God Sent

I spent the better part of last week in Folsom, working to drop a new transmission line into the Western Area Power Administration's Folsom substation. We will bisect a SMUD 230kV line which will provide for two additional electrical paths for Folsom generation to escape and to power the myriad subdivisons and exurban sprawl that define the City of Folsom and surrounding cities. I shouldn't be quite so hard on Folsom, I admit, because it is one of the few cities that actually carries an excellent ratio of jobs to residents, sprawled out or otherwise.

Standing in the switchyard I witnessed tremendous activity underway to build a new spillway and to raise the dam another 7 feet. Good work going on there; flood control along with additional storage capacity. But this activity is proceeding alongside a new bridge that opened in March of last year...a bridge that wouldn't have been built had Osama Bin Laden not been god sent:


The Bureau of Reclamation shut down the dam road to thru-traffic. Shut it down due to fear. The dam road, of course, was nothing but an arterial road for sixteen thousand daily automotive commuters. Thus began the howling screams from thousands of Folsomites as through commuters from Granite Bay and El Dorado Hills clogged their surface streets, destroying the "character" of their little town.

Something had to be done, and bridge building was the result. Truthfully, we must thank Osama because without him think how many more Americans might be unemployed: bridge designers, rendition artists, earth mover drivers, public relations specialists, cement factory laborers, dump truck operators, form assemblers, street lighting designers, aggregate pit miners...not to mention all the administrators for the Department of Homeland Security, the concomitant security jobs, and the tens of thousands of munitions and chemical and arms and MRAP manufacturing jobs. Just like an oil spill creates GDP, so did Bin Laden. Osama was good to them, but it's up to them to decide which God they should thank for sending him.

It's easy to highlight the positives that terrorism or an economic depression would bring. That's what I do -- I like to think about the potential these actions have in creating an America worth living in. I intentionally ignore the obvious bad that accompanies them. What happened to all that national spirit of unity that existed in November of 2001? It died off to keep the ensuing wealth-without-risk economic boom enriching our private lives; it died off fueling a seven year war with current prospects for another seven years. We had opportunities and yet we squandered them. At the same time, many became employed that might not have been otherwise, so it is for this reason I offer my narrow view that 9/11 was a godsend.

For all the things I protest about American and Elk Grovian culture on my Monologues, what do you think could possibly effect a change if not for something really bad to force us to change? Here in Elk Grove we have already decided that we're going to resume mall and sprawl building all the way to the Consumnes river as soon as we get "back on track." Because we've decided already is the reason I ask not to be lumped in with others who cling to hope. My ideas on how we are to going to get there, anywhere, are far different from yours, but the end result is likely the same: a place worth living in filled with people worth living with.