Raise the Hammer

I can't help but feel a little (perversely) bemused by the discussion surrounding this subject, namely: what amounts to addressing a badly-designed wheel. It got that way for understandable reasons, each element perfectly explainable in retrospect...because of circumstances being so varied, because of endless contributions by maybe unaligned 'forces', the result is...badly-designed.

What's bemusing is how the various factions (actually, it's really only 'anti-' factions, because people tend to not make noise about the status quo...unless they've moved into the 'anti-' camp, which means they're no longer silent...) see this flawed product (the realities of long commutes, of the associated Life-strain, the effects on the environment, yadda, yadda, yadda), rev up their umbrage machines, and...and...

Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of throwing out the square-wheel-that's-had-endless-compensatory-features-applied and starting over. Not only that, but the primary reasons that people don't live where they work are a) they can't get the living circumstances they've come to believe they need in order to have the life they believe they want, and b) there's no 'suitable' work where they've chosen (for whatever reasons) to live.

Add to this that everything attached to our dilemma is in motion. It's virtually impossible to apply a solution on-the-go; it's akin to attempting to thread a sewing needle while riding a mountain bike over rough terrain...while reciting the capitals of the provinces and territories...alphabetically. Backwards. In iambic pentameter. While having rocks tossed at you.

: )

So even if practical solutions could be offered by the 'anti-' factions (and they tend not to be; what's offered is more 'this is how things should be!' rhetoric), the fact is that there's too much momentum, there's too much at play, there are simply too many disparate ramifications to even attempting to rejig our wonderfully-flawed wheel. Never mind the fact that there's really no vision being brought into the process, too much cronyism, too much partisan-politics, too many elements that really don't have the common good (a properly-working, pleasant-to-use 'wheel') in mind.

From my vantage point, less energies need to be expended on whingeing about the state of things, about how many egregious errors have been made by scurrilous players over the years, and more applied to making things-as-they-are, better. Otherwise, what we're stuck with is a strangely compelling admixture of circle-jerk and mudslinging. On-the-fly.