Ron Galaktik
There are a lot
of reasons for border patrols and border wars, a lot of empty-headed and
tight-fisted justifications for keeping the thems out and the uses in.
That’s not what
I’m here to talk about. I’m not here to attack or defend the nonlogic that has
been robustly proliferated to propagate the mentality that the haves deserve
to have while the nots deserve to not. Whatever.
I’m here to
offer solutions. We here in Tucson have a problem with what they call urban
sprawl. It’s like when you drop a scoop of ice cream on the sidewalk in
August. After about 35 seconds, it begins to sprawl. That’s what’s happening
in Tucson. Sprawl.
Now we’ve got
the Double Fudge Nut Housing Community and the Super Chocolate Chunk Mall way
out where there used to be a lot of saguaros or mountains or some shit. (Note
to the developers: better make that the El Super Chocolate Mall and the Vista
del Double Fudge Nut Housing Community, this is the southwest and even though
our noble leaders seem to hate Mexican people they sure love to spruce up our
shopping plazas and civic centers with quaint and colorful words and images of
the people whose land this once was.)
Right. So the
nature people (mostly Sierra Club members who want to keep their choice spot
on the edge of the desert) have been getting their (organic unbleached cotton)
pants in a bunch over this sprawl shizznit and are doing their civic duty
trying to make more laws about this and that and everything between here and
yours is mine but the rest gets to stay undeveloped, except when it gets
developed or somebody comes in and makes a new law or finds a loophole in the
first law or invalidates it or ignores it for 6 years or 60,000 miles,
whichever’s bestest for the richest.
What they’ve
done to address the issue is to make up a merry-go-round of coalitions, like
the Concerned Citizens for Stable Growth and the Stable Citizens Concerned
About Growth, and the Growing Citizens Stable of Concerns to cook up a lot of
propositions with equally abstruse names and now we’re suffering from
coalition-proposition sprawl.
The brunt of
this gobbledygook is that the developers take a lot of heat. Which is all
peaches and pie, but mostly it’s just restating what they said in the first
place. “We can stop development by stopping developers.” Yeah. Put it on a
sign and walk around in a circle for awhile and see if you feel dizzy.
Folks, this
ain’t the field of dreams. Build it and they will come—you got to be kidding.
This is big money we’re talking about. No one’s building shit unless they know
there’s already people waiting to move in—and people just keep moving in.
So where do
they come from? Quick geography quiz. Where do all rich white people come from
and what is it that makes them so rich and so white?
Answer:
California.
Dudes, you’re
guarding the wrong border. Look at the subdivisions, the malls. What kind of
people do you see? That’s right, white people. Rich white people who like to
go to El Super Chocolate Chunk Mall to buy pictures of cute Indian children to
put in their adobe homes in Vista del Double Fudge Nut Housing Community to
remind themselves of what it was like before their Viking-ass ancestors came
to rape and pillage.
Now, look at
the people we’re spending so much money trying to keep out, the ones that show
up dead in the desert. I saw pictures of some of them in the Tucson Post
not too long ago, and they didn’t look rich or white to me.
So kids, it’s
simple. All we gotta do to bring sprawl to a crawl is just switch which border
we’re guarding. We’ve got the troops, and I’m sure some ranchers from Yuma to
Carson City will all be more than happy to pop any unwanted Calis trying to
swim across the Colorado river.
We don’t have
to worry about the Mexicans. None of them will be moving into Vista del Double
Nut Fudge Nut any time soon. History has shown that it’s poor hardworking
immigrants that have built America up and rich white leeches who have sucked
it dry. So why are we killing the one and giving tax incentives to the other?
We’ve got it all backwards, folks. Let’s switch it around.
Think of what a
wonderful world it would be. Z
Ron Galaktik writes a column for a small paper in the Southwest.