driving maxwell thorne No destination, No plan. I glanced over at her. She was lost, deep in thought. I couldn't tell what thoughts by her face, but I assumed they were probably the same that were running through my own head. A mixture of pure, uncut happiness, with the hazy shadow of an unpleasant reminder forced to the back of her mind. She glanced towards the dashboard clock, that lit her face, yet seemed so dark in its message, and then she looked at me. Now, I understood exactly. The time was moving too fast. Silently, her eyes screamed against mine, "Dont go." I had to tear my attention away, towards the street. My eyes scanned and picked up everything they could, and then quickly turned back to her beautiful face. That was all it took; I found myself wanting to stay, I wanted to stay, forever. I knew I couldn't, though. I had to go back to school. She knew too, and she would never ask me to stay. School was too important. A new song broke the silence, and, with some visable effort, we both pushed everything to the back of our minds. We had tonight. That would work for now. I squeezed her small hand, as if to remind her that I wasn't gone yet. No words, just us there. driving. 011105 ... eklektic through these preserved parks in akron, ohio - at night - with the windows down - the music all the way up - preferably "asleep" by the smiths - with a good friend. 020405 ... MollyCule i've only had my license for 6 months. it's still weird to be on the other side of the car. 020405 ... CRO I like the drive to the city. You can get into a meditative trance on the highways, and think about things you would have done differently, or things you would never have done at all. And some things you would still do - for better or worse - if you had your time again. It's peaceful driving home at 1:00am on a Monday night. 020519 ... syringe ...that train. High on cocaine... 020519 ... Kate I only have my temps, but my grandma and I drove to church today, by ourselves. It was so nice to drive her and I told her that I loved when I was in elementary school and how she would pick me and Andy up in her little blue car and drive us home. Sometimes if we were lucky, we'd stop at the Convenience store which has long been shut down for chips or go to Dairy Queen for hot fudge sundaes. Now Grandma can't drive anymore but I get to drive her now. I feel honoured. Love you, Grandma. 020519 ... niska is my favorite time of the day. I miss the long drive that i thought i hated before. I miss the planes. I miss the trees. I like driving everywhere. I sing in my car. 030303 ... Eblues Imagine driving a car at night on the freeway alone, with all the windows down. The wind is swirling around through the car, greatly messing up your hair, but you don't care. The music is loud and people are screaming, and it is nice. The night is warm and smells like a summer night and brings back many memories of summers past, good and bad. You think how good it is to be alone with your thoughts for a change and hope that although you have a destination, you never get to it. 040525 ... Myrrdin The best spot is harford rd. 060920 ... ladyfrill Myrrdin, are you from Baltimore or Harford county? 060922 ... Myrrdin Baltimore county. 060922 ... ladyfrill COOL! 060922 ... ladyfrill I'm from PA 060922 ... john taylor gatto Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling? An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You’d have to be an idiot to agree with my plan—at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence. And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven’t even considered the battering ram aspect of cars—why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone? It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it’s difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism. Notice how quickly people learn to drive well. Early failure is efficiently corrected, usually self-corrected, because the terrific motivation of staying alive and in one piece steers driving improvement. If the grand theories of Comenius and Herbart about learning by incremental revelation, or those lifelong nanny rules of Owen, Maclure, Pestalozzi, and Beatrice Webb, or those calls for precision in human ranking of Thorndike and Hall, or those nuanced interventions of Yale, Stanford, and Columbia Teachers College were actually as essential as their proponents claimed, this libertarian miracle of motoring would be unfathomable. Now consider the intellectual component of driving. It isn’t all just hand-eye-foot coordination. First-time drivers make dozens, no, hundreds, of continuous hypotheses, plans, computations, and fine-tuned judgments every day they drive. They do this skillfully, without being graded, because if they don’t, organic provision exists in the motoring universe to punish them. There isn’t any court of appeal from your own stupidity on the road.4 I could go on: think of licensing, maintenance, storage, adapting machine and driver to seasons and daily conditions. Carefully analyzed, driving is as impressive a miracle as walking, talking, or reading, but this only shows the inherent weakness of analysis since we know almost everyone learns to drive well in a few hours. The way we used to be as Americans, learning everything, breaking down social class barriers, is the way we might be again without forced schooling. Driving proves that to me. 210829 what's it to you? who go blather from