Later news

It seems the local BIG NO straight-jacketed Republicans have seen a chance to let Washington do their thinking for them, leaving funding for a Gtown-SCTx bus line open for a federal grant. I hate to be partisan in time of emergency, but I see that I am in the minority anyway. I AM a registered Republican, due mostly to what the Nicaraguans call "choña," not really laziness, but having full expectation that I will eventually get around to doing something, such as reregistering or dying, whichever comes first.

My own viewpoint is that bus service is STRICTLY a local problem. The local merchants should be on my side economically (not politically, no one else need endure that!) . The less people spend on keeping a car running the more they can spend on fattening foods and the clothes to cover their expanding figures.

Fellow SCTxans enjoy the thought of living in a golf-cart community. My viewpoint is that the wee machines are ridiculous, but do make lots of sense for our situation of providing minimal transport. With the Social Center serving as boarding point for the Gtown bus, you can get twice as many golf carts onto the parking lot as you can automobiles. If we had reasonable bus service assured, I think I would trade in my 1996 Camry on a golf cart, preferably not of the same vintage.

Our town council is eager to invite new bidnesses to our town by offering tax moratoriums. Why not think beyond the ends of their noses and consider that each new industry means more cars circulating, more contamination of the environment, the more "city-like" we become. A suitable bus service (especially that splendid new bus that runs on butane with reduced stinkum) would keep a lot of cars off the road, especially if the fares were kept reasonable.

By reasonable, I do not mean "give-away" as Austin has tried to do with their CART. We are not spread over the countryside as Texas cities like to be... yet. But City Planners, if they are doing their job right, must consider highway communications as a principal item in allocating how our territory is to be filled. The times they are achanging: land transport, which has always been cheap in the USA, must adapt to other fuels and other living standards. Driving humongous SUVs with only one person aboard is an obscenity, a lesion on the body politic. That idea during the last real war of sharing rides has disappeared from our minds.

As the richest country in the world, we are also the most wasteful. The American Way is to consume, and if you don't waste, you can't consume as much, and the economy suffers. When the economy contracts, we look for fall-guys to blame, when each and every one of us has contributed in his own particular way. As retirees, my end of society probably places personal comfort before anything else. Generally, I don't think this is much of an imposition. It's the second aspect that makes me persnickety: display. Spending money, not to keep UP with the Joneses, but trying to keep AHEAD of the Joneses becomes a full time job. I could cite a dozen instances, but then the people I would expose would kill me, and that, too, would be wasteful. Of me.

How do we get our voices heard? E-mail me at birchall.jack@yahoo.com and give me YOUR thoughts.