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Re: GM must re-make the mass transit system it murdered
by Joanne Forman
November 17, 2008

Sun nite 11/16/08. Few things are as delightful as finding one's ideas corroborated. Thanks for your piece on Common Dreams re GM/transit.

I'm old enough to remember well the deliberate and systematic destruction of L.A.'s not-bad transit system when I was a teenager. Earlier than that, I remember when nearly everyone took public transit--and no one felt low or put- upon.

My favorite examples are RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett, in whch the detective (circa 1922) is in a small city--obviously Butte, Montana-- and takes the STREETCAR. And the early post WW II movie STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, in which the characters DO take the train, because there WERE trains. (I STILL take the train whenever possible.)

I also remember the early TV series, when I was about 16, back in the stone age, 77 SUNSET STRIP; that was just about the first one devoted mainly to supposedly glamorous people spending a lot of time driving around in the first generation of new cars after the war--one of the main characters was a parking lot valet.

I'm much bemused: it seems to me 99.9% of ALL environmental stuff I hear on the radio (I don't do TV*) has the underlying notion that somehow our current level of consumption can be kept up.

Uh-uh.

Thanks for your good work; keep it up!

*I've never owned a car--and I haven't died. (So far.)

Joanne Forman
Taos, New Mexico

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