Every year until Grandma died in the mid-1970s, and the cancer took so long it's difficult to remember the actual year it ended, we drove from Seattle to Merced, California. It took two and a half days, best I can remember, and maybe some of that was because we took 101 down the Oregon Coast, and maybe some of it was because there were two squirmy boys in the back seat always looking for the next Sambos, a now-forgotten pancake chain.
The last year, just mom and me, it took a day and a half. In the same car, a 1964 Chevelle. That's how much the roads got better.
Over the years I've driven a good bit of this country, the main roads and the back roads. But this trip I have been struck by how bad our main roads have become, by how we've lost faith even with the fundamentals of our society.
Please take the trip over the fold with me.
I am writing from an indifferent hotel in the suburbs of Chicago. Later today I will pick up my wife and we will drive 8 hours south to home. We will pass beautiful old barns that are about to be turned into housing developments, the cattle already sold, one last corn crop in the ground. We will pass new and old -- but unoccupied at a rate that speaks to the deterioration of our economy -- retail and manufacturing strip malls.
And we will do it on roads that should have been repaired long ago. Now, I know the weather up here is rough and that road maintenance is expensive. But even Grandma, assistant to the county clerk except during the war, and then she gave his job back, even Grandma said you get what you pay for.
Some day we're going to run out of gas, and it may well be during my lifetime. Certainly its rising price will change my travel habits, making these trips far more of a luxury than they have been. It will become more of a struggle for my daughter to know her relatives on the West Coast.
But the roads are a symptom.
And they're plumb awful. Broken. Fragmented. Dangerous. Crowded, yes, but the pavement is in terrible shape.
We have suffered a fundamental breakdown of our social contract. We have changed our relationship to taxes and to civic duty. The sainted Ronald Reagan (though I don't remember him having been so beloved during his terms in office) and his followers have recast taxation as theft. Rather than believing government can and should work to better the lives of citizens, they infused political discourse with the notion that government could not work.
This is not a new observation. See: Katrina. See: health care. See: public education.
When we stop believing in this country, when we stop believing things can and should be improved, when we stop being willing to pay for the society we say we wish to live in, and when we start believing that we are all nothing more than specific and discrete interest groups, we have failed. We have failed ourselves, our children, and the patriots who founded this land. (Which is not to say their aim was pure, but that's not the point; their words were.)
We face a lot of choices. This next election, it could be about race, or the economy, or the war(s), or, with any luck, it could be about energy and ecology. But the bottom line is that it's about the roads we travel together.
No tip jar. This is my first entry, here, and while I'm clear that there's a status game to be played and some benefit to ratings, I'm just a solitary writer trying to practice my craft in public, and that's enough for now.