Jeff Whitten, Local Columnist
Don’t worry, be happy.
It can always get worse. I suspect it probably will.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know this part of Georgia has moved from being merely in the crosshairs of developers – the late, great Liberty County Commission Chairman Jimmy “The Original” Smith coined that term back in 1990-something to explain what was about to happen here – to being nuked till it glows by said developers and their shiny happy henchpeople.
It’s not their fault, of course, all those assorted and sundry players in the real estate game. Some folks think Mother Nature needs to earn its keep, just like the rest of us, or be put on some sort of work requirement. That used to mean growing crops or as habitat for livestock or wildlife or recreation.
Not anymore. And for many of us it’s a crying shame, a downright tragedy even, what has become of this part of the planet in the name of economic progress.
Consider:
Open fields one after another being turned into shoddy plastic housing developments named after trees that wouldn’t have stood a chance of remaining upright there in any case.
Countless acres of woods cleared to make way for warehouses or manufacturers of foreign goods or office parks or strip malls, because we all know we need much, much more of that sort of stuff. Georgia may rank low in certain social welfare categories, but it’s certainly No. 1 for bidness.
Waters and fragile coastal ecosystems overrun with recreational boaters who toss beer cans into tidal streams and pollute the quiet with loud outboard motors and stereo systems booming out bad bro-country rap.
Florida housing developers who (allegedly) build so-called upscale neighborhoods over ancient remains and protected habitats apparently without a second thought to what they’re destroying. They made a movie or two about that once. Remember Poltergeist?
Economic developers who tell us they’re bringing in jobs for local residents only to have to recruit people from elsewhere to fill them, thereby adding more growth to a place that wasn’t short of it to start with, and could’ve done without a lot of it.
And, roads already overburdened with traffic but with an eye on more to come, so much so in fact it’s turning Coastal Georgia into metro-Atlanta right before our eyes and if you want to get somewhere you might want to leave a couple hours early just to make sure you don’t get hung up in traffic. There’s liable to be a wreck somewhere, and once that happens the rest of the place goes into gridlock.
Cases in point: Took some acquaintances of our’s three hours to get from Springfield to Richmond Hill a while back. It took us nearly that long to get from Eulonia to Rincon last week. Every road you could possibly get on was covered up with semis and SUVs and school buses, and there were something like a half dozen wrecks on various roads to add to the fun of sitting in your pickup wondering where all these people came from and why can’t any of them drive.
It didn’t used to be like this, not here, not even as recently as 20 years ago, which was about when the aforementioned Smith issued his warning to your’s truly, then as now a funny-looking little reporter with a notebook, as we walked down a dirt road lined with live oaks and Spanish moss somewhere probably long since paved over and overrun with traffic.
At the same time, the Southern drawl in much of its varied glory is disappearing from places like Rincon and Richmond Hill and Pooler and Savannah and in my home state of South Carolina, and being replaced by a sort of generic collective mode of speech hard to distinguish from anywhere else. Go Buckeyes, eh?
Not that it’s happened overnight, none of it. It’s been like Chinese water torture or death by paper cuts, until all of a sudden you look around and discover it’s gotten so much worse of late and the old adage that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone now resonates more clearly each day.
This even as the money- makers and the bigshots and the people who matter to themselves take turns telling us just how wonderful we’ve got it.
I suspect they believe it, too, uttered as it may be from the vantage point of their wallets – just as I suspect many of those who profit most off the increased population density live furthest from it and thus can escape its worst effects.
If that’s a gloomy take on this gloomy Thursday morning, so be it, but this part of the world is getting sillier by the minute.
You hear candidates for local office talk about managing infrastructure and growth and no doubt being sincere, yet candidates have been saying much the same for the past couple decades and look where that’s got us.
The same could be said for the notion that more rooftops mean lower taxes, an old horse the real estate industry rode forever to cram ever more rooftops into this place. And what’s the solution? Another penny tax or two or three.
It’s a clown show. All we need now is for someone to tear down the City Center or South Bryan Administrative Complex and build a ballroom on it and, well, there we’d be. In traffic hell, sure, but with a ballroom for those who can afford helicopters.
On that note, there was a time not all that long ago one could expect at least some sanity from the federal government, for all its faults.
That too appears to be a thing of the past.
Now we’ve got an administration obsessed with punishing its political enemies and flexing our country’s law enforcement and military might against targets too weak to fight back and a Congress divided loosely into two camps – those who hate the President and all he stands for and those who lick his boots and press their noses into places best left unsaid in community newspapers.
Like undeveloped places in this part of Georgia, middle ground in Washington is getting hard to find.
That’s why in Washington, as in Coastal Georgia, we need statesmen, not politicians. And at the end of the day, it’s our fault we don’t get them.
Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.