The attack on walking is a global crime that suggests dehumanization on such a scale that it ranks with terrorism as a source of fear, and with global warming as a cause of ruination. Merely to raise the question requires a delicacy entirely inappropriate to the gravity of the crisis it reveals. We are addicted to what kills us.

Pay to walk

And the casualty is the world where more and more and more people pay to walk on machines in "health" venues than walk on the ill-kept sidewalks of the world. The US leads in this criminality. The rest of the world deserves no credit for emulating us as it does culturally, imbibing our violence, and physically worshipping the car just as we do.

Someone spoke out

It is a happy occasion when someone observes the stupidity of the world where children are made guilty if they dare to walk to school and police are mainly concerned with speeding traffic along rather with those who struggle to cross streets like afterthoughts in a saga of waste and criminality. Now we have celebrated entrepreneurs saying they will improve matters by creating driverless cars. Maybe they will come up with synthetic horses as well.

It does not have to be this way

We could design our lives to be vastly more economical and humane if we toned down the violence and rolled back the damage that fossil fuels continue to wreak. We could consider creating cybercommunities which are entirely walkable and which are connected by new, high-tech, public surface transportation.

An economy built around people and their well-being would cut health care costs and generate vastly more income than today's debt-based, one-percent society that criminalizes the act of walking.

Just published

Here is a means of accessing Michael Lewyn. "The Criminalization of Walking" University of Illinois Law Review Vol.

2017.

Climate catastrophe?

What will it take to bring the movers and shakers to their senses? Surely not today's market. Today's market is raining blessings down on the rich. As automobile carnage happens around the world, as global warming becomes more ominous, they think that even if the worst comes, they can control things.

Survival of the richest

They can stretch their legs fine in a number of ways. And if someone is smacked by a car on some fraction of an hour basis 24/7, they really should watch where they are going. The monumental selfishness involved might elicit a few sermons. But pulpits are just as silent as the media on this matter. You would think they were under the spell of a marauder in chief who favors fossil fuels and is served by oil moguls.
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