After dropping the Cadet (potential) at school, I dropped off the rig at the Brazen Pineapple, known colloquially as Gene's Auto Body. Then I walked home, because I didn't have a vehicle and didn't care to ask for a "loaner."
It still seems odd after growing up in England to see dirt roads within city limits but I like that, it's Centex Country, right along with the grain bins, sorry, bins not in the frame.
So are shacks, which are somehow less bucolic than the dirt roads and grain silos of this small slice of rural Texan paradise. Imagine, there you are in your shack, it's triple digits and the food stamps have just run out because you've swapped them out for meth. Not so pastoral idyll.
Still, the town's getting fixed up, with new shops on the Square and attractive older houses being renovated and sold. Who to? People from Dallas, I'd imagine, who can't afford the 500k+ price tag of living in the appalling and soul-destroying metrosprawl.
I thought all this and more as I strolled down the leafy boulevards of my quaint farming community and pondered the transnational, satanic, globalist elites that destroyed this town to make themselves even richer. Where will it end?
Pitchforks and Nooses down the Mall? Maybe. More likely a gradual breakdown of central government which, ironically, runs out of cash.
Of course we've seen it all before. Cast your minds back to Rome which, at its peak, was a city of over a million people. Then picture that same city in the 7th century AD, perhaps viewed from the Palatine Hill and the just at that point intact palace of the Caesars. What do you see?
A sea of ruins stretching out to the horizon, broken by still-standing monumental architecture, such as the Pantheon and Coliseum. Below you lies the broken Hippodrome with its ghosts of long dead crowds. Rome at this point maybe musters 20,000 souls.
This Texan town was 20,000 strong 50 years ago, now it's 7,000 if it's lucky.
Draw the moral as you will.
Quo Vadis,
LSP
I've seen it towns all across the Country, and it's almost always the gubmint that had a hand in it.
ReplyDeleteFrom excessive taxation, to insane minimum wages, to Presidents embargoing products sold, and already paid for, to countries he didn't like.
I don't know where it will end, but it won't be pretty....
The Tides of fortune wax and wane. History repeats it's self time and again, and we don't seem to learn...
ReplyDeleteHillsboro (and Waco) have a past that waxed, waned, and now is being gripped by gentrification. The Internet means that people don't have to live in any particular location and many of them now work from home. The Dallas Metroplex is not as appealing. I take all that as a positive sign.
ReplyDeleteThere was also hope and change in the last general election (MAGA). Will it begin to transform the nation with a philosophy
of America First? The transnationalists hope not. Image an America that has returned to God, the Constitution and a concern for keeping the wealth here?
I propose we tax every business an 'exit of operations' tax while the company is still a going concern, put those tax revenues into a lock box, and once the business leaves or files for bankruptcy, we take those funds and use them to clean up their abandoned premises.
ReplyDeleteThat ought to make for a thriving economy...;-). And I am confident our politicians will keep their hands off of those funds in the lock box so that they can be spent as intended.
I've got lots more of these ideas. Maybe I should run for public office.
Yes - but you have that gorgeous court house. I love your little town. And as quickly as they're building around here and destroying our once little town, I may have to move to your town.
ReplyDelete