For a short while we were revisiting old posts of clerkmanifesto once a week or so here, but I soon hit a prolific patch and our trips to the wit and wisdom of clerkmanifesto's history ceased.
But soon we will resume our revisits.
In fact, as we launch into an extraordinarily busy month, wherein I retire from the library, and then, with my darling wife, completely dissolve our life here, get rid of virtually everything we own, flee the country to travel in Asia, and then resettle in Europe, dealing with my daily commitment to clerkmanifesto is going to get...
complicated.
But it won't stop.
It won't pause.
It will carry on!!!!
But as it carries on it may, for awhile, have a looser quality to it. It may feature random pictures, old posts, and less of a carefully introduced and explained structure. I'm thinking about how that will all work. And you will soon hear more about that. But whatever I do it will surely include pieces from my past, like this one.
As a brief introduction to this particular piece from a few years ago, I have to say that one of the serious reasons we are leaving America for France is so that we can live without a car, something perhaps too challenging to do without enormous effort and expense anywhere in this country.
"Fuck Cars"
While recently perusing the "fuckcars" subreddit, a subreddit hostile to cars and concerned at how much worse they make life for everyone, I came across a post discussing Salt Lake City's large scale reduction of speed limits to 20 MPH in order to save the life of children. As usual with this sort of positive, but almost certainly tepid and uncommitted city movement, the fuck cars subreddit (an unfortunate subreddit name, since despite the salt of its name it is about as civil as any other subreddit, which is to say not that civil) sliced and diced the Salt Lake City action with some people going along the lines of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good", and some people claiming that without traffic calming street design this paltry speed limit reduction will be largely ineffective.
It was then that a solution hit me.
And let me just say, that for all of reddit's lack of civility, this is the kind of solution one never sees.
But I'm going to show you what a working solution looks like.
Are you ready?
Summary executions for speeding.
Summary executions for speeding!
That's right. If you go more than 20 MPH you will be pulled over and shot.
Too extreme?
Meh.
You ask:
"Would you drive the speed limit all the time if you could be shot for exceeding it?"
No. I'm not crazy
I'd never get in a car again.
Fuck cars.