General Eisenhower had a dream. Well, not a dream exactly, but a vision. Like Communism, Fascism, Soccer, and a bevy of other bad imports brought to America, it was a European vision. The victorious General, touring conquered Germany, saw the same masterful efficiency and strategic brilliance in the Autobahn that Hitler saw when building it. To be a great nation, Eisenhower thought, one a needed a great road system.
Nearly a decade later, General Eisenhower became President Eisenhower and, with a little nudging of his vision from the massively powerful automobile industry, signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 into law, singularly creating the largest public works project in American history and, arguably, the history of Human civilization. Over the next decades, the bill would lead to the creation of the most intensive, comprehensive, and extensive system of roads in the world: The United States Interstate Highway System.
If the Autobahn was impressive, what America did was downright magnificent. One of the largest countries in the world connected nearly every city, every town, even every rural area, with not one but several veins and arteries to every other city and town. This was progress.
And yet, I wonder. Instead of being the envy of the world, the system seems to have become ground zero for American decadence. The subsequent bills that govern highway construction, which are renewed every so often, have become famously grotesque in America for their amount of wasteful spending. Unapproved, unaccountable, and unauthorized money is added for Congressmen to give out rewards to the few at the expense of the many. These Earmarks have gone from small additions to hundreds of billions of Dollars for a surreal list of projects: Millions for horse trails, funding land development for the politicians biggest donors, a few billion for a useless building named after the congressman who added it, and, infamously, 200 Million for a Alaskan bridge that went, literally, nowhere.
But beyond the issue of government spending, since 1956, a half-dozen or so wars have been fought, and thousands of our young men and women have been killed, so we can cheaply fill the cars that ride on these roads, that’s not even including the covert operations and all the nameless casualties. Vicious dictators have been installed, legitimate governments toppled, and the Middle-East has been turned into a wasteland of poor, unemployed, young men looking up at the towers of a few fat sheiks, and gladly blowing themselves (and us) up for the smallest hope of a better world to come. And despite all of this, the price of Oil continues to go up, continues to bankrupt families and turn our leaders into dependent stooges. 
The very roads that were supposed to bring us together have seemingly done quite the opposite. Here in New York, the powerful owners of financial companies live in penthouses on the West Side while, thanks to an extensive highway system, the rank-and-file brains who run their companies live in dense middle class ghettos (suburbs) an hour or two away in Connecticut and those who clean the offices are neatly packed far off in the slums of New Jersey. Communities work like this throughout the country, separated by a class system increasingly strict, almost feudal, where few ever leave their designated areas except, thanks to the ‘interstate, to work for the others.
Neither has the air we breath escaped the vileness that plagues our politicians and communities. Our emissions are some of the worst in the world; our use of energy is contemptible; our rates of Cancers, obesity-related illnesses, and mental health problems are astronomical and tragic. Spending our days sitting alone in these tiny tin cans, breathing in garbage, has become the new American way of life.
Our very country, in my estimation the greatest in the World, a place where every culture, every religion, and every ethnicity has brought something with them, has altered the landscape, changed the architecture, morphed the way we talk and interact; most of it now goes unseen and unheard. We rarely talk to one another, mostly view this wonderful place only through our car windows, and if we could completely darken those windows, I doubt that there’d now be many complaints.
Who is to blame for this? I don’t know. My parents, your parents, didn’t do anything wrong. They did what they were told to do, what was considered the right thing to do: Work in the city, live in the suburbs. As did millions of others. To put it quite simply–and I say this for our critics as well–you cannot be an American without a car. With the exception of a few metropolitan areas, the American citizen must have a car; not because they want war and environmental destruction, but because they, like people everywhere, want to feed their children and help those around them. I can find no one person to blame, anymore than there’s one solution to all these problems.
I just wish, perhaps, Eisenhower had spent more time wondering what once made Europe great and less time admiring what caused it’s near-destruction.
Have you considered Subscribing to all of this madness?
