Just some quick observations from Inauguration Day earlier this week.  As I stood waiting for the bus, I watched car after car drive by with just one person aboard.  I thought to myself, most of these drivers were likely to be Obama supporters, since I live in cobalt blue Massachusetts.  But all the hope and change and gumption in the world can't get us pointed in the right direction if we're locked inside an insane process where one person hops in a two-ton hunk of steel and plastic and burns up gallons and gallons of gasoline, sitting in a line behind another person in another hunk, doing the same thing.  And to complicate things, we're also trying to move all of our children off to a separate building for learning, in these huge school buses, at the same time that everyone is driving to work.  It's absolutely insane.  When you don't drive very much (like me), the stunning waste of the whole thing is much more obvious.  Why would any rational society put everything that everyone does, every day, in sprawled out, disparate locations that can only be traversed by burning up ungodly amounts of a precious resource?  You literally could not dream up a more wasteful way of arranging our spaces than what we have now.  And I live in Boston, a fairly compact city with decent public transportation.  The waste of megasprawl areas like Atlanta, Los Angeles or Houston is utterly unfathomable.  There's no way that Obama's administration can do anything to turn things around as long as we're arranging our lives so that a single-passenger automotive commute is a common practice.

One other vignette from Tuesday.  I approached a crosswalk just as the light for the cars was turning green.  A woman brushed past me, looked up at the green light, and proceeded to walk out in front of the oncoming cars anyway.  When one driver who had accelerrated a little faster than the others had to slam on his brakes to not hit the woman, she stopped in front of his car, glared at him for a full second or two, made a rude gesture, and then kept on walking to the other side.  The driver, obviously pissed, honked his horn and sped past, and the woman shouted one more obscenity at him as he left.  Now, to be stereotypical, I assume this woman, a black woman, was an Obama supporter (he won 95% of the black vote, so I'm comfortable making this leap). And she would presumably be welling up with deserved pride later in the day, as the first African American President was to be sworn in.  But her brazenly a-holish behavior in that crosswalk spoke more to me than any of the anthems, poems, speeches or benedictions I heard later in the day.  As long as Americans are so self-absorbed, so dismissive of the consequences of their actions, and so -- just, well -- so douchebaggish, then no amount of change in Washington DC will help us.  I know that crossing against the signal seems like a stupid little thing, not worth worrying about.  But I see it all the time, and to me, it's really a small part of the much larger problem of general American narcissism and perpetual adolescence.  I mean, if people can't do a simple thing like wait 40 seconds until the next walk signal, what chance do we have that they will be willing to make the tough choices and sacrifices that will be necessary in the coming years? 

If someone walks in front of car on purpose, they're essentially saying: "I don't empathize with that driver. I don't care that I'm breaking the law. I know that if everyone did what I'm doing, no one would ever get anywhere in the city and lots of people would get hurt or killed. If positions were reversed, I'd be just as pissed as that driver is at me, but I don't care." 

A society filled with people like this cannot survive.  If my rudimentary philosophical memory serves me right, it was Immanuel Kant who described the Categorical Imperative of moral behavior.  We have to live in such a way that our actions could be universalized, without civilization coming to a screeching halt.  I know it's pie-in-the-sky, bone dry German stuff, but it's true nonetheless.  Part of being an adult, maybe the largest part, is shaking off the narcissistic obsessions of adolescence.  There is certainly a period of life when self-absorption is constructive for the formation of character and personality.  But after adolescence, the transition into adulthood is supposed to bring a cathartic re-adoption of the Other, in the forms of community and nature.  As adults, we are supposed to look out on the world, and see our cooperative place within it, our duties and responsibilities.  It is supposed to become clear that we cannot always get what we want, that the preservation of the world depends on our sacrifice.  As mentioned in an earlier post ("Consumption and the Adolescent Adult," 11/25/08), the culture we have created has blocked this maturation, resulting in a society of childish, grasping, ridiculous adults.  Again, this is not my idea, but that of the greatest ecological thinker of all, Paul Shepard. 

I would love to think that Obama's inauguration represents a tide-turning point for our nation.  But we need a lot more than just an economic fix, or a better SEC, or a stimulus package.  And if by some miracle, Obama is able to get the economy turned towards green technology and a sustainable future, there will still be one crucial missing ingredient: Americans have to grow up.  And I don't say this flippantly, as if people just have to get slapped in the face so they will snap out of their trance.  It's not a trance.  It's the full pattern of juvenile behavior that has to change.  Video game obsession is not productive for adults. Voting multiple times for American Idol but skipping your local and state elections is not acceptable behavior for a grown-up.  Feeding your already-obese kids McDonalds food is not an option for a serious parent.  KNOWINGLY WALKING IN FRONT OF A CAR THAT HAS THE RIGHT OF WAY IS A STUPID F'ING THING TO DO!!!!!!

As long as we're doing things like this, we could be drowning in hope but our civilization will end up in the crapper anyway.

Next time: President of the United States of Collapse (or, What the Hell Does Obama Do Now?)