A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
As I began writing this column early on Thursday morning, the usual cacophonous parade of block-long semi-trailers began thundering past on Spring Street.
We’ve been in this house for a decade, and I can’t recall witnessing this high a volume of engorged, steroidal truck traffic. It may well remain an apocryphal observation, given that there exists no entity in the city prepared to consider the problem or to deal with it – perhaps with the exception of Dan Coffey, who on more than one occasion has denounced the absence of weight enforcement as it pertains to football-field-sized vehicles destroying city streets.
Here’s the punch line: In the course of my early morning walks, I’m seeing plenty of trucks. What I’m not seeing is them ever stopping anywhere. They are traveling east to west, from one end of the city to the other. Apart from Padgett, which is the ultimate 800-pound gorilla when it comes to street grid reform, the fleets typically making deliveries to downtown businesses are comprised of smaller trucks of the sort that don’t shake structures while speeding past.
I believe it’s the first manifestation of bridges-evasion-borne, pass-through traffic.
I believe the city will do absolutely nothing, either to acknowledge the problem, or to act towards curbing it.
I believe this default inaction serves as an effective antidote to any meaningful concept of revitalization.
Of course, if social dysfunction is inevitable, one might as well pour a Progressive Pint and enjoy it. Consequently, I believe I need a drink … and some earplugs.
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Snow when it melts ranks highly among life’s mixed blessings.
On the one hand, as the ice gradually clears from the sidewalks, walking on them becomes easier. At the same time, the more one is able to go outside and walk, the greater the volume of refuse, litter and garbage peeking back out from beneath the blackened white stuff, eloquently delineating New Albany’s sovereign territory.
These are the times when we are brutally reminded that at New Albany’s scabrous heart, it remains a filthy, unreconstructed river town, which Matt Nash noted in 2013.
http://cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com/2013/03/in-time-it-took-for-matt-to-write-this.html
Over the last couple of years, as the weather started to get warmer and the official end of winter was right around the corner, I have noticed how much garbage was just lying around. You might not see it when you are driving along the roads in an automobile, but if you go for a walk or ride a bike around town, you will begin to notice it nearly everywhere.
All the proclamations issued to the contrary by various poseurs and their agencies do little to alter the fundamental reality, because they’re unwilling to do anything to change the paradigm, and their words are to be taken with a grain of salt, if any still exists after most of it was dumped on the ground this winter.
Really, shouldn’t New Albany’s official seal be a wadded-up Rally’s bag resting atop a mound of cigarette butts, with a polar pop cup (or eighteen) scattered in the background, slightly out of focus, ever present but ill-defined? It’s an artistic image, indeed – or perhaps an autistic one.
If (in theory) both impaired driving and littering are illegal, and if bar owners like me are held responsible every minute of their working lives for the potentially devastating behavior of customers driving impaired, then why aren’t the fast food joints held responsible for eaters who repeatedly litter?
Then again, if social dysfunction is inevitable, one might as well pour a Progressive Pint and enjoy it. I hear they go wonderfully with a Big Daddy Double. The abandoned wrapper is blowing merrily past as we shovel it down.
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My wife is a social worker.
For the uninitiated, here is a random web definition of her job:
“A social worker is a professional trained to talk with people and their families about emotional or physical needs, and to find them support services.”
Once upon a time, returning to her office, my bride noted that we’d just come back from a trip to Europe.
Came the immediate reply: “Did you fly or drive?”
No, not from a client struggling with mental illness.
From a co-worker.
I’m trying to imagine a European, even one with only an elementary school education, working in a similar position and proffering a similar comment, but I cannot. It’s simply inconceivable.
Has anyone ever determined why we Americans so often accept insufficient education with pride, almost as a birthright?
My bet usually is placed on the Barnum Axiom, wherein a sucker is born every minute – all the better to fleece him. We require an inadequately educated populace to render the average citizen less resistant to absurdly incessant sales pitches, so that the consumer economy can continue to hum along toward its goal of producing the most obese collection of poverty-stricken people the world has yet seen.
But if you try to make sense of it, maybe read a book once in a while, just be careful. In these parts, they’re always shopping for used rags and chloroform.
I’ve long since gotten over it, accepting as gospel that just about anything anyone might choose to say to me of a critical fashion will never spring directly from the critic. If it does, as with the perennially reeking derailment known as Professor Airwrecka, the comment will be made pseudonymously, or more often, anonymously.
My life is filled with backhanded compliments like these, because the ability to express oneself never goes unpunished by the semi-literate. I’ll never know what it’s like to feel threatened by ideas, and consequently, a degree of compassion must be retained. Take a deep breath. Walk a mile in their shoes.
Or, if their social dysfunction is inevitable, one might as well pour a Progressive Pint and enjoy it, while walking down the street, through the swirling detritus of unenforced ordinances, past the sacred slumlord empowerment districts, and against the headwind created by elephantine trucks.
Walking.
Since it’s the one thing they never seem willing to do, it may well be the best form of individual protest.
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