LICC - Connecting with Culture - The road less travelled

connecting with culture - the road less travelled

In a local paper last week, one advertisement in particular - for a 4x4 - caught my eye:
'The new model combines legendary off-road performance with distinctive styling. Perfect for style-conscious drivers, it features eye-catching alloy wheels, a CD player, and metallic paint as standard. Drivers will also benefit from the hill descent and electronic traction control technologies when the going gets tough.'
Christians can sometimes sound like grumpy old men, but in this case, it seems fair to ask: What use is off-road technology to anyone (other than a farmer) who drives a car in 2004? The advert encourages an unacceptable and unsustainable myth about motoring - something the Mayor of London believed when he told GMTV, "When you see someone trying to maneuver [a 4x4] round the school gates, you have to think, you are a complete idiot."
On 20th July, the Government unveiled a White Paper called 'The Future of Transport', setting out how it plans to maximise 'the benefits of transport while minimising the negative impact on people and the environment'. Car journeys, it says, have risen in relation to other forms of transport from 79 per cent in 1980 to 85 per cent in 2002. Transport accounts for a quarter of all CO2 emissions in the UK, and cars churn out 80 per cent of that quarter. Meanwhile, the cost of motoring has gone down as GDP has gone up - for all we complain about petrol prices.
Cars threaten our health (through lack of exercise as well as climate change), our town centres (with out-of-town shopping), our countryside, our lives (3,508 people died in road accidents in 2003) and our wild-life (if global warming means that the great-crested newt has to move north, how will it cross the M4, without joining 100,000 squashed foxes?).
However, it's hard for politicians who face regular elections to take any kind of mildly draconian action against a car-loving nation. We need an all-party consensus on uncomfortable but essential policies, especially if
designed to end our love affair with motoring.
If we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, then Christians must change the way we think about our cars, before there is legal compulsion. We should ask basic questions about our priorities not only when we buy them, but every time we use them - as an automatic act of discipleship. But will we take the road less travelled?

Margaret Killingray