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Jeff Whitten: Talking (and driving) in circles
Jeff Whitten

Jeff Whitten

Local Columnist

I bumped into a neighbor of mine the other day and we got to talking.

“I don’t get this Juneteenth holiday,” he said. “What are we celebrating?”

I looked at him for a second, trying to come up with an answer. He’s not a bad fellow, but sometimes I think he thinks anything that wasn’t cooked up and approved by the leaders of the Make America Great Again movement is a dark plot by the mainstream media and the rest of us hippies against real Americans. I suspect he’s not the only one.

“Freedom,” I said, and told him what little I know of the Juneteenth holiday, namely that it celebrates the 1865 emancipation of America’s slaves. “What’s wrong with celebrating freedom?”

Besides, I added, I’ve been to a few Juneteenth celebrations and had a great time, and I’d recommend them to anybody.

“Folks, these are some of the nicest you’ll ever meet,” I said. “Good people, great food and music and a day celebrating freedom. It’s kind of like Independence Day, only in June. What’s not to like?”

He kinda grinned at me like I’d sprouted peace signs out my ears and after a bit we changed the subject.

Truth is, we get along even if we don’t see eyeto- eye on politics, maybe because we do see eye-toeye on a lot of stuff.

Take speeders and the ever-expanding amount of traffic hereabouts as an example. And yep, it seems every road improvement just creates more traffic for the rest of us.

Both of us live on the same road, a much-abused half-mile residential street connecting two heavily traveled two-lane-rural-but-increasingly- residential-roads that link a pair of increasingly busy state highways.

Once upon a time – say up to 1995 – there wasn’t much traffic on any of these roads. Now, traffic is all over the place and at all times of day, and since we’re both retired codgers we get to hear folks turn onto the street upon which we live and hit the gas over and over and over again.

To the tune, it sometimes seems, of about 4,000 times a day. A lot of it comes courtesy pickups, lots of pickups. And little drifter cars, or whatever the heck they call themselves. SUVs of every description fly past. Dump trucks rumble past. Sometimes even semis journey down our street– even though there’s a “no trucks” sign on both ends of the street to ward off the big rigs.

Part of the increase in traffic is because nobody works much anymore. They do drive around throwing fast food wrappers and vape cartridges and all sorts of other flotsam and jetsam out of windows while traveling from point A to point B so they can turn around and go back to A later on.

Part of the increase in traffic is the 5.9 million extra people in the Coastal Empire. That’s far more than there used to be, say 15-20 years ago, and every one of them drives five vehicles.

Should you think I’m full of it, and I sometimes am, just take a day or two and take a couple laps from Richmond Hill over to Pembroke by way of Statesboro, swing into Effingham County down to Savannah, then head back to the thrill that is the Hill by way of Pooler, which, by the way, is the brainchild of our current Congressman, Earl Buddy Carter.

That alone should disqualify him from ever holding office again, but alas, it hasn’t so far. And for what it’s worth, I liked Buddy better before he became a MAGA warrior – and also for what it’s worth, I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I vote for whoever I’m least disenchanted with at the moment.

And I’ll stop the politics here because the truth is the pendulum will swing back the other way soon enough, and what’s undone in this election will be redone in another one, and before you know it the process of one side whacking the other will repeat itself again and again, even after most of us here now shuffle off this mortal coil, where we’ll get our just reward from the man upstairs.

Besides, it’s more fun to gripe and whine about things that really matter – like traffic, which is kind of where this column was going a minute ago, and complain some more about that smirking bully of a Fox Entertainment host/secretary of defense who is going around changing names of Army forts and ships for no good reason, and the way developers and their elected representatives are turning the Coastal Empire and South Carolina Lowcountry into one vast Pooler/Garden City/industrial park.

Plus, while I don’t drive as much as I used to, I know it’s getting more lunatic on our roads by the day. That’s because: A. It seems every time I get on I-95 or Highway 204 something weird, stupid, weirdly stupid or stupidly weird happens, and B. My neighbor has quit going to Pooler unless he absolutely has to, and it’s only about 13 miles down the road. “Takes too long to get there,” he said, “and then you’re stuck in traffic when you do get there.”

I suggested he complain to our congressman and enjoy Juneteenth, and maybe someday we’ll have a Developer-free December — a freedom from traffic, and the kind of racket that doesn’t come from talking heads, and all who create it.

Now retired, Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.

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There’s something about the Fourth of July that makes us all kids again. The fireworks, the cookouts, the watermelon juice running down your arm—it’s pure Americana. And yes, for many of us, that includes a hot dog sizzling on the grill.
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