You’ve probably seen the clip by now. A Tesla sports car tears up a curved ramp, hangs upside down for a second like a bat in a barn, fires its thrusters, flips clean over a semi-truck, and lands on its wheels. “Turns out the future does have flying cars,” says the man who built it, and he says you can have one in 2028. His company once said 2020. I’ve been promised a flying car since the Jetsons, so I’ll hold off selling the Camry.
I’ve also watched my fellow Houstonians merge onto the freeway. These are people who cannot manage two dimensions, and somebody wants to hand them a third. I’d like to know the flying-car version of the fellow doing forty in the left lane with his blinker on for miles. I suspect it involves my roof.
But I’d like to stand up for the traffic jam.
Everybody hates the commute. It’s the one thing most of us can agree on. Yet where else in modern America are you alone, sitting still, with nothing that is your fault to do? At home somebody needs you. At work somebody needs you. But stuck behind a gravel truck with the radio off, you’re as close as most of us will get to a monk’s cell. Nobody can reach you. Well, they can, but you’re driving, so you have a holy excuse.
I’ve done my best thinking at red lights. I’ve apologized to people there, in my head, before I worked up the nerve in person. On more than one bad morning I’ve counted my way around the steering wheel with my thumb, the way my mother counted beads, and arrived at work a better man than the one who left the house.
Every invention meant to save time is sold as giving it back to us. It never does. It gives it to the next thing. Fly over the traffic and you’ll arrive twenty minutes early to a meeting that grows to fill them, having traded away the only part of the day that belonged to nobody.
Most mornings, that traffic is where I pray. You can’t do that at 230 miles an hour. So keep your flying car. I’ll take the Camry, the slowest lane on the 610 Loop, and the only twenty minutes of my day when nobody can reach me but God.