Rails to Trails: The sweetener on top of a dying nation

In small towns and large cities across the nation city planners have been touting their “great successes” in converting abandoned rail lines to recreational trails. That appears to be a great thing to do – make good use of miles of unused right of way for walking and bicycling.  Great!  Let’s recreate!

But on the other and, this is like making a BBQ pit from the leftover bricks from your bombed out house.  Sad, really.

No! Neither trails nor BBQ pits make things better – not compared to what was given up. They are both a misleading salve over a bad situation – the urban planning version of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  But the poor pig is dead!  Like the violin music that helps lift the spirits just before the Titanic goes down.

And no, abandoned rail lines are not the result of advances in transportation or advances in technology. They are a sign of our economic decline.  We don’t yet have transponders that send kilotons of dry goods from point A to point B. Trucking is not the most cost effective mode of transportation for things we don’t produce anymore.

That’s the problem:  Things we don’t produce anymore.

With Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, we began to offshore production to reduce costs to American consumers. That was the beginning of the US transition from a producer nation to a consumer nation.  From a productive nation to a recreating nation – getting fatter, happier, and lazier as a result.

We thought that was great for over 50 years.  Cheaper stuff:  Yaaa!  More recreation:  Yippee! Fatter and happier:  You betcha!

But we were like the proverbial frog in the pot…the water temperature has risen.  And now we find ourselves beholden to nations we are beginning to fear for essential goods, from pharmaceuticals to electronic components. and a thousand other things most are yet unaware of.

So what happens when most of the products we depend on come from a nation we begin to fear and becomes one of our top three enemies? Is it too late to wean our way off our dependence on those wonderful lower prices and fill the void of strategically important components?

Rails to trails:  A symbol of a nation that got itself into an economic death spiral.

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[A little levity:  Is it possible that the the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was prescient, giving a coded economic/fiscal message with the lyric “Wimoweh” really meaning“wean our way” while the Lion sleeps. It was sung by The Tokens after all.  OK, very little.]