Most days, whether I want to or not, I step back and look at the world around me. Sometimes, it feels like it is looking at me, and is making me look back. I don’t know why, but it happens, and it scares me.
Hummers and I-Phones, televangelism and consumerism, bridges and highways, cigarettes and beer, money, money and money, money vs. money, television vs. internet.
Hunter S. said we were doomed.
I can’t hate him for being right.
“The canons of our time, our days are never coming back. The purist forms of life, our days are never coming back.”
In King’s, Road Work, a man goes crazy defending his home from a city that wants to tear it down. They want to build an extension to the local highway, he wants to keep the home where he watched his only son come to life, live short, and die.
(Spoiler Warning)
In the end, the man blows up the house, with him inside. The city cleans up the mess, then builds the extension. As it turns out, both actions are in vain. The state only wanted to build an extension for budget purposes, not public travel efficiency. If the state didn’t do something with the leftover money before a certain time, they would be given a budget cut the following year.
(Fiction or not, that’s a bitch when you wrap your head around it… and a nice addition to my Pot Holes post from last month.)
This is only prudent to this conversation because I can see it happening today, even though the story was created and printed before I was more then an itch in my papas panties.
Sad world, aint it?
I don’t think I could sum up System of A Down’s highway song as I did with King’s story, but I can tell you what it means to me. (Sure hope I don’t fuck this up)
The song is so beautiful, so sad, and speaks to me of convenience in today’s world that can never be reversed. They need it so bad, that if we swept it all away, they would revolt, killing us all. To strip them all of the comfort in knowing they can travel from Canada to Brazil with enough gas money, and four wheel drive, would be insane.
Admit it.
It would be cool to take the highways away, build more homes, renew natural resources of all kinds, lower the emissions output of all the populations of the U.S. and beyond as well as show the people that it was not a necessity in the first place.
But, they would never let it happen.
We, would never let it happen.
All in the name of convenience.
From horse and buggy traveled dirt roads, to cobblestone streets and railroad tracks, all the way to interstate 420 and John Travolta’s jet, we have shown that we are nothing more than vain gluttons for modern convenience.
Why did we let this happen? What’s next? Can we stop it? If we can’t go back, can we start over?
If we found a solution, would we use it?
From clubs and stones, to arrows and swords, to muskets and cannons, all the way from powder to nuclear atoms, we continued to push onward.
I’m still scared.
I hope you are too.
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