The Consumption Nation

My wife and I are in Texas and have been for a week. I haven't been back in this state for a few years and haven't been here for any period of time since the 70's. My father-in-law died last week and we've been trying to sort out his mess of an "estate" since. I learned a lot about why some people are careful about planning their death. The last memories of us that the people who have to sort out our crap will have can be pretty negative.

I snagged this picture from another website, but it is exactly
typical of the "traffic" we experienced in the Wichita Falls
ghost town freeway tour. 

I've been here for a week, putting on miles between Wichita Falls and Dallas, and there aren't enough Texas motorcycles on the road to warrant bothering to license motorcycles in the state. If a motorcycle is a transportation device, it falls miles below bicycles, skates, wheelchairs, Hot Wheels, and feet in miles-traveled in this state. If I throw out the few long distance travelers I've seen (maybe a half-dozen), I could easily count the number of motorcycles I've seen on the road on one hand. Pitiful.

This place is clearly oblivious of the world outside of its boarders. Cars are generally huge, mostly SUVs and single passenger pickups. Dallas is the ultimate urban sprawl collection of houses without communities. Downtown is all but dead, even the few suburban downtown areas are dead zones of empty business buildings and decaying neighborhoods. There is a light rail, but every time we've been traveling along its path the cars appear to be mostly empty. The highways, freeways, and toll roads are monuments to massive federal investment and a mindless faith that petroleum will last forever. Wichita Falls is, for example, a dying town, with a business real estate market that resembles Detroit. The place is overpass rich, though. For a town that has about as much traffic as a rural Nebraska farm town, Wichita Falls has a collection of giant overpasses and empty freeways. If I were making an "end of days" movie, I couldn't hope for a better collection of sets than in this abandoned city.

Texas drivers are mad. I mean exactly that word, too. They are a nasty combination of insane and angry. If I were forced to live here, I'd probably still ride but I'd spend a lot of my days in terror. If there is an example of a place that is actively burning up the world's resources so that their children can live in the stone age, this place has to be on the list. It's worse than LA.

When we went shopping for my grandson's birthday presents at a local Target, a man was hauling his 10-12 year-old daughter out of the store. She was kicking and screaming and nearly choking with emotion as the embarrassed man walked quickly through the store. As they approached I began to make out what she was screaming, "I'm not leaving until I get something I want!" She said it like a chant, repeatedly, all the way out the door. It felt like a national anthem after my experience in Texas.