It is all too much

 

Monday, July 13, 2009

 

 

I keep looking for old things when I take walks: cars, houses, factories – anything that gives testimony to the past.

I’ve never held out much hope for the theory “newer is better,” or that progress automatically means life will be better for us.

Sometimes it does – such as some of the advances in medicine. Most of the time, it means much less such as in the production of food.

We took a walk down into Hoboken yesterday – which is always a mistake – since each day things change there and rarely for the better.

The river front walkway is great, but it comes with a price – over development and an invasion of rude, self-centered people who have returned to the city after decades of hiding out in the suburbs where they assumed they could be safe from reality of street crime and such.

Most the icons of what Hoboken once was are gone, replaced by pill box development into which the mass of newcomers have been stuffed.

We have to duck out of the way of hundreds of bicycles, whose riders rarely get off their seats, even on the crowded platform to the light rail. My buddy O’Keefe calls these people the product of “an entitlement society,” meaning they mistake freedom to take what they want as protected by the Bill of Rights. They hog up parking, sidewalks, living arrangements. Their arrival in a place usually means that the helpless poor who lived their prior to the invasion get pushed out of the cities no body previously wanted, but now do.

Hoboken is over populated with over paid clerks, all of whom presume they are doing something productive when they are not.

I preferred the factories and the waterfront cargo, when trolleys brought people across town, when the water front was stark and full of reason instead of a playground for spoiled rich.

The city has put up orange fencing to keep the geese and ducks from spoiling the waterfront parks where these young people lounge. A few ducks still thrive in the river, but like the poor, they are being pushed out. And like wildlife throughout the world, they have to live in smaller and smaller plots of land or risk extinction.

Sharon said she preferred birth control for the animals as opposed to the butchery of sport hunters. I agree to a point. How can we expect humanity to offer birth control to animals, when humanity refuses to control its own birth rate and keeps popping out kids that make the world more crowded and creates the need for massive inefficient mechanisms to keep serving this surplus population?

The reason why new isn’t better than old is that it has to do more with less, part of the new assembly line service industry that has to find a way to provide them.

We need to churn out product to feed the ever growing population. We build new homes to house them. We build more cars to provide them with transportation. We import more clothing, food, and other products.

The food gets worse. The clothing gets shoddy. The housing gets expensive and less substantial.  And the poor and the environment suffer.

Of course, many of those we strolled passed or nearly got run over by during our walk in Hoboken also believes in the environment, riding their bicycles over us in order to save the air. While professing to be “green” these people still demand services that destroy the planet, still pop out babies that promise to continue the cycle, and still believe that they are something more than over paid clerks rather than just cogs in a machine.

As hard as life was in “the old” days, it seemed real to me. People did real things such as loaded ships or built cars, rather than pushed buttons on a computer.

I know this is an old refrain sung by every generation in commenting about the new generation, but is also true: progress doesn’t always mean “better” it just means more.