Bad Roads, Good People

Where the pavement ends, so too does the malfeasance and mistrust endemic to the city. It seems that corruption lives in concrete, and is allergic to a balm of dirt, mud, and gravel. When you get out there, among the potholes, ruts, and washouts, you will see a different picture of humanity. One where indifference yields to altruism, and cynicism turns to rust. Where farmers look up from their fields to wave as you pass by, shopkeepers invite you to stay for tea, and everybody is a mechanic if you need them to be.

That compassionate people live near shit roads is, I believe, merely a corollary of the greater truth that hardship breeds empathy. I assume that naturally good-natured people do not have some inexplicable tendency to blow holes in their own driveways, which suggests the inverse, that potholes - those physical incarnations of spite and inconvenience - are actually the loci of kindness.

Still, it would be awfully convenient just to call this benevolence the consequence of a simple life, and I suspect there is more to it that we would do well to appreciate. I don't mean to exotify or reduce anyone - we in the West have no monopoly on the human condition, and no society is beyond reproach. But in general, at least to a passerby, these far flung communities seem to have preserved something that the rest of us have forgotten.

Whatever it may be, I urge you to see it for yourself. So the next time you have the chance, take the bad roads - they lead to good people.