Honk

As I was driving down the section of US-1/64 that is -- what? -- eight or ten lanes wide between Walnut Street and Cary Parkway the other day, the news report on the radio said that North Carolina had the largest population influx of any state in the US of A last year. "That ain't good", sez I to me as I exited onto a Cary Parkway that was a forest of oak and pines trees when we moved to Cary in 1982 and is now a six-lane-wide thoroughfare with flora not found in that forest of oak and pines trees planted in the median. That piece of the earth under the Cary Parkway had to wait -- what? -- some 3 billion years to be so rudely disfigured by a bulldozer and covered with a layer of petroleum byproduct more suited to the wheels of a BMW than to the feet of man and beast who have been traveled it for the last -- what? -- 3 million years.

That same news report said Michigan had the greatest outflux of population last year. Why? Have the trappers run out of beaver pelts to harvest? Have the capitalists moved production to locations offering cheaper labor? Or, is it just that the University of Michigan has not beaten Ohio State University in football in a blue moon?

The North Carolina of today is but what the Michigan of yesterday was when Henry Ford created the auto industry, only with banks and computer technology and pharmaceuticals instead of cars. And, the North Carolina of tomorrow can just as easily become the Michigan of today with all eight or ten lanes of traffic headed out of treeless towns with broken economies.