Every now and then a breath of sanity shows up in an unexpected place.
It happened to me this afternoon as I was riding the Metro home reading the Best of the Best American Science Writing. In one of the pieces -- "Common Ground" by Danielle Ofri -- a young doctor working for a Catholic hospital struggles to decide whether to direct a pregnant teen toward an abortion provider even though hospital rules forbid her from doing so. Ultimately, Ofri helps send her patient across state lines for the procedure, and she's left worrying about the girl driving alone to the clinic. Ofri's stress and worry about the situation boils over one afternoon while she's stuck in traffic:
I left work that evening and drove to my hotel. The very act of driving, of commuting by car, made me feel odd. It had been more than fifteen years since I'd relied on a car for transportation. In New York I was a regular denizen of the subway, and an avid bicyclist. I particularly relished gridlock traffic in Manhattan. I adored watching the irate drivers fume inside their cars, locked in the daily midtown mess, while I whizzed past on my ratty old ten-speed, needling my way in and out of unloading trucks, yellow cabs, and wayward pedestrians.
And now as I sat in my rental car, idling at a traffic light, I felt confined. I pined for the freedom of my bike. I yearned for the foot-based culture of New York, in which everything I needed was in walking or biking distance.
Some people feel nervous in big cities; I feel nervous in small towns. No pedestrians on the streets. No one to make eye contact with. No one to negotiate personal space on a sidewalk with. No mass of actual human beings on the street to remind you that you are alive and part of a species. Only cars.
And so I sat in my car, cut off from humanity, isolated in a metal box that rumbled with diesel heat under my feet as the traffic light languished on red.
Shifting gears--but just slightly -- it was quite fitting, I suppose, that Jon Stewart chose to highlight motorists squeezing through a tunnel to New Jersey during the climax of his sanity speech. Few places can rival the constricting steel belly of a car for their ability to inspire the rage and irrationality that Stewart spent his rally railing against. "You go, then I'll go, you go, then I'll go," he said.
Such tiny courtesies do help keep us all sane. But, lord knows, we'd probably need fewer reminders to be civil in the first place if we had, say, another tunnel that would make it possible for more of us to take the train out to New Jersey instead.
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