The slideshow featured in this entry consists of photos snapped before and during the 2023 Art Car Parade. It is presented without descriptions, captions, or tedious explanations. Just enjoy what some incredibly creative people and groups can do with vehicles.

Orange Show Art Car Week is a celebration somewhat like Mardi Gras in New Orleans and elsewhere—except that almost everyone knows what Mardi Gras is, and far fewer people know what Art Cars are all about.

The culmination of the Art Car celebration is the Parade, which for most of its history has run on Allen Parkway into Downtown and back out. Thanks partly to COVID-19, and partly to the State of Texas scheduling political party conventions on the same weekend as the Parade, until last weekend I had not attended an Art Car Parade since 2019. I didn't realize just how much I'd missed it until I spent Saturday afternoon sweltering in the fickle shade of a sycamore on the median of the Parkway, watching this most H-Town event of all.

I loved the entries from school groups (there were about 20 this year), the SLAB cars, the low riders, the non-motorized entries, the trailers with bands playing on them, the Mutant Vehicles...every bit of it. What I loved most was watching it with a friend from the Burner scene, her daughter who's about my son's age, and her five-year-old grandson. The grandson and several preschoolers near us were seeing the Parade for the first time—or perhaps for the first time they might actually be able to make sense of what they were seeing.

My friend Angie educated her grandson on the distinction between an Art Car and a Mutant Vehicle: the latter typically has a body that does not resemble that of a standard motor vehicle, like the banana and the Aladdin slipper included in the slideshow.

Quite a few of my Burner and Burner-adjacent friends were in the Parade, most of them participating with the Zebra Crew. There are some non-Burner friends and acquaintances as well, such as once-upon-a-time Green Party activist Bev Peters with her car Shep the German Shepherd Rescue Car (a VW Beetle). Bev and Shep have appeared in at least 20 Art Car Parades.

Happy 2/22/22, y'all!

In eight and a half years on Twitter, until yesterday morning I had never posted anything that has generated this many Likes, Retweets, and Follows. I honestly didn't expect the reception that this one received. It's not kerjillions, but it's still a bit of an ego boost. I did expect that people would misinterpret my statement, simple as it is, because of the way people plug messages into their own frames of reference whether they fit or not.

The Tweet was conceived as a pre-emptive response to something I've observed in elections past. A whole week into this year's midterm early voting primary season, I haven't yet seen any selfies on Facebook of friends smiling as if they've accomplished something, sporting their I VOTED stickers, rehashing that horrid cliché about "doing my civic duty." However, when I have seen these selfies, they're from smart, earnest Progressives who cling to the absurd notion that the Democratic Party is an avenue for their ideological aspirations rather than a dead end.

​Yes, participating in small-d democratic activities in general is, in my view, a civic duty—i.e., one's duty as a citizen. Voting in a primary election, however, is only a duty to one's political party, not to one's nation, state, or community. It's debatable whether voting in the big-d Democratic Party's primary elections is a democratic activity, given that DNC attorneys have successfully argued in court that their party is not bound by law to respect the will of its voters.

So far, at least, I haven't seen any replies defending the Partisan Duopoly, and for that I'm grateful.

I'm Not Encouraging Not Voting...
Some of the folks replying to yesterday's Tweet have insisted that primary elections are as important as general elections, if not more important. They're entitled to that opinion, and I am entitled to disagree. I'm still trying to figure out the replies that say essentially not voting (in a primary) is how we get four years of Trump! Srsly?

But my Tweet doesn't say don't vote! It doesn't even say don't vote in primaries. I don't believe that it even implies that message—or, at least, I didn't intend to imply it.

​If you consider yourself a Democrat or Republican, if you have an interest in having your party put forward the best candidates, go ahead and cast your primary vote. But don't call it a "civic duty" and expect me or my fellow Texas Greens not to snicker in response, and don't you dare try to peer-pressure folks into joining you.

Fewer than half of registered voters in Texas participate in primaries: 30% turnout for Republicans and Democrats combined is considered high, and turnout is considerably lower in primary runoffs. This is hardly shocking or even surprising, given that fewer than half of registered voters identify with either of the corporate parties. Plus, turnout even in the quadrennial Most Important Election of Our Lives!!!!! barely breaches 60%.

The Green Perspective on Primaries
As a Green in Texas, I would prefer that my Progressive comrades abstain from the big-party primaries. Greens and Libertarians do not conduct primary elections in this state: The law doesn't allow it for parties that don't poll at a certain level in statewide elections—and even if it did, primaries cost the parties more money than GPTX has ever had. The smaller parties nominate candidates via local, county, district, and state conventions.

As a Green in Texas, I would also prefer that folks of the progressive persuasion abstain from major-party primaries so they can sign Green candidates' petitions or participate in Green conventions.

At the other end of this scale of voting habits, I have a number of friends whom I respectfully call "principled abstentionists." These folks refuse to vote even in general elections because doing so legitimizes an anti-democratic system. I see their point, even if I disagree with it. On one point I do agree with them, though: As I've said more than a few times on this blog, democracy is much more than voting. (If you can't effect change by voting, take to the streets—and risk violent repression at the hands of police because the US is sooooo not a democracy). A few replies to my Tweet acknowledged the importance of protest for issues that merely voting cannot address.

​Post–HB 2504 Reality
In the Lone Star State, if you vote in a primary election, you are barred from active participation in any other party. That includes signing a ballot-access petition for any third party or any third-party candidate. In fact, since the passage of HB 2504 in 2019, the reverse is also true: If you sign a petition for a candidate to submit in lieu of filing fees, you are barred from voting in the next primaries three or four months later. If you're caught voting in a primary after signing such a petition (which you've likely forgotten about), you could face a misdemeanor charge.

SIDENOTE: Signing a ballot-access petition does not restrict or dictate which candidates or parties you choose in the general election. In past petition drives I have seen way too many potential signers decline to sign because they thought that signing would obligate them in some way, even after we strenuously insist that it does not. By law, we're not even allowed to compile signatories' names and addresses into a mailing list.

What I find absolutely gobsmacking is that a lot of habitual Democratic voters to whom I have explained all of the above just don't get it. It's not from inability to understand it but from unwillingness. These are the same folks to whom I can give all the reasons Ralph Nader did not cost Al Gore the 2000 election (or Jill Stein did not throw the 2016 election to what's-his-name) but who still insist that it all comes down to Nader getting more votes than the difference between Gore and Dubya Bush.

If these folks know anything about HB 2504, which passed both houses of the 86th Texas Legislature on party-line votes, they likely see it as a Republican ploy to make life difficult for Texas Democrats. (NOTE: This is based on personal observations and conversations, and it is not intended to put words in anyone's mouth without their consent.) They reach this conclusion in part because the bill, as submitted and as passed, allowed the Green Party to keep its ballot line through 2026, which Texas Democrats perceive as an existential threat. I exaggerate only slightly.

On that subject, here's hoping the Greens can make enough noise to get a 2% polling for one of their statewide candidates this November, which would extend the party's ballot access through 2032 (at which time climate disruption will probably start rendering large portions of the planet uninhabitable, but one can dream, eh?).

Harris County Greenfolk and other Progressives who have given up on the Partisan Duopoly:

Please clear your busy social calendars to make room for these important upcoming events:

• Tuesday 8 March, 7-9 pm: Harris County Consolidated Precinct Green Conventions, La Granja Disco y Cantina, 5505 Pinemont Dr. (just east of Antoine Dr. in the Near Northwest)
• Saturday 12 March, 3 pm: Harris County Green Convention, same location
• Saturday 9 April, all day: Green Party of Texas Convention, Kyle TX, actual venue still TBD (delegates may also attend online)

Skip down to the bottom of this entry for a list of important things to remember about attending the conventions.

David Eric Grohl, the Craig Biggio of post-grunge (a Hall of Famer in two positions, drummer and rhythm-guitarist/lead vocalist) has a particular knack for communicating just how awesome his favorite musical acts are without falling back on tired adjectives like awesome. From Little Richard to Elton John to Neil (Rush) Peart to Joan Jett to Lemmy (Motorhead) Kilmister to AC/DC to Naked Raygun to his pal Paul McCartney to the Preservation Hall Jazz Society, Grohl lionizes them all without falling too deep into the pit of clichés. As an aging punker with varied influences myself, I resonate to all of that. More than anything, Grohl is grateful that such people and their music exist in this world and during this time.

Now in his fifties, Grohl is at root a father, a fan, and a Foo Fighter—in that order. Nothing illustrates this better than his story of flying back to California from Australia, mid-tour, to escort his first two daughters to their school's annual daddy-daughter dance. It's a cool story, and it's always pleasant to be reminded that rock stars can be functional, family-oriented people. Grohl is passing on the grace that his mother extended to him, her blessing for him to follow his bliss and his destiny, to his own three daughters.

As fun a read as The Storyteller is—especially for someone like me who turned punk at a young age despite having a mostly OK childhood—the book as a whole just isn't up to the level of quality I'd hoped. The problems are more editorial than authorial. The whole work seems hastily thrown together in places. Particularly in the later chapters, it has a tendency to repeat phrases used a few paragraphs, pages, or chapters ago, sometimes verbatim. It's as if he couldn't decide whether to insert a clever turn of phrase at the end of this paragraph or that one, so he left it in both places.

Another quibble I have with the latter chapters is that they consist mainly of anecdotes in which Grohl meets or otherwise interacts with this or that musical idol. These are all in the service of underscoring just how blessed a life Grohl has led, how he has never allowed himself to become a jaded rock star because dammit he's just a grown-up version of that kid from suburban DC whose whole life was changed the first time he heard (insert godlike artist or band here).

Despite now having spent about half his life as leader of the Foo Fighters, Grohl doesn't provide much material about the creative process involved in the band's recordings beyond the first three albums. The tours get plenty of ink, as do Grohl's various side projects, mostly because the Foos have proven over the years to be much more of a live sensation than a prolific recording outfit. Ten studio albums in 26 years? Srsly? It reminds me of the omissions in Elvis Costello's memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, in which Elvis skips completely over two of my all-time favorite albums, Trust and Imperial Bedroom, as if he has blocked out those unpleasant years 1981-83 either intentionally or due to chemical overindulgence. Nonetheless, Elvis and the Attractions had ten albums out in the space of about nine years, if you count the compilation of singles and B-sides.

Maybe Grohl doesn't find much of interest in the Foos' output beyond 2000. The three songs they played at their induction ceremony were all early material. IMHO, nothing after the third FF album There Is Nothing Left to Lose has had quite the same impact on society or culture, whereas the first three albums introduced some truly fresh sonic flavors, as inspiring as they were inspired by Grohl's omnivorous musical explorations.

The anecdote from this memoir that rubbed me the wrongest was the tale of performing "Who Are You?" in honor of The Who at Kennedy Center Honors for none other than President George W. Bush. By the early 2000s, Grohl was already rock & roll establishment, assured of his place in the Hall of Fame for his efforts with Nirvana and quite likely the Foo Fighters as well. Grohl could not turn down the invitation despite his ideological disagreements with Bush. He rationalizes the whole process as an exercise in civility among people of different partisan affiliations, recalling the way DC used to be. But there's a huge difference between respectful disagreements on policy and facing someone for whom millions of deaths are just the cost of doing business.

Later in the same chapter, he recounts performing in honor of McCartney at the White House in 2010, expressing his great admiration for then-President Barack Obama and...oy, I thought my stomach couldn't have turned any more after reading the parts involving the Bushes. At least fellow Nirvana alumnus Krist Novoselic sees the anti-democratic nature of the partisan duopoly and works on finding ways to wrest power from the duopoly's tentacles.

In 2021, a 79-year-old Sir Paul McCartney stayed up well past his bedtime to officially induct the Foo Fighters into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. As I watched the ceremony, I had no idea that McCartney was a close family friend and frequent dinner guests of the Grohls. Macca shows up in multiple chapters of The Storyteller, an ever-looming numinous presence that keeps Grohl connected to the Beatle-worshipping preteen within, inspiring him to keep rocking into his pre-dotage. Considering the Macca is pushing 80 and still making some quality records, perhaps some of that will rub off on his protégé Dave Grohl.

17 Dec 2021
Houston TX

Dear Family & Friends/Intentional Family:

DBC here, writing on behalf of Kayleen & myself.

This HalloThanksChanuKwanzMas letter is brought to you by Ticket to Ride, the award-winning train-game series from Days of Wonder, which has provided many hours of enjoyment in this household during months of limited social activity.

​One sentence you’re probably tired of hearing or reading is “Wow, it’s been a crazy year, hasn’t it?” It’s right up there with “It went by so fast!” So, we won’t say it.

We hope that this note finds you physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy. We know that the past two years have brought many changes, large and small—some of them harder to handle than others—and that such rapid change brings no small amount of stress.
​
Despite all the lethal weirdness of 2021—viral variants, a winter storm unlike any ever seen in these parts, crowd-crush mayhem at a music festival just down the road—life goes on, as do we. We have some actual good news to report despite the apparent collapse of civilization-as-we-know-it.

Katy's New Job
The top headline would have to be Kayleen’s new position, which began on 1 November, within the Houston Community College System. Her role as Administrative Assistant to the chair of the Visual Arts department feels like a perfect fit: She works with a bunch of creative people, and she gets to put her broad array of clerical and technical skills to use (for faculty members who generally lack those skills). Hardly a day goes by without the chairperson telling her how indispensable she is.

Perhaps best of all, the position comes with a significant increase in what HCCS calls “Rewards” but most of us call “compensation.” Pay and benefits aside, the job carries far less stress than teaching in a public school. We both still consider ourselves “recovering schoolteachers.”

I enjoy telling folks this tidbit: Kayleen has been taking advantage of some online instruction in MS Office toward a certification (whatever they're calling it these days). I have been providing her additional tips and tricks for the last two years or more. Last month she surpassed all expectations by looking up and implementing some sophisticated VBA code to make Excel mass-produce folders in MS Outlook (or is it Teams?) for instructors to upload their grading documents to be entered into PeopleSoft. I was most impressed.

DBC Goes Back to School
At a somewhat advanced age, I have begun preparations for a whole new career in website development, acquiring skills and knowledge that are much in demand. The immediate goal is to escape the world of contract and gig work, which has defined (and complicated) most of the past three years.

In the first two weeks of online classes, my previous knowledge and experience in webwork—mostly picked up independently or informally—have set me up in the half of the class that often assists the other half with less of a programming background. What will this lead to? Well, sitting in a room writing and testing code all day has a certain appeal for an introvert; however, I would prefer to pass the knowledge on to others as an instructor.

Here’s the part where I thank Mom & Pop for backing me in this investment in my future and my well-being. I am incredibly fortunate that they are not just able, but also willing, to provide the necessary assistance.

This is one of the topics about which I intend to post as part of my New Year's resolution, mentioned at the top.

The company providing this six-month full-stack web development boot camp, Codeup, started eight years ago in San Antonio, and has since expanded into Dallas and Houston. The Houston office is scheduled to open for in-person instruction in April 2022.

Codeup has rented billboards along several area freeways. After a few months of hesitating, I did the research into Codeup that helped me overcome my natural suspicion that it was a well-financed scam, that the full-tuition-refund-if-you-don't-get-hired-within-six-months thing was legitimate, with no fine-print gotchas. Then I made contact with some staff members. Then I waited a couple months more to swallow what remains of my pride and ask my parents for assistance with the (substantial) tuition.

So far, I have found that Codeup offers not only quality instruction, but also a caring environment. The staff understands that students have actual lives and families, and the format of the classes is geared toward achieving success, including time for students to get together in Zoom breakout sessions and help each other.

I fully expect that I will be working full-time on a development team at this time next year. The staff has also assured me that, through its connections with the Texas Workforce Commission, Codeup provides opportunities beyond the planet-killing sectors that dominate the Texas economy: fossil fuels, "defense," and high finance.

Texploration
Kayleen and David continued their exploration of Texas this July, visiting places they never had previously. This year’s edition included a brief road trip to Port Arthur and the Museum of the Gulf Coast.

Previous road trips within Texas have included expeditions to Big Bend, Lufkin-Nacogdoches, and the Hill Country.

I foolishly omitted that we had an enjoyable dinner with my cousin Pam and her husband in Beaumont. After that, we drove around the virtual ghost town that downtown Beaumont has become.

The ground floor of the MGC displays the natural and industrial histories of the Upper Texas Coast, with the Spindletop oil discovery as the fulcrum. Upstairs is all about the musicians, artists, athletes, and philanthropists who have called the Golden Triangle their home; the Janis Joplin room was the main draw for David, as well as an exhibit of artworks by another Port Arthur native, multi-disciplinary modernist Robert Rauschenberg. The Museum stands a few blocks from where Janis took some college courses to become a keypunch operator.

Much of the downstairs is a not-so-subtle tribute to Gulf Oil and Texaco, the companies that made the Golden Triangle golden. Despite their looming presence in the exhibit, it's still informative and even enjoyable.

On the way back, we got to visit Bolivar Twist, the Bolivar Peninsula beach house belonging to my brother-in-law Jason’s father and stepmother. (Kayleen reminds me that this was the first time we had ever taken a beach trip together.)

New Identity
[In the interest of family privacy, I've removed from this publicly available site some of the details of the trip that my son Paxton and I took to Pennsylvania in August. The important part is that I met a lot of relatives whom I didn't know I had until a couple of years ago. You see, my mother was adopted as an infant, and she never knew the identities of her birth parents until after several years of ancestry.com and 23andMe research.]

The research [referenced above] has also revealed that my mother's mother came to the US from a portion of northern Serbia that was once considered part of Hungary (where a lot of ethnic Hungarians still live), and that her father was from a well-to-do Jewish family that also came from Eastern Europe.

Meeting all that new-found family brings with it a new backstory and an abrupt shift in one’s identity. Digesting it all required a few weeks of soul-searching and quite a few adult beverages. Fortunately, I have recovered from that experience of temporary personality dislocation, and I have avoided developing an obsession with my personal genealogy.

Recent Writing Activity
I have plenty to keep me busy, but for the last few months I've been semi-obsessed with a writing project that I have undertaken. At this time, I do not wish to disclose the nature of the project, other than that it is not a fictional work. It does require a combination of time and concentration to put it all together in the right order and keep it, as The Tick would say, "fun...and educational!"​ So when I get deep into it, it's difficult to get me out of it before I have reached a suitable stopping point.

A Better '22
Here’s hoping for a 2022 that, for all of us, makes up for the chaos and tumult of the past couple of years—or at least makes a down payment on it. I am especially hopeful that our beloved Houston Dynamo FC can turn their fortunes around after a dismal season. At this point, I'm mostly hoping that it will be safe to go to an occasional game at the recently renamed PNC Stadium. However, I'm increasingly disenchanted with the experience, especially after this past season, when the Dynamo and Dash games required a specific app (SeatGeek) just to purchase single-game tickets.

Astroworld: At Least Eight Dead, Scores Injured
I have a lot to say about this tragedy (paywall), much of it profane and possibly riddled with typos. The whole thing sickens and saddens me, all the more because it happened right here in H-Town, a 20-minute bike ride away from where Kayleen and I live.

For those who haven't followed this particular item in the news, Astroworld is the name of a music festival assembled under the auspices of Houston-born rap mega-star Travis Scott (not his real name—peculiar stage name for a rapper, eh?). The festival gets its name from Scott's 2018 album, which in turn gets its name from the theme park that stood across the I-610 Loop from the Astrodome between 1968 and 2005.

Scott's Wikipedia entry now contains a subsection that he will rue for the rest of his days. In fact, the tragic event now has its own wiki page. I'm neither afraid nor ashamed to say that I feel bad for him. He's about the same age as my son. My son has made a few mistakes, just as his parents have, but (as far as we know) none of those mistakes have resulted in deaths and mass hospitalizations.

This year, the third Astroworld festival has put Houston 2021 in company with Cincinnati 1979. The latter was the site of a stampede, before an arena concert by The Who, that ended with nine deaths and countless injuries. The Cincinnati tragedy made the phrase "festival seating" scary forever after. A few days ago, Houston was the site of a "crowd crush" that occurred during Scott's performance that resulted in at least eight deaths.

If even half of what I've heard and read about this year's "festivities" is true, it is a multi-dimensional clusterfuck that will put an end to music festivals of any kind in Greater Houston. Other cities will think twice and twice again before allowing anything of similar scale within their jurisdictions.

The rest of the festival had to be canceled. We will not rehash the details of the crowd crush here. You can read about it elsewhere. But it's only part of the larger picture.

The deadly crush is grabbing the headlines, of course. Some of the press articles mention, several paragraphs down, that even before the crush there was a problem with gate-jumpers. An eyewitness told me that large numbers of mostly young people, mostly without tickets, forced their way through or around the COVID screening station onto the festival grounds. Houston Police, including some mounted patrol officers, and event security staff wound up having to chase down anyone they had a chance of catching during the mad scramble.

Fans who had bought the expensive tickets—many of whom had traveled from points all over the continent and booked rooms in hotels ranging from the sublime to the sketchy—could not have been too happy that hundreds of kids crashed the sold-out festival or at least tried to. And they certainly must be disappointed that the remainder of Astroworld was canceled. While out on my weekly grocery run Saturday morning, I saw clumps of festival-goers walking around the NRG Park area to and from local shops and restaurants. At least they'll get to see more of Houston than their hotel rooms and the festival grounds.

Via Facebook friends, I have seen second-hand reports that the drugs circulating at the fest were not limited to the usual rave fuel. There was some mention of drugs laced with fentanyl. What kind of genius actually sells that shit—someone who hates festival rats and wants them to die? the CIA, perhaps? Even before the crush, several patrons were hauled out in states of cardiac arrest and treated by emergency medics. A friend of a friend who works in an emergency room said that ER's at both county hospitals (LBJ and Ben Taub) were full Friday night, with not enough staff to treat the hundreds injured.

As humans will do, humans are busy working out where to point the finger of blame. The answer, unfortunately, is that we don't have enough fingers of blame to go around. Scott is getting a large chunk of it. Live Nation certainly deserves a share, as it has a history of concert events going horribly wrong and hasn't done enough to fix the problems. Some folks are casting blame in the direction of HPD and the 367 officers deployed at Astroworld; I hate being in the position of defending HPD for anything, but I don't think this is their fault.

The biggest finger is pointing at the many festival goers who felt compelled to get as close to the stage as possible when Drake made a surprise appearance on stage during Scott's set, compressing the crowd until people passed out from lack of oxygen.

Based only on my observations, not on any peer-reviewed studies of the empirical evidence, I think it runs deeper than that. These "kids" engage in high-risk behavior—risky not only to themselves, but to others—because society doesn't offer them positive alternatives. They may not even know consciously that they are reacting to a society that doesn't value them, treats them as disposable, subjects them to a world of war and climate chaos, but they are seeking short-term thrills as if they have nothing to lose. They certainly have little or nothing to gain by staying with the confines of the law.

Even young people raised in $300,000 suburban homes and well-resourced suburban schools don't see much of a future. In my youth, we only had to live with the threat of nuclear annihilation, and we knew that, even with Ronald Fucking Reagan in the White House, there were enough smart people in positions of power to prevent a nuclear exchange (except for those time when a false alarm almost triggered automatic launch of the whole Soviet or US arsenal).

Never underestimate the potential for dangerous stupidity when people assemble in large groups—or the potential for rudeness. I went to Free Press Summer Fest twice, and it cured me of ever wanting to bother with festivals again. Both times, when I was trying to enjoy whichever act was on whichever stage, people were constantly working their way toward the front of the crowd, not caring whom they stepped on or pushed out of the way, not caring how many bodies per square foot there were, not caring that when someone moves toward the front it inevitably pushes some less rude folks toward the back. And then, once they reach the front, they keep up a conversation during the performance loud enough to hear over the music. My impression is that they don't even know that their behavior is stupid and rude.

This is nothing new, of course, and it is not limited to festivals. But now it is worse than I and others of my acquaintance have ever seen. In the bigger picture, it is connected with a worrisome percentage of young Americans who see criminal behavior as normal—or even as a competitive endeavor, to see who can flout the most laws and societal norms.

It is connected with the way young people are driving on Houston's freeways and streets. Well, I assume that they are young, driving muscle cars with no regard to speed limits, lanes, traffic lights, etc., like stereotypical testosterone-poisoned youth, with tinted glass so you can't see who's behind the wheel. There have always been maniacal drivers, true (well, since there have been automobiles). But I have lived in Houston for almost 50 years it total—my mother took me to Astroworld during the first week of its existence—and I have never seen so many driving so aggressively as I have seen in the past two years.

There have always been young people who liked to ingest toxic substances, but it was generally just those two or three guys who cut class to sniff glue. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the Tide Pod generation.

There have also always been young people stupid enough to buy drugs from strangers, and strangers who took a certain psychopathic glee in selling tainted substances at huge profit margins. But now, they seem keen to ignore generations of acquired wisdom.

In sum, I am convinced that post-Millennials acting like the pre-pubescent monsters who end up in charge of the drug trade in Cidade de Deus are blowback for our imperialist-capitalist empire create a world that doesn't give a shit about them. Again, it's a small percentage, but it's a large enough percentage to be dangerous.

This October 2019 article from Houston Public Media distills the message of Angie Schmitt's important book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. Auto-pedestrian collisions, including fatal ones, are becoming more frequent year over year, outpacing the growth in population. And we cannot just keep blaming the dead pedestrians or just accepting the inevitability of traffic deaths as the cost of improved mobility.

I am amazed that there aren't a lot more such collisions on Old Spanish Trail. My wife and I live just a few feet from OST, a segment of US-90A that runs about five miles south of Downtown Houston. West to East, it diverges from Main Street near NRG Park, passes through portions of the Texas Medical Center, crosses the South Freeway (TX-288), divides the relatively upscale South MacGregor district from the low-to-mid-level homes mid-century bungalows of South Union, continues through some industrial areas south of the University of Houston, veers northward, and becomes South Wayside Drive just before reaching the Gulf Freeway (I-45).

For most of its length, OST is six lanes plus left-turn cutaways, with speed limits at 35 or 40. Motorists with sports cars, muscle cars, motorcycles, Polaris Slingshots, jacked up pickups and SUVs ignore the limit constantly. Day and night, drivers gun their engines, show off their glass-pack exhaust systems, act like they don't know what a school zone is and even accelerate through the zone to pass the slow-pokes complying with the reduced limit. It certainly doesn't help that somebody built a gigantic sports bar/night club/hookah lounge right at OST and 288.

Pedestrians, many of them low-income POC, many of them seniors with mobility issues (but also schoolchildren and young families) cross OST at random points constantly, day and night, seeming not to care whether a young dude in a modified Dodge Challenger is bearing down on them. In parts of OST, the sidewalks are either crumbling or blocked by trees, bus shelters, or lamp posts that a driver has knocked over—so pedestrians just walk in the highway to get around these impediments.

In other words, OST fits the profile of the hyper-perilous traffic corridors that feature so prominently in Right of Way. It is designed to expedite the movement of cars and trucks...which it doesn't do very well. Particularly from 288 to Spur 5 by UH, the traffic lights are poorly timed. Far too often a driver can encounter red lights at every lighted intersection. So, to avoid the red lights, drivers speed from light to light, maybe treating the red light as a stop sign, maybe just plowing through the intersection.

But enough about my hood. What's so remarkable about Schmitt's book? Top on my list is that it takes a holistic approach to this under-reported phenomenon. Individual crashes may be reduced to a single cause; the rapid, steady increase in fatal auto-pedestrian crashes results from combinations of factors, most of which in turn result from planning that shows callous disregard for the lives of people who walk or use wheelchairs to get around. There's also the heavy marketeering of taller, heavier pickups and SUVs by the auto industry, mostly because the profit margins on these vehicles dwarf those for sedans. In just a few years, these motorized behemoths have practically erased all the progress toward improved fuel efficiency and curtailing climate chaos that has been made since the 1970s, the advent of Tesla and other electric vehicles notwithstanding. (She even mentions, as an aside, how auto companies are making their trucks and SUVs look meaner, appealing to the untamed ids of car shoppers, as well as outfitting them with "bull bars" and other such dangerous accessories.)

Second, Schmitt dives into the details to show that these factors actually cause increased traffic violence rather than merely correlate with it. How? By citing examples of places that have applied fixes and seen their traffic fatality numbers decrease instantly. Fixes include redesigning streets and roads in line with Vision Zero guidelines, reducing speed limits, adding crosswalks (too often crosswalks are too far apart, potentially adding half a mile to one's walk), installing traffic-calming devices, removing auto traffic entirely from specified business districts, and educating the public about safe navigation of urban streets. Maybe government agencies can eventually concentrate on discouraging citizens from buying those god-awful SUVs.

Third, Schmitt has collected material from sources all over North America and beyond. That source material includes not only the stark statistics kept by advocacy groups and government agencies, but also the anecdotes of regular folks whose loved ones were killed by drivers who mostly faced no consequences for their "accidents." Schmitt constructs a big-picture view of the root of the problem: over-reliance on statistics, but not all the relevant statistics. In an attempt to appear "evidence-based," agencies and policy makers tend to make decisions based partly on the stats, partly on budgetary considerations; however, they tend to work only with the stats that support their plans. They tend not to listen to the people who will be or have been harmed. It's only when a politician or local luminary takes up the cause of those harmed that media outlets pay attention and the issue enters public consciousness.

I have seen something like this phenomenon up-close, especially in the last few years with the proposed North Houston Highway Improvement Plan (NHHIP), also known as the I-45 expansion. The Texas Department of Transportation's own impact statements include estimates of the number of residents and businesses displaced, the number of schools and parks brought within 500 feet of the freeway's exhaust cloud, etc. Following a longstanding American tradition, those displaced are mostly (you guessed it!) low-income African American and LatinX folk.

Nevertheless, TxDOT and the Houston-Galveston Area Council have pushed ahead with the plan despite impassioned testimony from residents and advocates, including Houston's legendary furniture guy Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale. It has taken a lawsuit from Houston and Harris County government to block NHHIP on civil rights grounds, but even that injunction is temporary. I've also seen commuters on Facebook and Twitter saying basically that they don't give a shit who gets displaced as long as the North Freeway gets widened and their commute times lessened—but guess what, guys! That solution is also temporary! More lanes lead to induced demand, as we've seen on the expanded Katy Freeway; those lanes will fill up again, especially with more housing development along the corridor and more subdivisions springing up around Conroe, so...you see where all this is going, right?

In recent years, I have also seen our city and county governments respond positively to the need for alternative and multi-modal transportation options: improved pubic transit, protected bike lanes, bike racks on the fronts of buses, better connectivity between hike-and-bike trails, etc. Gentrification is often an unfortunate side-effect of these improvements, but that would be happening with or without the addition of bike lanes in traditionally black and brown neighborhoods. Sadly, real estate development trends and heavy demand for heavier vehicles are working against local governments' efforts: Pedestrian fatalities are still increasing. We have a long way to go to catch up with the Portlands of the world, let alone the Copenhagens and Amsterdams. We have a lot of attitudinal barriers to overcome, which is nice way of saying there a lot of sociopaths making and influencing policy, especially in Texas and elsewhere in the Sun Belt. As long as they get paid, these assholes don't care who lives or dies as a result of their decisions.

Indeed, if there's any way to summarize the combinations of factors contributing to the increase in pedestrian deaths, it's assholes. Whether those assholes are driving policy or driving (or selling) Hummers, they are creating the conditions that make walking in the US a high-risk activity, especially in Sun Belt cities. Making our society less assholish is an uphill battle; Schmitt and other transportation wonks, including myself, are grateful for the people waging that battle to halt traffic violence.