Trick or Treat?

Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.  Our birthright is a vibrant cityscape that we seem to be doing everything possible to decimate. More broadly and devastatingly, with Walmart (devastation to rural and semi-rural small retail businesses, gutting fragile rural townscapes, blighted and dead already now for many years), Amazon (devastating to everything left after Walmart and endangering even Walmart itself), and the whole online shopping apocalypse, we have sold our birthright in a Faustian bargain for measly discounts and the Trojan Horse of “convenience” (talk about mixed metaphors! It makes me so proud!)

 

The New York Times reports today (Sunday, October 27, “Shoppers Click, and City Chokes on Convenience”) that “the very fabric of major urban areas around the world is being transformed. And New York City, where more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily, shows the impact that this push for convenience is having on gridlock, roadway safety and pollution.  Delivery trucks operated by UPS and FedEx double-park on streets and block bus and bike lanes. . . . The main entry for packages into New York City, leading to the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, has become the most congested interchange in the country. . . . ETC.

 

And this is only a small part of what it is doing to us. It is hollowing out our core, outer and inner.  Happy Clicking.