I know I rarely post on weekends, but the "spirit is moving me."
Back when I was in my teens, I took a long daily school bus ride from Schenectady to the schools I attended (St. Agnes, 7th through 10th grade, and Albany Academy for Girls, 11th and 12th grades.) The bus wended its way around the two cities, but the longest stretch was down the Albany-Schenectady Road (Rt. 5). Even back then, and this is the late 1960's and early 1970's, this was an early version of what is now called a "strip." What undoubtedly at some point had been farmland (and before that, forest) was now block after block of gas stations, dry cleaners, clothing stores, insurance agencies, hair dressers, carwashes, etc., all the way from one city to the other. And this is before the era of endless fast food restaurants, although some early ones probably had cropped up by the seventies. Even in their own time, these unremarkable stores, all surrounded by paved parking lots, were, to me, an eyesore. I've never found any aspect of American suburbs to be beautiful, and the commercial strips are the worst, spreading, as they do, to any available vacant patch of land. Because I never understood the profit incentive, the urge to spread more and more retail establishments on people's path seems bizarre. Recent forays down Rt. 5 have felt particularly post-apocalyptic to me. Some of the original stores remain, with hopelessly outdated original signage, cheek-by-jowl with many more modern fast food places. My 20's era elementary school is still there, but boarded up and abandoned. One reason (of many) that I couldn't stay any longer in that area of the world is that it already feels to me like ruins.
Watching the aerial coverage of this hurricane was heartbreaking because it shows a slice of land that was similarly covered by sprawling development, literally in ruins. Mile after mile of homes, trailers, shops, malls, schools, restaurants, entirely flattened. These people are living a potential future for any or all of us; with no electricity, there can be no banking, pumping of gas, communications, food storage, control of waste, you name it. What will personal property lines mean when the landscape has re-formed, when you cannot even see the ground, and trees have been uprooted? What will it matter that you are on important, life-saving medications if pharmacies are closed? What will it matter that you have a job if it isn't there any more? It is almost too much to take in, yet I think we must start to recognize that it is a current and growing reality. I utterly feel for everyone down there and for the shocking U-turn their lives have made, but even more so for the health of the natural environment as tons and tons of unleashed toxic materials make their way into the oceans, rivers, and topsoil. In our exuberance, in our push to own and profit and "grow," we certainly didn't think ahead.
What is so out of kilter hasn't been the urge to create and innovate. Many of the fruits of this creativity have been extraordinary. But it is the fact that this impulse didn't recognize the necessity of working with nature, with purveyors of beauty, with women's priorities -- that is why we are at such a momentous impasse. Once again, I've heard people talk about restoring power, re-building, getting things back to the way they were, and yet I just don't think this is really the life lesson of this experience. The way things have been has not been sustainable. That is the whole point.
