move that’s significant; a self-driving car won’t take that away.  It’s the acquisition and perfection of the skill itself—that will be lost.

Already, in this country, only five percent of the new cars sold have a standard shift.  Stories are told of people who try to steal a car, only to suddenly, and grindingly, find that they can’t drive it.  Just about every week comes a news story of somebody who’s driven a car into a building because they mistook the gas pedal for the brake. To drive well, to really control a car, is to know how to get moving and stay moving on a snowy road, to know how to recover from a skid, to drive with an awareness of what’s happening half a mile ahead, to make it safely through fog and torrential rain, to know what to do when a tire goes flat, to know when to accelerate past a potential accident and when to yield.  These are great and valuable skills, the marks of truly alive and awake individuals.  They are the skills of someone who controls technology rather than one who is controlled by it.

Maybe they’ve become irrelevant.  Increasingly, young people are foregoing the acquisition of a driver’s license and ownership of a car.  And maybe that makes sense in today’s environment.

The road may still be open.  But our mastery of it is coming to a close.