Moving
The local paper has a big story today about California's proposed $42.6 billion bullet train. Part of me is appalled at the notion of spending that kind of money when countless nonexpendible services are crying out with economic pain. But--part of me is pumping my fist in the air, saying, "Yeah. I wanna move fast!"
We are human beings, and I believe that as such, we are hard-core nomads, wired for movement. To me, the most apparent evidence of this is that we run. But when I look around, I see that the innate instinct toward locomotion informs countless aspects of our civilization. Our cities--heck, our country, our very civilized world--are created around our compulsion to move our bodies (not to mention our goods and our very lives) from one place to another.
I run under a train track.
I live on a street, which by definition is a place for movin' right along.
It's street connected to many other streets.
And I take a bus home from work.
Where all this leaves my stand on the bullet-train, I really can't say. In forming a responsible opinion about this issue, I can see reasons both for killing the project right now and for charging full steam (full electricity?) ahead. So I'm trying to live for now in that uncomfortable gray space called ambiguity, a space whose nature is a whole 'nother blog post.
We are human beings, and I believe that as such, we are hard-core nomads, wired for movement. To me, the most apparent evidence of this is that we run. But when I look around, I see that the innate instinct toward locomotion informs countless aspects of our civilization. Our cities--heck, our country, our very civilized world--are created around our compulsion to move our bodies (not to mention our goods and our very lives) from one place to another.
I run under a train track.
I live on a street, which by definition is a place for movin' right along.
It's street connected to many other streets.
And I take a bus home from work. Speaking of multibillion-dollar projects, the above photo was taken at the start of my last bus ride out of the SF Transbay Terminal, which is being demolished to make way for the "Grand Central Station of the West," a most visible and extravagant shrine to the phenomenon of movement.
As we await the completion of the new terminal, currently forecast to happen in 2017, we catch our buses in this temporary terminal, which has a bit of a shrine-like feel on its own, what with angel wings reaching skyward toward the holy, towering sentinels of city business.
As we stand deep in the cleft of this urban canyon, we wait impatiently under the clock, nervously shuffling our feet, which are singing to us, "Let's move! Let's move!"
Where all this leaves my stand on the bullet-train, I really can't say. In forming a responsible opinion about this issue, I can see reasons both for killing the project right now and for charging full steam (full electricity?) ahead. So I'm trying to live for now in that uncomfortable gray space called ambiguity, a space whose nature is a whole 'nother blog post.
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