I think you're focusing too much on the "individual freedom" bit and missing the "at the cost or inconvenience of others" bit

We rarely have other viable options. Long before most of us were born, the U.S. built an infrastructure centered around cars, sidelining other forms of transportation.

In America, owning a car is often the key to freedom of movement. So it's no surprise people equate cars with freedom. Getting people to see how car dependency actually limits our freedom is like trying to wake someone from the Matrix.

To be fair the mindset that a car means freedom is also quite common in Germany too. Especially in the countryside (tbf its often required if you dont want waste a lot of time due to shitty public transportation)

No one can make a profit on people walking, so I dont understand how your point makes any sense.

edit: oh wait! footware and sports drink companies. OK, well, you've made some compelling points here. And we use small handed children to in America to make these shoes and sports drinks, right?

Just like the founding fathers intended

Wait ’til you hear our cute ideas about public wellbeing!! They sell themselves!

Oh? This is actually great news.

I’m a grownup who got a driving license late, but even after the practice and test I didn’t know the answer to how to signal out of a roundabout. So I looked it up.

In my home state, the law is: never use your left signal at a roundabout (unless switching to a left lane within a roundabout). So I assumed it was universal. Maybe not.

Yeah, he was a cracker. Here's the thing though, in other ways he seems like a perfectly normal and decent human being.

We passed by an Amish produce stand and he had me stop. He got a bunch of fresh Veggies and then we stopped at a Chinese restaurant where he went inside and gave the lady working there a bunch of them. As we were leaving he even had a short conversation with her in Chinese. I'm sure it was very simple things like "Have a good one" and "Goodbye" or something similar, but I thought it was cool he had learned it. That kind of thing is pretty rare around here.

In the car he was telling me how they had recently lost one of their children in a car accident. It was heartbreaking. Sounds like he has known them for quite while.

He then had me drive to a neighboring college town that has people from all over the world come to go to school, so it's a fairly diverse place. He was telling me he liked it there because there were so many different kinds of interesting people. We stopped by his Dry Cleaners which was also ran by Chinese people and he left them with the other half of the vegetables.

Then on the way out of town he had me stop at the International Market. He asked me if I had ever tried Eel before and when I said I hadn't he bought me a couple of cans (it's ok, nothing to write home about imo).

So yeah, he was an old white redneck, but he wasn't a total piece of shit and fairly open minded about some things. I'm not sure why he hates roundabouts, but that attitude is super common around here, among all sorts of people.