Aaron Naparstek

» Saturday, May 01, 2004

Pedestrian as Freak

"One of the local characters in the small city where I grew up was Judge
Green. A giant man, probably 6 feet 7, he was widely admired around town, in
part because he had been star of the only Urbana High School team ever to
make it to the championship game of the Illinois state basketball
tournament. I remember him as a cheerful man who greeted everyone with a
smile. But he had one trait that made him seem a bit peculiar: He walked to
work every day. If you drove down Broadway Avenue at certain hours, you
couldn't miss his towering figure striding along the sidewalk.

"One day, home from college and already an ardent environmentalist, I was
walking uptown myself when it dawned on me that Judge Green's home was only
a few blocks from the courthouse - hardly more than half a mile. I was
shocked. The man many folks thought eccentric (and I thought heroic) for not
driving to work each day was covering a distance that would be nothing to
pedestrians in Europe, or most other places outside the United States. How
sad, I sighed. There really is no hope that Americans will ever get out of
their cars if a half-mile walk looks to them like an Olympic endurance
event..."

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18554

7:21 PM | Link |