Whatever happened to outrage over light pollution?
The super-bright LED streetlights that have spread like a plague throughout every major and minor city have totally ruined our nighttime charm. A decade ago, driving through town at night was pleasant, almost dreamlike. Cities and towns back then used sodium vapor bulbs, which cast a soft, amber glow, appropriate for night. Thinking back, I remember an opulent amber, a sunset orange, that bathed every town with public lighting. These sodium bulbs had been used for decades, and generations of Americans could enjoy them, probably without even knowing or appreciating what they were experiencing. But just like the song says, we don’t know what we got till it’s gone. And boy are those sodium vapor nights gone. The old bulbs have been replaced with what amounts to a welding arc, and Christ is it a pain to drive through town under the punishing glare of these hideous lights.
Many people are waking up to the fact that their cities and towns have been brutally marred by these lights, but which municipalities will grow the stones to make a change? Why not pick a softer, warmer, dimmer LED bulb? What post-modern Neanderthal chose the frozen supernovae as an appropriate choice for public lighting?
Doesn’t even a semblance of beauty matter? Or is the LED bulb the cultural equivalent of modern art? Is it somehow old-fashioned to wish that our city radiated charm, and took serious account of beauty, or is this obsolete among the modern, hyper-practical brutes who appear increasingly to find employment in public spheres?
Show me the person who signed off on these godawful abominations of illumination and I will show you someone who should be considered a destroyer of civilization. Not through any conscious wickedness, but through sheer, contented imbecility. He, or she, is perfectly fine with burning his eyes out, slowly, imperceptibly, with these comically bright lights. He doesn’t care, because he didn’t see the aesthetic value of the sodium bulb. For his decision he cites King Numbers as the final authority. Are LED bulbs more cost efficient? Then that is all that should be taken into account, according to this dismantler of human civilization.
There was a time when people cared about light pollution. Well, here we are, smack in the middle of a plague of it, and where are the activists and aesthetes? These lights are pumping out daylight, albeit grotesque and unnatural. No one can stand under one of these street lamps and say with a straight face that this light is natural or appropriate.
LED streetlights, in their current dullard iteration, are anti-civilization. There, I said it. To be pro-LED and pro-civilization is a contradiction. You must examine your priors, search your soul, and either repent or renounce God. I imagine that the creator of the 6000K LED bulb is burning at this very moment, in Hell. To his right, the inventor of the Phillips head screwdriver, to his left, Oppenheimer.
