Morning Story

 

Once Upon a time, there was a town. The town sat along a river and a freeway ran through the town.

The freeway was crowded in cars and also in big trucks hauling things up north and down south and to all points everywhere else, too. People wanted stuff. The trucks delivered stuff to the people and made money doing it and everybody was happy about it.

Maybe not quite everyone.

The old lady limped along the sidewalk to the nearby convenience store. Just inside the heavy glass front doors, she spotted the local paper in its rack. The headline read “Counsel Approves 176 House Development”.

She knew what was coming!

More cars. More costs! More concrete.

The streets of the new development would get names like Heron street when they should get names like Dead Heron street.

A handful of citizens in the once small town turned city lined up with signs half halfheartedly outside City Hall. The signs said things like “No More!” and “Save the Wetlands” or "Save the Farms:, all kinds of things. The city council lined up across from them in photo op style grinning and chanting “We don’t care! We don’t care!”

Once the trees were cut down and the barn style houses put up one jammed against the next, the car traffic skyrocketed in that end of town and people and kids and old folks trying to get to mail boxes, or some exercise or just play, ran gauntlets every day. When somebody got smashed into the pavement, people laid some flowers down along with maybe a plastic cross, then roared off in their own cars.

The emergency room waits became days instead of hours if say someone broke a leg or became very ill. The doctors and nurses lined up with signs across from city hall and the signs said things like “We are Overworked!”, “End Under staffing!”. Everyone agreed that the small town turned city needed more medical personnel now that it was a city, but where would they live if they could be found? The new development was already full and you could tell from the unchanged license plates they were from states like California, Texas, Montana and Idaho, to name a few.

“More Development” the city council members began to chant cheerily back at the distressed line of medical professionals.

Meanwhile, the city water department raised rates on everyone across the board because they had to clean more dirty river water to make drinkable and more icky storm water before dumping it back in the brown river with all the new people in the city.

The river was brown and icky because fisher people wanted more fish but only fish of a certain kind and made the government dump almost all the water out of the reservoirs into the river which turned the river into a chocolate mud pudding. Children and old ladies who swam and paddled summers in the reservoir cried out loud over their losses and could hear the groups responsible chanting “We don’t care!” cheerily somewhere off in the distance cause none of them lived anywhere near.

The police wanted more police men and women and bigger better jails and the fire department wanted more trucks. See, there were more houses that could burn down now.

More and more people went homeless, ranting on the street corners, doing drugs, and when they overdosed they were jolted back to life with more drugs, angry already their high had been stolen.  Eventually, guilt ridden, the charities given government money to solve homelessness, just handed out fentanal on the street corners.

The older poor sections of the small town turned city had streets falling apart but the grant gotten by the very proud city mayor and council, it was decided, would be used to put down sewers and water lines for MORE DEVELOPMENT, and they all gave three cheers cause who really cared about the poor part of the city. Or would even see it.

Ten to twenty of the houses in the 176 new barn style no tree development had cats that were not fixed and they let them breed more cats who were sent out free as kittens unfixed like little cat time bombs to create more cats in countless other little spots and on and on and the poor tiny rescue people, bare to the bones and unappreciated, cried their nights through and wrung their hands and sacrificed more the next day.

The mayor and the city council then agreed, with big smiles, that the cats themselves were at fault, and should be punished by death and rescuers were fined and harassed and called insane.

“We Don’t Care” became the new big city’s motto, chanted with hands over hearts before every meeting of any kind and by all good citizens and school children.

The End?