Car Culture, Grace, and Lowering the Stakes
People make mistakes. But they shouldn't be killed for it.
One or two times a month, my wife and I teach a children’ Sunday school class at our church. Class typically wraps up before “big people church” is done, so we let the kids play games until parents arrive to come get them.
This past week, some of the kids opted to play a game of hangman. But after one round, it wasn’t just hangman. It was hangman, but there was also a shark that would eat you if you didn’t guess correctly in time. After two rounds, there was also lava below (for those wondering, the shark was apparently a “lava shark”), as well as approximately 12 spectators on hand to watch the first ever public execution featuring a fiery aquatic monster.
Every round, the stakes of not guessing the correct letters to the incorrectly spelled words were raised. Perhaps our lesson on grace and mercy didn’t take as well as I’d hoped.
The whole premise of the game seems absurd, right? A simple task like guessing words, met with potentially fatal (albeit, pretend) consequences if done incorrectly.
But isn’t this the premise of how our daily lives are designed? Step out in the sidewalk without seeing a car making an illegal turn, and you’re toast. A child disobediently unclicks their seatbelt mere moments before an accident, and what should’ve resulted in a timeout at best ends up with a consequence far more dire.
And seldom is the primary response mourning. Instead, it’s saying things like, “They should’ve looked both ways.” Or “they should’ve been wearing their seatbelt.”
Because we’re unforgiving people. And unforgiving people design unforgiving places. It’s a vicious cycle: in our natural tendency towards subtle or abject cruelty, we normalize “the life or death-ness of things,” numb ourselves to it as a cultural norm, and proceed to incorporate it into more things. So when people get hurt, surely they deserve it because they made a mistake, right?
But when we stop and get some perspective, we realize this doesn’t have to be true:
Failing to wear a seatbelt does not put you at exponentially greater risk when riding a train, bus, or airplane. Only a car.
Getting hit in the crosswalk by a pedestrian or cyclist almost certainly won’t result in a fatality. But getting hit by a car often does.
Struggling to stay awake while walking to work cannot lead to a fiery high-speed wreck resulting in several casualties. Driving while sleep-deprived very well could.
Car companies are in an arms race to sell you the vehicle most equipped to help you be the one to make it in a crash. But the “it’s either me or him” mindset is a false choice that is only created by car culture. Even at the highest of speeds, pedestrians that collide into each other are not in an inadvertent jousting match to the death. Only cars.
While this might seem obvious to some, it is very clearly not obvious to the masses. For most, car culture and all that comes with it are seen as such a default that the unnecessary death and suffering it causes are also insurmountable. If we want to get around at all, it just comes with the territory.
But we can tell a better story. Cars are not a prerequisite for having transportation. Sacrificing 45,000+ lives per year is not the price of admission if we want a society where we can travel somewhere that isn’t walking distance. These things are not remotely as intertwined as they might seem. And we can show people that.
The world’s become more tense lately. Can’t you feel it? Maybe we should lower the temperature a little bit. Let’s start with making it ok to guess the wrong letter.