Today’s Editors’ Choice

• Jeff Jacoby: When I Ride the T, I Miss My Auto-nomy
• George Will: The Scars of Our Nation’s Violent Birth
• Michael Goodwin: The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards

To view all of today’s opinion, click here.

Opinion in Brief

Jeff Jacoby: “The festival of American independence is a good moment to give thanks for the immense changes wrought in our society by mass car ownership. Starting with cleanliness: At the turn of the 20th century, when people mostly relied on horses to get around, American cities were vast equine cesspools. ‘In New York City alone,’ the historian David Kyvig wrote in his history of the years between the world wars, ‘15,000 horses dropped dead on the streets, while those that lived deposited 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the streets every day.’ Automobiles made Americans far freer and wealthier than they would have been without them. They brought knowledge, experience, and natural beauty within reach of innumerable men and women of modest means. They ended the desperate isolation and loneliness of rural life, gave rise to the consumer paradise of modern retailing, and made it possible for upward strivers to escape tenement life and own a home of their own in the suburbs. One last word before this Fourth of July, courtesy of a splendid 2010 Dodge Challenger commercial: ‘There’s a couple of things America got right: cars and freedom.’ George Washington couldn’t have said it better.”