Metal Shells with Nothing Inside Them

A thought about cars for today:

[Cars] keep people from treating other people as human beings. One thinks of passing the car in front of you...instead of passing the person in front of you. Because we don’t understand the humanity of others, there are fewer limits to our aggressive tendencies.” —Raymond Bruel

I find this to be true of how I experience driving, and of course it explains the dehumanized way drivers so often treat each other. And it extends to the way media writers cover car-pedestrian crashes: "SUV injures pedestrian," "Woman killed by pickup truck," and so on. No one is ever done wrong by the driver of the those vehicles.

It's as if Christine or My Mother the Car were on the loose, but we all know that's not the case.

We probably can't change the way people think about this, but we can at least change the media behavior, getting reporters and headline-writers to model reality: that it's people behind the wheel — not a bunch of metal shells with nothing inside them — causing mayhem on the streets.