How driving a car is not a victimless crime
Why won’t we walk more or cycle to work and school, walk to a bus stop, or even get out of our cars?
When I was growing up, the perfect normality of homosexuality was illegal, and the utter awfulness of child sexual abuse was pretty well rife in Jersey. Going to an all-boys school, some combination of these two — the illegality and the exploitation — had the effect of putting me off sport, with its showers and its changing rooms, its bullies, cliques and secrets, in a very significant way.
Music was important to me and the free-form dancing of that age easily got me into a sweat. Later, in England, friends introduced me to hill-walking, and with compass, map and survival rations I often tested myself to my physical limits. Then I came across T’ai Chi and Zen meditation, with their tradition of Bodhidharma getting the fat monks out of the Shaolin Temple to exercise and train, to make their hours of sitting more meaningful. Throughout this time I also walked and cycled regularly, to work, to classes, and everywhere else.
As February drifts into March, it is easy for our New Year resolutions to gather dust. With both a bike and a car sitting outside, it takes a little resolve to choose the wind on your face, when the alternative has both a heater and a radio.
In England, Ireland and elsewhere, there have been calls recently for pollution exclusion zones around schools. Measurements on playgrounds and pavements show that, especially during picking-up and dropping-off times, the fumes of parents’ cars regularly raise dangerous pollutant levels way above legal health limits. This happens in the very places to where parents want their children safely delivered.
Driving a car is not a victimless crime.
Every motorist contributes to the climate chaos that threatens us all. Every journey adds to the fumes and pollution that stunts children’s development and will put many of us on oxygen tubes in our later years. Every bit of healthy outdoor exercise not taken as we grow up, go through our middle years and into old age, will contribute to the fat, weakness, breathing and heart problems that will put many of us into hospital long before our time. The road rage and the lack of connection with fresh air, birds and trees as we sit fuming behind glass contribute to the mixed up, unhealthy mental states that have ruined many a life.
We need to get out of our bubbles and smile with our living neighbours much, much more often.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 21 February 2019
