It Should be Called: Cars ARE Freedom Day

September 22, 2011

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Today is something called, “World Car Free Day.” It was started back in the late 1990’s by left over communist radicals in Prague, Czech Republic.

Their objective was and continues to be to rid the world of “evil” cars.

But I say cars are freedom. 


It’s interesting to note that what is now the Czech Republic used to be called Czechoslovakia when it was under the thumb of the Soviet Empire. The freedom found in that Prague Spring resulted in the explosion of art and expression. The novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” was set in Prague in 1968.

Freedom of movement was finally enjoyed by those who had battled, protested and survived. Now totalitarianism and all its permutations find a home in the environmental movement. 

That’s why the Car Free Day has caught on in Portland.

Sam Adams and his anti car transportation apparatchiks embraced the car free days with gusto. They used taxpayer money for extra police and city services, cut off an entire portion of the city to cars, invited people from all over the region to come and celebrate with hot dogs and tofutti all while wearing self satisfied smiles about how precious they were.

I brought this up on the program while it was in the ‘talking’ stage years ago. It sounded like the City was taking its cues from the old totalitarians, which they were. I blogged about it. Talked about it. Others listened. So they changed the name from World Car Free Day to Car Free Sundays to “Sunday Parkways.” Nice name if you’re into Orwell.

Gary LeVox was onto something when he and his Rascal Flatts band mates wrote the song, Fast Cars and Freedom.
 

I see a dust trail following an old red Nova,
Baby blue eyes, your head on my shoulder
Wait, baby don’t move, right there it is
T-shirt hanging off a Dogwood Branch
That river was cold but we gave love a chance
Yeah, yeah for me You don’t look a day over Fast Cars and Freedom
That sunset river bank first time feeling…

You don’t need a study by PhD’s to figure it out, all you need to be is a 16 year old with a set of car keys and know cars=freedom.

But nonetheless people have done papers, op eds and studies about why cars provide freedom to people.

Waldemar Hanasz  a professor from Prague sums up the movement:

Car Busters, headquartered in Prague, has gone a step further and proclaimed today to be World Car-Free Day. The Czech activists hope to launch an “international car-free movement” with the help of other groups and individuals dedicated to “fighting against the car’s dominance and destructiveness.” Ultimately, their goal is not merely less pollution or cleaner vehicles but “a world without cars.” In their view, this would be a world of far greater freedom than our own. 

Cars provide the ability to live one place (a cheaper place?) and work somewhere else. They get you to work on time with less hassle, giving you the ability to hold onto a job. You can choose to use it or not. The benefits are endless.

Cars are much cleaner than they used to be. Pollution is lessened. So why crack down? Why demonize? Because the environmental movement isn’t so much about cleaning the earth–they’ve had a lot of success at that–but about power. They can plan your life if they can force you to live in one of the transit oriented developments near a light rail station. Of course as the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole reveals in a power point he does on the subject, those TOD’s often take on the look of the old Soviet apartments.

Hanasz sums up what’s at stake if we allow these totalitarians to take our cars:

Finally, are we really freer when we are free of cars? Under the old communist regime, I lived in a world of very few private cars. Today, in America, I live in a world with an abundance of cars. And I can speak from personal experience that automobiles have dramatically increased and extended my liberty in countless ways.

My car gives me the opportunity to travel, to learn, to meet other people, to enjoy life. It expands my choice of where to live, where to work, where to dine, where to shop.

The privacy of car ownership is a major part of this automotive liberty. People buy cars not only to travel from one place to another, but also to enjoy many things while they travel: music, conversations with friends, landscapes and sunsets.

In a sense, it is not only my home that is my castle; my Toyota is my castle too. Underlying all this is the freedom to choose where to go, when to go, and whom to go with. Westerners take these liberties for granted; survivors of communism do not.

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com