Hope springs infernal

Paul Rosenfeld has an interview in The Atlantic with Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten entitled The Rise of the Bicycle in the Twenty First Century. It would be easy to write this off as just another example of yet another Northern European attacking America's love of cars and their associated dependence on petroleum. Just another viking preaching about a transportation model and an attendant quality of life that cannot and never will be implemented in the United States. That is it would be easy if the model had not already started to gain traction in communities across the US, including right across the river in good ol' Arlington, Va. And increasingly in DC, and even right here in Bethesda, MoCo, MD, USA.

If I didn't know better, I might just start to feel a twinge of hope that at least some Americans are beginning to recognize that suburban, car-dependent communities suck and that human-scaled environments with pedestrian friendly infrastructure and public transportation (formerly known as "cities") potentially offer a higher quality of life, reduced environmental impact and a general improvement in the well-being of our citizens. Yeah, right...

In defense of idleness

The Atlantic has an extremely important article in the current issue entitled, Teach Kids to Daydream by Jessica Lahey. The topic is a particular bugaboo with me; a subject I return to time and again, about which I have even found myself in arguments with parents. I am a firm believer in the notion that children need unstructured time. I think many modern children live time-boxed over-scheduled lives that, combined with the saturation of electronic media have a devastating impact on their natural impulse to dream and imagine.

I've long maintained that boredom and idleness are the catalysts for imagination and creativity. In my own childhood I recall many a long, summer day filled with invention and discovery, as my brother and I roamed the woods, "explored" the local creek or built a tree house. Do today's kids even build tree houses? I'm sure some do, but I suspect they spend as much time figuring out how to get electricity and broadband access to it as they do actually building it. Then, instead of pretending it's a pirate ship sailing on a sea of acid, or writing a journal with entries that begin, "Day 39: I have secured shelter," they just sit inside it texting their friends about how great it is to be texting them from a tree fort. I dread the thought of having to read the books written by this generation, if such things still exist. So do me a favor and take Lahey's advice:

Teach your kids how to just be. How to value silence and be at peace with nothing but their thoughts to occupy them. Make the romantic notion of laying back on the soft grass with nothing to do other than to watch the clouds pass overhead a reality.