We could have a safe, transit-based system. Instead we have a literal arms race where everyone's jockeying to have the vehicle that will best crush someone else.
— Angie Schmitt 🚶♀️🚴♀️ 🚌 (@schmangee) June 20, 2019
American obsession with enormous vehicles is a symptom of the sickness of the society at large. It’s inseparable from this. The US is an extremely hierarchical culture that pretends not to be so. This cognitive dissonance leads to mania and this mania leads to societal-level sociopathy which further leads to buying 5,000 pound terror-boxes.
Yes, it is wrapped up in inequality as well, but that’s not the only cause or explanation. It’s an entire mindset, a Weltanschauung, that is expressed in various pathological ways. That we find mass killing acceptable emerges from this in various forms: SUVs the size of houses in lieu of mass transit; lack of gun regulations as we meekly accept that elementary school kids will be routinely slaughtered; invasions of foreign countries where we murder civilians by the score.
All of these are not isolated events but are connected by the malady that has no name but that pervades our civilization down to its marrow and converts us all into people we would not want to be if we could see ourselves from the outside.