Dash cam, Part 5: Revenge is tweet

Our stats blew up last week, and it took me a few minutes of research to determine why in the heck we were getting so many visitors from outer space, er, I mean, places other than our own tiny subdivision:

This blog is neither commercial nor monetized,
but still, it's useful to monitor its visitor traffic
as a source of general feedback on effectiveness.

But seriously... Kuwait?!  New Zealand??

So we have had visitors from these nine countries...
now if we could just encourage readership
from all nine sections of Centerpointe,
we'd really be cookin'!
:-)

It turns out that a syndicated journalist had tweeted Dash Cam 3, where I went into detail regarding the intentions behind leveraging a dash cam to influence public behavior, and why maintaining respect and order on "the little things" like driving habits can resonate with a disproportionately-positive effect through an entire community.

Good.  I hope those hundreds of remote visitors were able to glean a few ideas that they can take and apply in their own communities.  It is important for ordinary people to make attempts like this, whether via blogs or dash cams or other methods.  You can forget about relying on the federal government, the local police, or any other public entity for problem-solving when it comes to many aspects of crime and cultural deficiencies.  No goverment program, grant, or subsidy could ever hold a candle to actual citizen involvement when it comes to shaping better communities.  (And be assured that I'll rant more about that in future posts).

The fact that anyone would even want to tweet content from a micro-micro-blog is noteworthy in itself.  It derives from a grassroots movement to restore a greater sense of community to American suburbia.  Decades ago, of course, everyone knew their neighbors, and a collective sense of awareness and safety derived from that interconnected knowledge.  But these days, many subdivisions across the country have become the proverbial nameless faceless cultural wastelands, where nobody trusts anybody and children no longer play outside because nobody trusts anybody and because so many people drive their cars like freakin' brain-diseased idiots, with no regard for the safety of anyone. 

Centerpointe already had a running start on bucking that trend, with its very active Property Owners Association, and through the networking and newslettering done by our community coordinator.  By the time my family had moved here, microscopic Centerpointe, with fewer than 400 families, had already created the largest National Night Out celebration in Galveston County, with its population of about 290,000 people.  It was my intention to expand upon that running start with this blog, but it's cool that some material herein is potentially useful to other far-flung communities as well! 

So with those thoughts, I'll leave you with this morning's dash cam disaster: yet another ode to the infamous El Dorado freeway exit, showing two separate gap-shooters filmed just 81 seconds apart: