It couldn't be to me. I hadn't even made eye contact with anyone at the gas station.
Actually, it was. When I turned around to clean my windshield, the old guy with the giant 1980's Cadillac in front of me said it again:
"In the future, we'll be renting cars from the car companies."
I still couldn't believe he was talking to me, but I actually responded this time, and what resulted was a short conversation about gas prices and their implications (Who hasn't had one of these yet? Anyone? Anyone?). This particular conversation was only as interesting as a conversation between a 21-year-old and a 65-year-old at 9:00 pm at a Novato gas station can be, but his last point was interesting. Or at least informative. He explained to me that in the early 1900's, L.A. had a world-class public transportation system, until the car companies came along and convinced everyone that we didn't need public transportation. We had cars, and after all, gas was cheap! I didn't know this, and when I told him so, he said I should look it up. "Very interesting. Very, very interesting."
Interesting enough for me to get in my car, pass him as soon as I could, and drive home.
His two points did, however, raise two interesting questions to me:
1) Will we really be renting cars from car companies someday?
2) When the public is convinced to make a decision, and years later that decision doesn't work out, is it a sign of villiany?
In regards to (1), I think the answer is no. Usually, things become rent-able because they are very useful but too expensive for the average consumer to buy, especially if they don't want to consider taking out a large loan. But in this case, it isn't the price of the cars themselves that is making them too expensive, it's the price of something else (economists would call this a complimentary good) - gas - that is pricing them out of most people's budgets. So I really don't see how renting cars helps. Honestly, I think this a problem that is going to need to be solved by good, old-fashioned human ingenuity. We need to make public transportation really attractive (high overhead costs because you need infrastructure), make gasoline more efficient (good, but still not politically or environmentally satisfying), or find a new fuel source (again, infrastructure is a huge roadblock). It's looking like those first two solutions are equally useful in different situations, but I think the third one has to be the wave of the future. It just still seems really far off...
Question (2) is a bit more interesting to me because it seems to be part of paradigm that has cropped up a lot of late. People have developed a tendency to villianize decisionmakers when their decisions turn out badly - even years later.
It reminds me a lot of my brother when he was younger. Every once in a while, I would tell him that I would do something with him in the near future - for example, play Mario Kart with him over the weekend - and then I would get assigned a big project for school, and not be able to do what I said. And then he would call me a liar.
Now, I understand someone being disappointed about not getting to spend time with me, but I would get REALLY angry about being called a liar when the reality was that I couldn't predict the future. So I guess what I'm saying is that if I was a car company rep in the 1930's (or whenever it was, I'm simply judging by the guy's age), and now I heard this old guy questioning my character 70 years later, I'd be pretty damn angry. I wouldn't apologize for not predicting OPEC, I wouldn't apologize for the fact that terrorism and oil keep the same company, and I sure as hell wouldn't apologize for popularizing the automobile (It's done some good stuff...). I'd probably just tell the guy to go watch Syriana (even though what I'd want to tell him would be that if he wanted to complain about gas prices, the first thing he should do is stop driving a 1980's Cadillac, since they are practically the Hummer of sedans).
Tangents aside, this way of assigning blame seems to be really popular. Rhetorical questions about who armed what regimes fifty years ago and who didn't build a good enough internet infrastructure for today's business climate abound. And to be sure, sometimes people with power maliciously manipulate "the people" for their own good. But not always. A lot can happen in fifty years, or in twenty if technology is involved. Sometimes, people just have to admit that the the world is way too unpredictable for every major decision to work out well.
After all, I bet the old man didn't hate the car companies when he bought that Cadillac.
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