On the twelfth day of Christmas...

Okay, so I have no idea if this is the twelfth day of Christmas or not. But it has been twelve days since I last posted, so I figured I would give all of you bored cube dwellers an early Christmas gift: a shiny new blog post! At least this way none of you can claim that I never gave you anything. And I sincerely do apologize for not posting anything recently. One of the problems with starting a blog and then laying off of it for awhile is that one can sometimes forget the proper sequence of user id and password. Yes, dear readers, I was having trouble remembering my user id to log onto my own blog. Truly pathetic.

Well, now that we have the painful little bit where I admit my fallibility out of the way, we can get to the meat (mmm....meat) of the blog where I give a delicious rant worthy of being called your Christmas gift. And what, dear readers, have we selected for today's topic of scorn? Answer: A delightful double-header of evil - Wal-Mart and urban sprawl. Now, I won't waste too much time and space on the evils of Wal-Mart. Besides, those of you who are regular readers of the Wife's blog know that were I to speak too ill of Wal-Mart, I would probably come across as the biggest hypocrite alive (if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, follow this link and scroll down to the post for Sunday, Sept. 24). That being said, there is something refreshingly evil about a company willing to build a parking lot around a Mayan altar. Yet if Wal-Mart would just admit to being evil, like some members of the family are grudgingly willing to do, then I might be a bit more accommodating. As it is, Wal-Mart, especially when combined with urban sprawl, is destroying the fabric of America.

So what are small towns to do? This article examines some of the ways that communities are attempting to adapt (plus, it gives you a chance to read The Economist which in my opinion is one of the finest magazines out there). Now, it is admirable that some towns are able to reinvent themselves as Bed and Breakfast destinations, and others as artist colonies, but there is a limit to this. Seriously, how many artist colonies can there be? Plus, how long can a town survive on the backs of starving artists? About the only worse plan would be to build a local economy around the contribution of historians. Likewise, how many people are going to visit a community of Bed and Breakfasts somewhere in north-central South Dakota? Now, I realize that problems related to unattractive locations are not the fault of Wal-Mart or urban sprawl. But when these problems hit otherwise attractive communities within reach of the tentacles of large cities, then it is the fault of those that drive urban sprawl and those that erect new Wal-Marts. Basically, it is Wal-Mart's fault for building stores that manage to devastate local economies in a twenty mile radius, but can only offer jobs to less than half the displaced workforce, not to mention sucking money away from local endeavors. It is developers' fault for pushing city boundaries so far out from their geographical center that it is no longer possible to tell where one city ends and the next begins. And, to a certain extent, it is everyone's fault for not stopping to question the need to buy a large house in the burbs. Is a yard really necessary? Generations of Europeans have grown up without them, and most of those nations have done alright for themselves.

Now, I grew up in the burbs in a house with a big yard, so I realize that my soapbox here has pathetically weak walls that will probably cause it to collapse in the very near future. But I do think that urban sprawl has gone too far. Cities will probably never cover the Great Plains (seriously, does anyone live in North Dakota?), but as cities expand to cover every available acre on both coasts and the old Northwest Territory the need to farm the Great Plains more extensively will grow. And as it does, especially given global warming, we're probably looking at a new Dust Bowl. Of course, I'm probably wrong - after all, I couldn't even remember my user name.