The Looming Environment
The single largest piece of furniture, in our early childhood home, was actually a fascinating piece of equipment. Hand-built from logs and hand-hewn boards, coupled with steel rods fashioned from metal coat hangers was a loom for weaving textiles. Arriving in individual parts and pieces, since it would not fit through regulation-sized doors, the loom was assembled in our parent’s small bedroom. It encompassed at least 25% of the room.
For years prior, my mother had cut, deteriorating or outdated clothing that she had gathered. They were cut into strips about 1 to1½ inch wide with no restriction relative length. She then rolled these into balls and stored them in a cardboard box. This was all future inventory for the loom. We could hear the screech of pedals and the constant bang of the loom’s beater or ‘handtree’ as my mother fashioned rag mats, careful to use certain colors in a specific order to arrive at a mat she liked.
A typical rag mat weave – article continues after image:
Historically, great things have happened from such austere and unembellished beginnings. In the later 1800s, Japan’s Sakichi Toyoda, a farmer, and carpenter became interested in the looms that people used around farms in his area of the country. He studied them in earnest. By 1896 Toyota had invented steam-powered looms and other auxiliary items all mechanically operated. He went on to form the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a company still in the textile and equipment business today.
In 1933, Kiichiro Toyoda the son of Sakichi Toyoda, and just as inventive, set off to look at the business expansion of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works and effectively started the Toyota Motor Corporation. The 11th President of Toyota since Kiichiro is Akio Toyoda and this latter company leader says that the silent majority is contemplating whether or not electric vehicles (EV) are an answer or merely a single option.
In the linked article, Toyoda suggests, that these people, the silent majority, regard EVs as, “the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.” This is the anxiety and concern of cancel culture where progressives make it difficult to question their fashionable positions. Interrogating a virtue-signaled issue may mean removal from a previously friendly environment or an unwarranted pink slip at work.
As well Toyoda says he tries to, “communicate this idea to stakeholders in the automotive space, including government figures”, but to no avail. Again, it’s that unwillingness or aversion to break from the progressive ‘boisterous minority’ and face ad hominem and cancellation or removal consequences.
According to a relatively recent Pew Research survey the purchase of electric vehicles has climbed to 7% of the US market. California has said that it will phase out fossil-fueled vehicles by 2035. I would suggest that unless something better than the current EVs comes along with all of their disadvantages, California’s automotive environment will begin to look like that of Cuba.