The freest I ever felt was when I ditched my Ford Pinto. I had moved to Chicago in 1970-something, and urban living meant a car was superfluous. I let my sister take over the car payments and gladly walked away from other expenses like car insurance, gasoline, oil, maintenance, parking tickets, registrations and city stickers. I saved up enough money on my meagre $6,000 salary to go in with a buddy and buy a 40 acre farm in Wisconsin.

My sister actually needed the Pinto, because she was studying nursing in Indianapolis, and had to get to school in a city with almost no public transportation. I, on the other hand, availed myself of my bicycle and the CTA and made out like a bandit.

But in the end, I, like my country, just couldn’t wean myself from the automobile. A few years later I bought a beat-up pickup truck and I was once again a slave to the oil companies and the car companies.

Over the next 30 years I watched, horrified, as the city I grew up in, and every other city I lived in or visited, ate up the countryside around it, spewing out strip malls and vinyl-sided subdivisions as far as the eye could see. I knew in my heart it was not healthy, and I knew it was not sustainable.

Now we’ve reached the point where billions of dollars of taxpayer money are gonna be spent to bail out GM and Chrysler and Ford. I think this is a fool’s mission.

There once was a time where our government was able to fund public scoools, trolley lines, universities, libraries, museums and more. Then all the public money got sucked into building and maintaining highways. The automobile reached into our pockets and caused us to spend more than we could afford as a society. Now we’re at a crossroads.

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