World without cars
By: Marko El Fuego Stojkovic
Tags: Pollution, Responsibility, Cars, World, Nature

There is an old story.

A man walked through a forest and became tired. He decided to sit on a rock to get some rest. A snake started to approach the man to bite and kill him. Suddenly, the rock where the man sits said: Don’t harm him! Snake said: Why? I want to kill him, he is our enemy! Stone replied: Yes, you are right! But, why to grant him a quick death. Let me take care of him. My surface is cold. Let me kill him slowly.

This may sound a cliche, but the World is devastated by cars. With every minute many cars are being produced all around the world, and the production is growing. Worse, the demand is bigger and bigger…

A lovely polluter

Are we hypocrites? We are complaining about pollution, about bad food and water, but we still love using our private transportation (cars) to have a “normal” life. As for a contemporary man, a life without a car is not a life. A life without a summer vacation or traveling is not life worthy of living.

Anyone can ask a question, what’s wrong having a car? I can’t reach my work without it! My mom has a car, my dad also, my girlfriend and my sister as well. Today, we have a situation that one family has many vehicles. So, to transport one person from point A to point B, we need to use an object of 12 square meters, or 21,5 sq. ft. If you do the math and multiply this on an average family level (four members), we spend approximately 48 sq. meters, or 86 sq.ft. to transport one family.

In contrast to the public transportation system, this may be an uneconomical way of traveling. As the modern lifestyle spreads a latent mental virus, whispering; buy a car, or you need a car, or you can’t do a thing without it, normally people tend to have it.

I won’t get into details about relationship between; lifestyle — bank — marketing and advertising — production — oil, but rather I want to express my concern for our future.

It’s hard today for anyone to offer a proper alternative or to substitute one of the major polluters today. By this, I refer to a general transporting system where cars are dominant. There are thousands of challenges that one has to tackle to get a bit closer to any alternative.

We must confess, that cars had a huge impact on our civilization. We can easily say that without cars, we wouldn’t be as advanced as today.

But, if you think about it more carefully, this is not entirely true. The most important thing about the land transporting system is to transfer goods from one point to another. We could do this by using only trucks or vehicles specialized for transportation. In this case, private cars are luxury, but very expensive luxury on our nature account. Our nature is not just our environment but also our body and mind, and pollution effect from cars undoubtedly disturbs it.

Not just car gas pollute nature, but used cars generate mountains of waste

Are we criminals? Certainty! We are ecological criminals and we will have to answer to God for this. This is not just a matter of cars, but for all other harmful things, born from our desires. This may sound confusing, but please stay with me and I will try to explain. From the dawn of man, we always wanted to make our life better, safer, and longer. These basic human needs evoked our actions to fight for survival. We invented new things, we traveled, we explored, we became cunning. This born selfishness, and in our mind this unconscious feature may look morally right. For instance, I work hard, I earn money and I can buy things that I want with my money. Clearly, this is our right and people fought to have this right. But, what about our moral responsibility to our selves. For instance, we can bay plenty of food and eat it. If we are not rational about how much we eat, we will get sick eventually. Nobody can’t tackle this fact. This is a firm fact.

Growing in our families, in our cities, countries, buying a car is a perfectly normal and even desirable thing to do. Our social environment shaped our moral thinking and formed our life values. So, is it possible to be responsible for ourselves? Is it possible to look into the mirror and to think: well, maybe the world would be a better place to live without cars, for instance. In this way, one has to give up lots of things. And this is the turning point, we need to make a sacrifice! But, in our deepest parts of our soul, we may see that we simply love to use cars. It’s not just about I need to use it for my work. I need a car to take my children to school or to be a normal person. I think that, when we sit for the first time and drive, we love that feeling of power and we can’t help ourselves. We feel safe, we feel comfortable and we feel mighty. In contrast not having a car, we can feel poor and pathetic.

A world without cars is not possible without a personal sacrifice. Making a personal sacrifice requires an enormous amount of moral strength and knowledge. Making a personal sacrifice requires a sense of a greater good. Until then, I will use public transportation and imagine this world of mine.