With fuel reaching record highs I’m curious as to why there are not more people carpooling. Well, I mean I was curious until I was offered the opportunity to do so and I felt the “why not” crawl up inside of me. What interested me most though was I think this behavior reaches far beyond the car.
I think, as a country, we have no ‘1’ culture. In the South, where I’m from, we do things in a manner that I am sure is somewhat foreign to our fellow countrymen in the West; same goes with Northerners, Mid-westerners, etc. It’s not that one way is better than the other . . . it’s just the way we are; the way we were raised. One thing that seems to be pervasive throughout all of these sub-cultures is our since of independence.
This is why men can’t rely on other men, we have to be strong islands unto ourselves, just like John Wayne was! He didn’t need any help so why would we? For this same reason, in a sense, I don’t want to ride to work with anyone else. I mean it’d make sense too wouldn’t it? There are at least 4 of us that could load up into one car and travel into work 4 days a week. But we don’t do this, and when the email went out there was very little interest.
Carpooling would require us to get close . . . a car is a very close environment . . . you’d have to get to know one another. I think that’s it . . . I think the desire for our nice fences around our lives far out weighs the money we pay for gas today. It’ll be interesting to see what price we’ll have to hit for people to start tearing those down. I’m not taking myself out of the argument . . . I’m right there in it. I know it makes sense to carpool and I should . . . but that would mean having to give up my own freedom to ride in someone else’s car and I’m just not there . . . yet.