When I had more friends with children, I remember hearing them talk about how it was impossible to teach their children how to ride bicycles without cul-de-sac configurations. I was puzzled, because although I was tapped by a car at age 12, I was allowed to ride my bike limited distances from my house. My father actually taught my sister and me to ride bicycles because he liked to ride, and I was pretty strong on my bicycle from a younger age. As people would tell me about the need to constantly protect themselves, I would wonder what their children would do if they ever wanted to commit to a bicycle as a vehicle. Sadly, it occurred to me that there was a deeper, psychological reason behind the demand for cul-de-sacs.
Suburbs or gated communities stem behind the concept of protection for the favored few and danger for everyone else. Thanks to suburbs, there are so many communities that lack consistent resources and opportunities, and people believe that such a life is just “the way things are.” In 2025, there are still people believing that there is nothing wrong with everyone on the planet living the suburban lifestyle, which has damaged communities all over the world. With all the information available about how water- and energy-hungry suburbs are, people have no excuse for not understanding the harms of that lifestyle.
The smear campaign of the mainstream press presents the façade of how a “safe” neighborhood looks, and the image is a suburb. Its purpose is that the residents are isolated from other communities, and cutting through the nonsense, that simply means segregation from Black people. There was nothing noble about using excessive resources to separate others because they were unwilling to look at the consequences of their behavior, or the people who they commanded to work for them. Building highways exacerbated the problem because highways were both more expensive to build, and added more corruption due to the high number of contractors.
It is even more daunting to consider how expensive it is to create suburbs in other countries. Though there may be suitable landscape, the amount of energy and resources may mean that other communities are forced into deprivation because of the influence of western media. Other countries are already having the manage the tourism that luxury markets have created, and local populations are frustrated with the excessive water and energy expectations of that. Now try imagining how anyone other than the rich are going to survive when so many entitled people think they have the right to get everything they want.
Stop maintaining the delusion that more is better, or that people with money deserve “better” communities. Not everyone will be able to have a stress-free lifestyle where they never have to manage their expectations, and the world should not keep enabling that delusion. Suburbs and highways live on forever on television screens, but it is time for the real world to stop relying on fiction to develop reality.
Chasing A Dying Empire 