Lebanese Excellences! We and the Automobile...

If the Lebanese had been the inventor of the automobile, our condition would be other than it is today, and we would be in fine shape. But since the Lebanese is no inventor, and the traditions of the automobile are foreign to him — though he is among the most skillful who ever drove a car — we are in a "fix" beyond all fixes.

Imagine, for example, a child of ten, his schooling not yet complete, into whose hand is put a rifle of whose rules he knows nothing. He masters "shooting" with it, and without fear — indeed with a certain self-conceit and what he calls gallantry — he uses it night and day, hitting sometimes and missing sometimes, heedless, undeterred, unaware of the extent of the gamble he is running. What danger would such a child be to human life? Could the automobile in our hands be any greater danger to our lives? What is to be done?

In the West, where the automobile was invented, we find rules, traditions, and manners concerning the automobile, traffic, and the driver in general — even concerning the passenger carried in the car from one place to another, and even the pedestrians on foot in their relation to the passing automobile.

In the land of the automobile's inventors, for example, tradition and good manners require that the "horn" be used only in exceptional cases, and this for many reasons: among them, that the horn disturbs the residents' peace, and to use it at any hour, loudly and continuously, is in their view a mark of barbarism; and among them, that pedestrians and drivers consider being honked at an insult, as though it were a rebuke for some grave error they had committed, when they had broken no rule at all. I have often watched people in the land of the automobile, where the rules, manners, and traditions are inherited, glare with disgust and contempt at the "honking" driver — and it always became clear to me in the end that the honker was a stranger to the country.

And, for example, in the land of the automobile there is a known order of traffic which everyone respects. The driver does not stop suddenly in the road without giving a signal or warning, as if he owned the public highway, forcing the cars behind him to stop — to stop with a swift violence that sets all the passengers in them trembling, and that if the affair is spared a terrible collision! Nor do cars race one another on the road, for such conduct is counted childish and primitive. Speed is permitted in certain cases and on roads marked out for it; and whoever does not wish to hurry, even on those roads, keeps to his right and allows the hurrying cars to pass on his left in an orderly, regular way; so there is no obstruction of traffic and no swaggering over racing. And whoever breaks these laws — his lot is jail.

And in the land of order, where people hate chaos, cars are divided and classified according to their kinds, and the conditions of driving are fixed for each. Transport and freight vehicles travel at a set speed and always give the small cars room to pass them; so there are no terrifying scenes there of a "bus" and a "truck" racing each other, and racing in their turn the small "passenger" cars — and all of it on a road of little width, bordered by ravines. The "buses" and freight trucks do not stop wherever they please, obstructing traffic at their own whim; nor do the "buses" pick up passengers along the road, holding up traffic in order to win a fare. Rather there are special, fixed stations along the road, to which the passengers go and where they wait for the "bus," and it stops only at them. Nor do the freight trucks groan under a load that would call for two or three trucks instead of one to carry it, exposing the truck, its driver, and whoever passes by it to the danger of certain death.

And in the automobile's homeland there is a sacred law regarding the right of way (Right of Way). The driver on a main street drives in confidence, without wariness and without fear of colliding with the cars entering that main street from the side roads; and these do not try to race the cars that hold the priority of passage on the main street.

Among the traditions and manners observed there concerning the automobile is the matter of the use of lights. There it is not permitted for a car to travel by night without lighting its lamps behind and before. To make do with the light of a single "eye" is not only dangerous and a breach of the law deserving punishment, but a thing frowned upon and an object of ridicule. And the driver who does not dim his lights

for the car approaching him at night not only offends against good manners but exposes himself and his fellow to the danger of collision; and in the eyes of the police and of the public he is an ill-bred man, a criminal.

And in the land of the automobile good manners require that the driver not deafen his passengers with the car radio; that the driver of a public car, like the driver of a private one, know the proper conduct toward the passenger; that drivers and passengers keep the car clean; and that the passengers not deliver lessons to the driver from their back seat on the subject of "driving."

All these examples are plain in the land of the automobile's inventors. Why, then, did we take the automobile without the tradition, the rules, and the manners? And why are we bent upon chaos and suicide?

A few days ago one of the newspapers came out with the news that a select company of our worthy fellow citizens had met to study this problem and treat it. May God grant them success. As for the plan of reform, it is plain — if we truly want it, and if here too we do not content ourselves with a superficial borrowing of the things of civilization, without aspiring to go deep and to understand things by their principles.