OUR CITIES TOO BIG FOR QUALITY OF LIFE

By Frosty Wooldridge
September 30, 2010
NewsWithViews.com

On my coast to coast bicycle trip across America this past summer, I discovered amazing dynamics that need addressing if Americans expect to lead productive, fulfilling and happy lives in the 21st century.

In my latest book, America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans, I discussed mega-cities around the world such as Tokyo, Japan; Mexico City, Mexico; Beijing, China; Hong Kong, China; New York City, New York; Los Angeles, California; San Paulo, Brazil; Paris, France and many more. I’ve traveled through all of them.

What kind of quality of life do mega-cities present to their citizens? What qualities do they bring to parents and children? How do they address the spirit of humanity at the personal level?

From their inception, large sky-scraper-dominated and sprawling cities around the world represent the worst of humanity. Ayn Rand, in her bestselling book, Atlas Shrugged, praised sky-scrapers as humanity’s highest achievement.

But another author Itzhak Bentov wrote Stalking the Wild Pendulum, a book on how modern man, living in cities, cuts himself off from the natural vibrations of life. We humans walk on concrete instead of grass. We live in square, wooden or blocked homes and tiny apartments—totally alien to our animal heritage. We drive cars at 70 miles per hour and gaze through glass windows from steel encased prisons.

The rich may escape for a weekend camping trip to recalibrate their natural vibrations and refresh themselves, but the average city dwellers remain in the endless din, sirens, honking horns, televisions’ ubiquitous blaring and the many negative aspects of city life.

Thus, humans, when confronted with such aberrant surroundings respond with overeating such that two out of three Americas suffer obesity; heart disease, cancer and diabetes grow epidemic, smoking, drinking, drugs and coffee used as mind and body altering states, and for those that visit the drug stores—a million prescriptions of valium a week along with Prozac, Viagra and Excedrin.

On the violence side, look at the mayhem in cities! How about the killings, schools as victims for drug gangs and bullies, car accidents, breathing of toxic air and loss of community?

In other words, cities drive human beings completely out of their minds. Bentov said, “Cities create the most abnormal and aberrant living conditions on the planet…no wonder we’re methodically going crazy in the Western world.â€