Bits and bobs #3

I was riding my bike down the road from my family's house and a car stopped and gave way to me. It was a guy I vaguely knew as a neighbour and we gave each other slight nodds and continued on with our days. I thought about this tiny interaction and wondered if that one of the reasons community has died in cities and been reconstituted as the commonalities of television celebrities and sports star is because of cars. Sure, cars have made suburbia possible, but a car is by nature an exclusionary device which creates the illusion of privacy - hello important businessman I saw picking his nose at the lights - and also generates hoons. Hoons seem to be like the non-internet version of trolls - people who delight in the actions anonymity and group-thrill lets them get away with.

Beyond privacy and dickheads lies a bigger problem with cars: they kill community. If you are a capsule moving alongside other capsule and the outside world is just dots along a moving chain from home back to home, you don't just fend off the weather, you fend off stray interactions; fend off the possibility of meeting someone new; fend off the built-up feeling of community which grows silently through the sense of sharing the same air, the same space as another human. Cars wipe that away and replace it with mediated humanity, with radio personalities and portable musicians so that with car and home accounted for, the chances of interacting with someone outside your designated micro-community of friends and colleagues drop off a cliff.

I wonder if this goes some way to explain road-rage - the imposition of someone else into your tiny capsule-space.

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I wonder also how much parental homophobia comes out of a fear of losing grandkids, out of a vestigal fear of family lines ending? People talk of the tragedy of infertility but homophobia is always attributed to fear of the unusual, religious antagonism and retrograde 'protection' of masculinity. Are there perhaps more prosaic elements?