On the Road

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/22/gloria-steinem-a-life-on-the-road-but-not-behind-t/

“I would miss something if I drove,” Steinem says. It’s about communication. She loves talking to taxi drivers anywhere in the world, or arriving at a university for a speech and being driven by her hosts, who tell her what’s going on around campus. “That’s really crucial time,” she says. “I would not want to miss that.”

But it’s not just about recounting her own experiences; Steinem wants to encourage others - especially women - to head out, “because the road doesn’t belong to women, and it should. Women aren’t ‘supposed’ to go out on the road.” She also, incidentally, would like politicians to live up to their claims that they know the country. “They ought to be forced to go on the road for two years for every term they’re in office, because then they would stop saying ‘the American people’ as if there’s one,” she says. “Because it’s just so wildly diverse.”

There’s yet another reason for the on-the-road theme. Steinem fears that in our increasingly digital world, we may be forgetting the value of in-person communication. “Not to diminish the importance of the Web,” she says. “But it should be also obvious that people can’t empathize with each other unless we’re in the same room.”
Gloria Steinem