Where Are We Going?

This picture was made on our way home from the airport after returning from Europe,  that land of high-speed trains, intercity trains, long-haul buses and short-haul buses, trolleys, subways and street cars.  

Probably all of the cars in this picture, certainly most of them, have only one person inside, and many of them have no large purchases they are bringing home.  They carry one person who could be reading a paper or book, or be perusing a laptop computer (many trains in Europe have wi-fi) if they were not driving - or starting and stopping and starting and stopping.

We are being left so far behind the rest of the developed nations of the world that we will probably never be able to catch up.  It is not so much that we are “eating their dust” as it is that we are coming to resemble the concrete we have covered our land with, slowly hardening into place even as it - and we - also show signs of cracking.

And we must realize that those “third world” nations that are now beginning to flex their muscles are not going to model their infrastructure after ours, but will pass us quickly by as we remain attached to our gas guzzlers and concrete roadways and traffic jams.


Obama was going to introduce high-speed rail and inter-city rail, but great forces are determined to prevent that from ever happening.  That power comes from large corporate-political organizations representing the gas, highway construction and automobile production industries.