Golf Cart

Like many who work at large facilities, I go from one place to another via golf cart. It's faster than walking, relatively quiet, and fairly green. To be sure, it's not as pleasant as walking - nothing beats discretionary walking for sheer pleasantness - but because it's a small and slow-moving vehicle, a golf cart is a very humanitarian form of mechanized transport.

For one thing, it allows society. My golf cart top-ends at 10 mph. This is slow compared to cars, but it's very near a bicyclist's unhurried pace. As I share paths with bicyclists, trips in my golf cart are opportunities to be social. When a bicyclist is making somewhere between 9 and 11 mph, there is a slow-motion pass-by. A casual greeting is called for. "Hello!" often brings a counter-greeting. "Nice day for a ride, isn't it?" can start a conversation. For those who come up quickly and find themselves unable to pass because my cart and other traffic combine to make things dicey, a heart-felt, "Sorry! This is as fast as this thing goes!" can bring a smile and a courteous reply.

Plus, there's the fact that a golf cart can go off-road - onto pedestrian paths - between buildings, in courtyards, and on small short-cuts hardly wide enough for three walking abreast. On these paths, I go slow. I creep cautiously toward blind corners. I smile a lot at people who worry that I am a golf-cart Mario Andretti. (They exist, giving us careful, respectful golf-carters a bad name.)

Again, a chance for human interaction typically absent from car-driving or simple walking. If I met the same people as fellow pedestrians, they would likeley avoid my eye. On the road, as fellow drivers, they would never think to look at me. (Just as well. They're probably on a cell-phone and distracted already.)

Thus the view from a golf cart - more humane, personal, and social than one would think. Except there's another level to it, not so pleasant; a kind of classism. Who is that fellow in the golf cart? Why does he have a golf cart, and not me? Why is he so special?

This is, I suppose, a variant on my own feelings as I watch someone drive by in a Porsche Boxster. I would like to drive a Porsche Boxster. I mean, I would like to drive one for the sheer luxury, the amazing responsiveness, that I imagine to be part of the experience. (I have never driven one, sorry to say.) Except I would never buy one, because they seem to me to be so excessive, so much part of the world of conspicuous consumption that I detest on principle while feeling mildly jealous in practice. (I could never in a million years afford a Boxster, by the way.) Even if I had a million dollars laying around, I couldn't in good faith buy a Boxster. For me, there are too many other things that matter more than driving a sweet car.

Now, I don't suppose that people who see me in a golf cart and shoot me openly quizzical looks are lusting after my golf cart like I lust after a Boxster. But you take my point. There's a thing - a class thing, a money thing, a privilege thing - that comes into play when we gauge what we have versus what someone else has, especially when someone else is right next to you, in a golf cart or a Boxster. This thing matters, for both good and bad reasons. If only because this thing happens as a routine part of my own human existence, I have to figure out where I stand in the world of class, money, and privilege. It's almost an automatic calculation, part of what I do when I meet people. Even if I'm just seeing them from a distance - what's their story? How did they get to be the person they are, with the things they have?

To be fair, this is a small part of my assessments and calculations with regard to other people. But to another person - someone more driven by acquisitiveness (and we allI know a few people like that) - class, money and privilege matter a great deal. They might put a bright face on their self-interest - after all, having a middle class existence and money in the bank is not in itself a bad thing, and it can afford security and flexibility which can be productive and positive. But the danger is there: seduced by comfort and slipping toward complacency, we can put too much value on our wealth. We can forget that our status in the golf cart is neither here nor there when it comes to our status in terms of what matters most.