I’m a fan of Over the Hedge for a couple of reasons. 1. It’s just a funny ass show. B. It has a lot of social commentary. Take that bag of chips scene from the above video. If that isn’t a jab at what we call “food” I don’t know what is. And the whole HOA commentary…
However, there is one quote from that movie that sticks out and sums up our entire societal existence.
“That is an SUV: Humans ride in them because they are slowly losing their ability to walk.”
“Wow, it’s huge!”
“How many people fit in there?”
“Usually just one.”
And that more or less sums up our existence. The automobile was freedom. It allowed us to leave our neighborhoods, get out of the city. Leave mom and dad’s house on a Friday night and drive out into the country, park on a view point and enjoy the company of some nice young lady. It was a way for us to be independent. If we needed some time to clear our head, we jumped in the car and headed to whereeversville and didn’t turn around until our head was clear and the gas tank was starting to drop.
We liked being out of the city so much, we all wanted to live outside of them. So we built suburbs. Eventually, the suburbs were where all of us lived. We no longer simply left the city to go out and enjoy some alone time. No, we had to drive out of the city just to get home from work. Soon everyone was on their way home. The roads became clogged. So we built bigger roads, which led to more suburbs and more people living outside of the city. So we moved farther away from the city. Built more roads…
Pretty soon, we were all sitting in our cars driving back and forth from where we thought we wanted to be to where we had to be. The in between time was atrocious. We were all spending those same hours driving, but now out of necessity. We didn’t clear our minds, we were perturbed and couldn’t wait to get home.
All that time driving from here to there and back again, meant there wasn’t a lot of time for other activities like being outside and moving around under our own power. We got fat. We were all in such a big hurry to get to work and back home, we no longer had time to grow a garden or even to go to the grocery store. They installed roads next to our favorite restraunts and called it fast “food.” We ate it up. We got fatter. At some point, we literally lost our ability to walk and they started having those little carts at the grocery store so when you had time to go, you didn’t actually have to walk. They’re like little cars for the store. If you’re real nice the cart boy will even follow you out to your car so you can drive it right up to the door.
Of course, our car was parked in a parking lot. What’s that you ask? It’s a giant slab of asphalt that we park our cars in. Usually, it’s where there used to be some green space or a nice little neighborhood where people had picket fences and the kids played in the street. Our cars our such a “necessity” that our cities that we moved out of but have to visit anyway because we need to work to pay for our car and our house that is out of the city and also to get food, yea, those cities now have to have codes requiring businesses to have a certain size slab of asphalt so we all have plenty of space for our cars.
The automobile was seen as freedom. We took advantage of that freedom and now we have this.
And we all live in little boxes that we picked from three different models. We all hate each other and our differences so much we have organized into little box associations that require our neighbors to do what we want them to do and vice versa. We have streets, parking lots and attached to our little boxes we have more space for our cars than we do for our children to play.
Don’t get me wrong me, the automobile does have its advantages; it goes fast and it can carry a heavy load.
That’s pretty much it.
It’s not hard to link every single problem of our modern society back to those four-wheeled carcinogen spewing coffins. Those boxes, with windshields that gave us so much freedom, that allowed us to leave the city and be outside of the realm of influence of our parents, of our teachers and preachers, have become our masters. We work so we can have a nice home in the woods. Our commute is a little long and money is tight because the boss man doesn’t think he makes enough money, so we have to buy a different one that gets better mileage so we don’t spend so much time getting to work. And in another five years, there’s a new model that’s more expensive, but will save us so much money on gas. We continue to work paying for our little boxes in suburban hell and wishing we could just get outside.
And every time we go to the store we park our “freedom” where there used to be open space with trees and bushes and little bunnies and children building forts. We crawl onto a little cart so we don’t have to walk and drive into the grocery store. We buy food that we aren’t going to eat because we don’t have time to cook it anyway pretending that we aren’t going to end up at Burger King the next morning, in a hurry and wishing that life was a little easier and that walking from our kitchen to the garage where we get in our car didn’t make us breath heavy. We remember times as children when we felt free and it didn’t feel anything like this.
But whatever you do, don’t ride a bike!
P. L. and R.
