Notes toward moving beyond big oil sprawl strangulation

Our crisis is integral.It will not be solved until decisions are made that give rise to a vision of what the United States of America should look and feel like in the future. PREMISES :
1. The roads belong to the people and should be used more for group transit than individual transit. 2. A community should be accessible by foot (or by something other than private automobiles) and should contain the elements needed to enable life to proceed in most respects by accessing what is within walking distance, education, health care, retail outlets and so forth.
SUSTAINABLE DWELLINGS
3. Dwellings should be organized so that they can be sustainable. The notion of retrofitting what we have and then building more of the same is not sustainable. In fact the whole notion that an economy needs to be able to grow at all costs is a false and deleterious assumption. An economy is what enhances life, community, well-being. What enhances these things is a satisfaction with the underlying values of the polis. This is the nub of the whole thing. This is why the grammar of getting lending going so people can buy more is deficient.
Buy what? For what?
Not until we create a sustainable matrix which can economically create affordable power and recycling and design communities around this idea will we have the model we need to lead the globe once again as an innovator beyond the crazed lust of the world to replicate our failed automotive culture.
Countering Stratification
4. President Obama is all about countering the fragmentation and stratification of our society. But the economic program has been very much like an effort to move backward into a time when everything worked.
It is not going to happen. If the recovery is still building with the idea of economic growth period, if the infrastructure is to maintain our atomized automobile based, traffic jam culture when more and more people should not be driving, if schools and medical facilities and stores continue to be translated into automobile-accessed warehouses that make Kafkaesque merely a quaint synonym for idiotic, then we are not in the business of enhancing life. We are in the business of increased reification, meaning the transformation of persons into things.
Oddly enough, it was Hillary who wrote the book "It Takes A Village". She was right.
So
Commit Detroit to creating public forms of transportation on our roads.
Include in the discussion the combat of sprawl and depersonalization.
Include in the repair of bridges and highways the creation of smart roads with public transit opportunities.
Bring integral into the discussion. Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store