Over the past year, I’ve noticed several harbingers of a clear de-civilizing process that has been set in motion, silently. The most auspicious has been the rapid proliferation of LED streetlights, replacing the beautiful ambience of the sodium vapor bulb. Town after town has fallen to this ugly, evil (every evil development is ugly) glare, and the once-quaint dusk of almost every Oklahoma town has been brutally dispatched, and in its place a blinding ultra brightness has been established. This has been a significant victory for the cause of ugliness, and it has been achieved almost overnight, with zero resistance. City councils deemed the new artificial light to be more cost efficient, “environmentally sound”, and so, aesthetics and beauty be damned, they made their towns hideous to the spirit.
No town that I’ve encountered, in my nocturnal travels, has made the effort to even place a light-diffusing cover over these harsh bulbs, whereas the old lights were covered, and diffused their charming amber glow. We now drive under a series of pin-point welding arcs, and can’t see a damned thing. Vehicle headlights are now equipped with the LED plague, and meeting other cars on the road is a blinding experience.
I’m at a loss to explain the indifference towards beauty on the part of city leaders. Decisions seem to only take into account dollars and cents, and everyone appears to be in a mad rush to penny pinch their way to wealth, and in the process, utterly destroying what made their cities beautiful, and civilized.
I’ve also noticed the mushroom-like growth of the four-way stop, particularly in my hometown. Long streets with unbroken right-of-ways have now been segmented with ridiculously unnecessary four-ways. Stop signs are going up everywhere, hobbling the driving experience, and creating needless conflict as if by design. The four-way stop seems tailor-made to elevate blood pressure and incite road rage. Who has the right-of-way? Drivers race to the four-way to beat the other drivers also racing there. Some blow through the stop sign altogether, assuming that the other driver will also stop. Two-ways, with their clear demarcation of right-of-way, rarely had this problem. The four-way, I’m convinced, has its origins, just as the LED streetlights, in the deepest pit of Hell. Some spirit of prudish, hateful antipathy to civilization appears to have settled in the hearts of city planners, and is now running free.
Are we better off than we were three or four decades ago? The answer is a resounding no. Rampant, unhinged technological progress has resulted in the opposite of a Utopia. There’s a man who walks his dog every morning while hunched over his smartphone, posture permanently distorted. It’s a dismal sight.
Local businesses, having been open for decades, are now closing up shop, replaced with vaperies or weed shacks. All new business is of the chain variety, devoid of soul and charm. What explains this?
Small town America has always seemed to me to be the fountain of civilization. When they go down, so goes the world. The technological god is smothering whatever remains that is human there, and now generations raised on the screen will inherit their ruins. Who carries the memory of civilization anymore, who has time to? Cities are in a rush to bulldoze the past and pay fly-by-nighters to erect particle board horrors in their place. Are we becoming the flies of a summer, with no past, no future, and little hope?
If we are to live in a Dark Age, make it a real Dark Age of charm and imagination, because this current age has neither. We live surrounded by technological marvels, but are far less well-off than our predecessors, who were forced, by necessity, to use their minds to work things out. Through technology, our minds are dulled, emotions infantilized, bodies enervated, and yet we each are confined to our individual hamster wheels, that spin continually faster. We race to make ends meet, only occasionally noticing that 5 years, 10 years, two decades have passed, as our expenses increase steadily.
A very real cultural attitude of anxiety about the future has taken hold, but we don’t know who or what to blame. We feel under constant attack, but can see no enemy. Vaguely, we wonder if God will shake the biosphere, through everything into blessed chaos, freeing us from this stifling course.
