Kurt Cobb – Green shoots: An alternative view

I am seeing green shoots everywhere these days. But not in the places in which Wall Street’s strident financial cheerleaders and Washington’s happy economists are. I am seeing green shoots in the many cracks in the suburban neighborhood roads I now travel daily by bicycle.

Unlike the supposed financial green shoots, these green shoots are not propitious. It is mid-June and the cities which I traverse by bike do not seem to have the wherewithal to douse the weeds that are cracking their streets. I also ride across many lovely private parking lots that are breaking up like so many crumbled cookies with no one seeming to want to fix them. I am reminded of images from a History Channel series called “Life After People” which depict what the Los Angeles freeway system would look like just one year after the disappearance of people (surprisingly green!) and how it might appear one hundred years after people (like a nature preserve!).

The roads are, of course, crumbling. But this has long been the case in Michigan where the governor and legislature refused to do anything about it throughout the 1990s and the early part of this decade for fear of voter reaction to new taxes. (One can still today close one’s eyes and know immediately whether one is on the Michigan or the Ontario side of the Canadian border just by how the car rides.)

Not surprisingly, in the face of the current financial crisis, our local colleges and universities are doing what they can to encourage green shoots of their own on their campuses, namely, deferring even more maintenance.

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