What we value

 If things work out, I hope to have a few good years left as an urban planner. Continuing to work at it remains more fulfilling than, say, trying to learn to play golf. I’m afraid, though, that I’m beginning to be known as a bit of an old curmudgeon. I’ve even developed a rep as hating the latest fad in my profession: vehicular roundabouts. May I set the record straight?

I don’t hate them. I think they work well. I think they meet their purpose in an excellent fashion. They are fine devices for moving traffic, if that’s the reason that urban planners were placed on Earth.

So, what’s the rub?

 I’m just tired of our spending so much public money to feed the insatiable demands of the automobile. If history tells us one thing, it’s that the demands of the automobile can never be met, nor can that monster ever be satiated. Someday we will know that. Drive slowly and sneak a look next time you cross over Interstate 40. What you’ll see now is the scene of a variety of cars sandwiched in between miles of 18-wheelers, resembling long trains with rubber wheels on concrete tracks.

What you’ll see in maybe five more years is a parking lot stretching from Wilmington, North Carolina to Barstow, California. Our state highway department will then tell us that it needs several trillions of dollars to fix the problem. Oh, and they won’t have a cent left for those kids I see sometimes walking several miles in the summer heat to their first job at a fast-food franchise.

I’m hoping our cities will decide to spend more on their people and less on cars. I don’t really care if someone gets their car from point A to point B faster. What I care about is how fast we can get that kid in dirty diapers off the front porch of that shack in the Arkansas Delta and into an education, a decent home, and a life with a future. He’s waiting for us to help, while his mother is inside earning enough for the next meal or the next hit of methamphetamine, whichever she needs first. Our fundamentalist “Christian” friends say, “Hey, no problem. He’s born now so all is well. Don’t worry, be happy, and just hope he doesn’t decide to be gay.”

Yesterday I visited the site of a memorial to a beloved niece whom I hired for her first job as a grant writer and grant administrator. After a long career, and a losing bout with cancer, she received, posthumously, a monument for procuring a grant to help a city build a splash pad for its youth. It stands as a fitting and well-deserved honor.

What she should receive a monument for, although she won’t, is for the many hot summer evenings she spent in small, frame, often unpainted, churches in the Arkansas Delta, one of the most neglected sections of our country. She’d be meeting, in the stifling heat and the hordes of mosquitoes with a group of poverty-stricken brothers and sisters trying to secure safe drinking water for their families, just drinking water is all.

It’s all a matter of priorities. Our priorities. It reminds me of a call I received in the late 1990s. I was enjoying a limited, but not particularly lucrative, success as a planning consultant. A friend, an attorney with whom I had done some work, was the caller. He had left his job in Little Rock and moved to Northwest Arkansas, a region richly blessed by the whims of modern history.

“You need to move up here,” he said. “There’s money to be made.”

I supposed that there was, but said, “No, I’ll stay down here.”

“Why? Don’t you want to be where the action is happening?”

I thought for a moment. “No,” I said again.

“Why?” he said again.

“Oh,” I said, “I think the Galilean would have me stay where the action isn’t happening.”

The Libertarian Roundabout

My Redacted Life: Chapter 34 (Cont._4)

Things moved smoothly in the summer of 1972. I was to be married soon. Brenda was working on her wedding gown. I couldn't see it, though. No problem. I would see it soon enough.

I was learning new things every day, like if we just built enough traffic arteries, and they were wide enough, one day there would be no traffic congestion. Population projections proved our existing cities would grow forever. They all possessed the same opportunity. The federal government would maintain a fiduciary relationship with cities and counties in order to make sure that the important inner workings of our country would remain strong. The head and body would function in harmony. Reason would rule if we only planned carefully enough.

Well, yeah, not everything I was learning would prove out to be true. What would prove true was that our country’s role in the Vietnam War would end eventually, not “with a bang, but a whimper,” along with the bodies of students on the campus of Kent State University. Had war not proven so profitable to some, it might have ended our forays into civil wars halfway around the world. That was all in the future, though. For the time being, I was safe away from it all.

Right now, I had to get ready for the wedding. I knew my role by heart, and I had the money to get our wedding rings out of layaway. My bride-to-be was growing more beautiful every day, although she seemed to spend a great deal of time with her two co-conspirators. Sometimes, before knocking on her door, I could hear them inside laughing. They always stopped when I came and never let me in on the jokes. They were being nicer to me, though. I suppose they had come to realize that they couldn’t have this wedding without me. They even let me in on some of the planning.

Things were looking great. We would stay in my apartment until we had enough money to purchase a house. I would be able to get financing through the GI bill. Currently, that meant no down payment and a 7.5 percent interest rate, lower than the market. Our combined incomes suggested a home in the $20,000 to $25,000 range. (I found out later that housing purchases were best based on a single income, but that was in the future.) That seemed fairly grandiose and was enough to attract the interest of real estate sales people, all men. Later, women would come to dominate the profession. We weren’t ready yet, but give us time to study things. Things were running on a fast track. All we had to do was to hang on.

The bosses at work were already looking at a purchase of land for our next private development. It lay in the southwestern part of the county, just outside the city limits at the time. They had set the boundaries and Jack was already on the job, flourishing his magic markers over thin, semi-transparent sheets of thin paper known as “yellow-flimsy.” This development would include a community center, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. We planned for it to be the pride of central Arkansas. Who better to plan future developments than a group of talented urban planners? Indeed. It mattered little that the oldest of us was about to turn 30. All things would come to pass as planned.

 Those were glorious days. I’m glad we had them, Brenda and I. We would have others, many others, but there is something about the joy of living during times when you haven’t yet had to face reality.

I'd come a long ways.