Moving Mountains

We are in a mess. Lots of people are not working and this time they don't have jobs either. It used to be you could just sit around in front of your computer and get paid for not doing much. Now you sit in front of your computer and hope for email from Nigeria with your lottery winnings and Viagra ads.

This mess has two parts: one is people forgot how to work hard and the other is there is no work anyway. Some folks might just give up and tell everyone to sit on their hands as they mouse around the internet, but I have been checking things out. Those political scientists are calling for big, new public works projects to give everyone a nice fat paycheck and a shiny, new shovel to go with with their snazzy, new work ethic. That's the way out of this mess.

Public works projects may solve the work mess but they leave us with another big problem: what should people work on? We don't want them just raking leaves. We want them to build something that will last. Before when this happened in the 1930s they built a bunch of post offices and highway bridges. But who needs post offices these days—we have UPS and Mailboxes, Etc and they work just fine.

How about making bridges--we built so many bridges before that they got old and concrete is flaking and rebar is dangling down and they shake in a strong wind. We could rebuild them. But then people would just keep on driving their gas-guzzling cars. Maybe a few shaky bridges every evening on the commute will make people take the train and then we can really get out of this mess.

We need trains. Let's build them. Maybe they could be wind-powered solar trains. But then they couldn't go very fast. A train with a windmill doesn't have much umph to climb hills and mountains. Trains go best when its flat . We need more flatness in America to make trains use less fuel. It's a flatter country that will get us out of this mess.

So what I am suggesting is that we make a lot more smooth, level places in America. Move those Rockies and Ozarks and Blue Ridges out of the way. Just make a big flat pancake America from coast to coast. Then a train can go all the way across on a windy, sunny day or maybe just from your house to your new job flattening out mountains and digging out rocks and dirt. A good all-american job that has lots of work ethic to get us out of this mess.

I bet that you guys who always look at the bottom of the empty glass instead of the top are asking: what are you going to do with all the dirt when you flatten out America. Ha. This is where my idea is really great. We pile it up at the borders. You try to sneak into America over a mountain twenty thousand feet tall. Who needs fences. Who needs border guards. Just cover the roads with about three or four miles deep of dirt. No one can drive in. No one can get out. It's like living in the world's best prison. We are saved. Hurray for America. No more mess!

Even better, with all the dirt lined up east and west along the border (instead of the north and south like it is now), then all those cool pacific breezes can blow all the way across from California over into the Atlantic. Just think of those warm sunny mornings in the highlands of Nevada where everyone is going to trade in their fur jackets for flipflops and shorts. And those big pacific storms will fill up the deserts with lakes for all the waterskiers who had to move to some drybone western town and pack their waterskis in the garage or sell them on eBay. Now all Americans have the right to bear arms and to waterski all the way across America.

OK, you say: what about snow skiers. I planned for that too. Don't forget the border mountains. Go ski down from the top of North Dakota to the bottom of the hill in Chicago. Or Maybe from Maine down to Connecticut. So, we may have to cover up Maine and all those border states with a mile or two of dirt but who wants to live there anyway. Ditto for all those towns near Mexico. They can all be ski resorts instead of cactus farms.

Then to top it all off—just remember where all our cold fronts come from. Canada! And with the trans-border mountains blocking off the north then the cold just stays up there and those Canadians can tighten up their moose-skin blankets and dream about balmy Chicago and Minnesota, so close and yet a mountain range away.

So I say it one more time: Hurray for this great pancake of a country we are going to have. Hurray for getting out of this sticky mess. Hurray for America.

Choice

There are lots of types of choices. We’ve gotten used to choosing between ice cream or pie. That’s easy. Pick one today; pick another tomorrow. Or maybe both today. That’s the choice I like.

But there are really hard choices, like when you choose one thing and it eliminates the other. Marriage is like that. Pick Miss Mary today and say goodbye forever to old Suzy Q. Maybe that’s not a great example with divorce and messing around going on, but you get the idea.

The experts are telling us that we have a big choice coming up that is really, really hard. Either global warming crashes the planet or global slowdown crashes the economy. Either we quit making stuff in order to cut down on carbon or we quit worrying and watch the water rise and the polar bears attack. That’s what they say. A hard choice is just ahead.

But I want an ice cream and pie choice here. I want my globe to chill, but I need my stuff, too. I know it takes a couple trees and a barrel of oil for every 10 minutes I’m alive, but I don’t want to change. I get bored without my stuff. And you don’t want me bored because then I get nasty and make lots of noise.

So you smart-guy scientists need to figure out how to make fun stuff that doesn’t have any carbon in it, doesn’t take any carbon to make, and doen’t use any carbon to carry it to my front door. That´s what we need. Then the choice is easy. Stuff for me and polar bears for everyone, too. So get to work.

I know you scientists are already working on carbon-free stuff. Your fancy video games point the way. A new game uses up about ten days of my life and only uses two cupfuls of oil to make electricity for my computer. A windmill in a light breeze spinning for an hour could power me for a week.

My carbon footprint shrinks to mouse-sized for a month when I have a game that’s interesting. It could stay shrunk forever if great, new games came out every week and (this is important) I didn’t have to go to work and commute burning all that oil in my pickup. So I say it’s work that makes us burn up too much carbon. Because working takes me away from my games and gives me lots of money that I use to go buy useless stuff. Like lava lamps and food processers. I don’t even cook. I just eat. And how much carbon is there in a couple cheeseburgers anyway?

If everyone just stayed home and played video games and partied a lot on weekends or maybe even every other day then who needs to drive big cars. Who needs fancy houses and trucks of designer furniture that comes here in big boats from China. Who needs all that stuff. I just need my chair, my computer and my fridge.

Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Maybe I should start working on other things, like world peace and babies that understand bathrooms before they are born. OK, scientists you heard it. Let’s go.