More on Kar is King

Barney Brantingham’s column titled Open Season on Pedestrians: Streets Becoming Human Pinball Machines dated March 17, 2011 tells us Kar Is King. Much more should be said about this.

Santa Barbara has indeed, as many other communities have, elevated cars, motorcycles, trucks, other traffic to an exalted position in the community. By doing this we have also demoted and devalued everything else… and as Barney attested to, human life. While the “car-crazy City Council majority” he mentions may be the official public face on the cruel elevation of machine over humanity, it is, and has always been, the individual driver’s responsibility to refrain from endangering the world around them. Considering how damaging pollution comes from these cars and their drivers, Santa Barbara is proving to be a very reckless and callous community with no public or communal sense of compassion or shame. This is not good. We should do better, quickly.