When our kids were smaller, we used to go RV camping a lot.
We have since joined the group of people who used to RV camp, and that’s a happy group. But for a time, we loaded up the various tow behind used campers we owned, considered the tow rating on the mini van as “suggested”, and set off to all the exotic places a person can afford to visit while getting 11 mpg and downshifting to second to get over the highway bridges in a headwind. We went up in the Niagara region of Ontario quite a bit, lumbering up the iconic Queen Elizabeth Way.
The QEW started as a plain old road from Buffalo to Toronto, a distance of about 80 miles. During the depression, it was widened as a public works project and redesigned to be similar to the Autobahn highway with separated lanes and exit ramps. It opened in 1937 and was the only divided highway in North America at the time. Today, the highway has over a quarter million cars a day in the busier sections and continues onto the elevated eyesore of the Gardiner Expressway, another one of those urban highways that seemed a good idea at the time.
Toronto has strongly embraced a suburban sprawl growth pattern with massive highway cloverleafs in the middle of the city and eight lane streets leading through the former farmlands surrounding the city. As a result, driving down the QEW with a trailer on a minivan can get a little spicy close into the city.
As a child in the late 60’s, I remember driving back from Toronto in the Rambler after a family trip to see the shop window at Christmas. Half awake, I grew mesmerized by the mercury lights, the first lights deployed on an entire highway in North America, flicking by on the QEW, set atop green standards with the initials ER in beautiful script atop each pole. Those lights were ready in the late 1930’s, but were kept off to save electricity for the war effort and were finally flipped on in 1945, that must have been cool to witness.
The inscription is Latin for Elizabeth Regina, or Queen Elizabeth, the older one who was married to King George VI. A few still exist today, notably the Henley Arch bridge that serves as the gateway to St. Catherines and a reminder that it’s time to exit for drinkable coffee and a Save a Lot store that sells subsidized infant formula for those who celebrate.
One of my favorite stops when heading North was the Ontario rest stop on the QEW, just at the point when things were getting boring. What I loved were the wonderful paper maps of the whole province of Ontario and the smart young people who could help me on my journey. Armed with a map, they drew the route in orange highlighter, working upside down so the top of the map pointed north for me, noting interchanges and interesting places along the way. I loved getting a map, even if I didn’t need one, and the coolest thing was the back side, with all of northern Ontario growing ever more desolate, with seasonal roads and rural telephone locations and finally places like Moose Factory and Polar Bear Provincial Park, sitting windswept on Hudson Bay. Interestingly, Polar Bear Provincial park is actually site of a contaminated cold war military installation only recently cleaned up, who knew!
That backside map just set my mind to wander at the dark and trackless wilds to the north and how they contrasted to the endless donut stores and suburban sprawl of greater Toronto. It seemed almost another planet. And somehow, on that map laid across the dining room table, the picture in my mind was able to paint itself more clearly. And the map was impractical and hard to read while driving. You couldn’t zoom in or out and it was hard to fold back up correctly. And the little rest stop on the QEW now sits empty and abandoned and the GPS on my phone is better, in every way, and in-car arguments over which interchange on the hellscape roads up around 427 have been silenced, and a calm has been restored to the car, especially in the wake of the sale of the RV camper
Which brings us to the actual point of today’s letter. People sometimes poke fun at me for being a bit of a luddite, with my wool bike jerseys and old cars. But as funny as the hat looks, it doesn’t quite fit. I embrace technology and love all the things I can do with my little hand-held device, just like the rest of the world. And as the world changes fast, the older legacy technologies evaporate so quickly. We still have a couple of rotary dial telephones in the house, for no good reason, but try calling an automated PBX with one of those. But I like the old phone and when I take it apart, I can see the old Western Electric circuit boards and solenoids, all soldered by hand somewhere in America in the 1960’s, built to last. I like to think back to a copper wire telephone system that connected the nation and used some of the first applications of mainframe computing, and the switching technologies that would later become the internet. And maybe I’m more prone to being sentimental rather than rejecting the new stuff, always one eye on the rear view.
I see a palpable change in our country these last few years. It gives me genuine pause, and I wish I could use my hands and my time to change the trajectory, but I can’t. One of the things that have been leaving me stunned every day is the embrace of utterly ridiculous conspiracy theories, even in the face of mountains of evidence. The release of the Dominion suit against Fox has led to a portrait of a news organization literally discussing how to directly lie in an effort to appease a restless viewer base and salvage declining stock prices. Still, in the face of this first person written evidence, people on social media parrot back the same tedious lies, two years later, like a married couple finishing the others sentences. The other thing that worries me is the spiraling hate, the talk of civil war and succession, the irrational legislation aimed at transgender youth, the abortion laws that force a woman to carry a functionally dying baby in her body until she develops sepsis as though medicine is like on TV, and we just bring her back from brink without lasting harm. And more than just the tone of laws, it’s the people who stand and cheer, waving their torches across social media, finally able to put voice to the meanness and hate they have felt, but needed to constrain just a little. The lid is off the cesspool now, all hail the very worst of us.
And perhaps, that’s the thing that makes me a little wistful for the paper maps and the flip phone calls to another human and stopping to ask a person for directions and getting some confusing mash of “Where Denny’s used to be” sort of landmarks. I know people who I can be in civil conversation with in real life, people who believe differently from me. But on social media? Bring on the anger and the rudeness and lack of any civility to each other. Broadcast your support for dictators, for the wisdom of avoiding childhood vaccinations, for hating whole groups of people that one has never met. Is an AI driven experience of ideas, video, pictures all delivered with the goal of maximum engagement to make maximum money really good for us as people? When I step back and look at people I know personally who slipped away during the pandemic, embracing conspiracies related to people eating children, and government plots to inject little 5g phones into people, I’m so sad to see the people who have stumbled out of the backside of this strange two years. And I look at myself, once seeing things like social media as a way to better understand others and the views they hold, now just kind of disgusted with great swaths of my fellow countrymen. That’s not healthy.
I’m not sure how the movie ends. It’s certainly a swirling time in history, and I think we all know it. My hope is that my children step into an adult world that sets America on a path toward again doing great things that benefit all people. A nation that offers compassion toward the least among us, and doesn’t begrudge the shared wealth as some weird conception of socialism. A nation that just leaves people alone who are not just like us in how they worship, or eat, or love others and express themselves. A nation that steps toward one of FDR’s four freedoms, the freedom from fear. A nation that pulls back the curtain and sees the use of fear to sell us more guns and bigger vehicles and hateful policies as being what it is, a way for a few people to make even more money without having to do much hard work. Without having to climb up on a roof and tear off shingles, or take care of the dying, or make sense of my taxes. No, it’s just making money by making us hate each other. And it’s time we stop.
The world feels a lot like we are in the novel Lord of the Flys. Sadly having a book that old describe behaviors we see all around us today says something as well. People have the capacity to behave terribly when they are lost in crowds but eventually that wears off and the larger mass of humanity demands something better. I just hope we are at the nadir of that arc and start to see the something better in people.