Jeff Whitten, Local Columnist

My wife used to give me a hard time when I complained about traffic, bless my heart.

“You should get your own island,” she’d say. “Then you could have your own road and nobody could drive on it but you.”

I looked into the idea but somehow it never materialized. Islands don’t come cheap, for one thing. Roads, neither.

And what with the proliferation hereabouts of “gardens that grow people,” which is some kind of weird developer euphemism for subdivisions, I suspect even if I had my own road on my own island someone would find out about it, use it as a shortcut and pretty soon I’d be right back where I started from, complaining about traffic.

That’s how it works, you know. Taxpayers build a road to help relieve traffic congestion, developers get a twinkly look in their eye, then build a couple strip malls and a 500 house subdivision and six or seven warehouses and a Korean automotive plant; the next thing anybody knows, we need traffic lights or roundabouts everywhere because the whole place has turned into a sort of regional Poolerville where you might as well get used to seeing the same traffic signal go from red to green and back a couple times before you can finally put it in your rear view mirror. And now my wife – who mostly still follows the old rule of “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” -- has started grousing about traffic and development, knocking down trees and sending wildlife packing.

Finally.

“Welcome to the club,” I said.

Then she said something to the effect that if you’d told her 40 years ago we’d be dealing with the kind of development we’re seeing right on top of us now she would’ve told you to go see a psychiatrist.

Or words to that effect.

But she’s originally from Arabi, a South Georgia town so small it’s only got one convenience store and, last time we were there, no stoplights and just about no traffic.

In fact, the last time we went down there we again reveled in something refreshing on the way. Once you got on the other side of McRae, which has its own homemade Statue of Liberty, traffic just about dried up. Nobody on your bumper, nobody in front of you trying to text and drive at the same time and so going 50 mph, then 60, then 40, and back up the scale. Just calm, easy driving.

It was nice.

It was sort of that way here, 30-40 years ago.

Sure, traffic was bad in spots. Highway 196 - you can always tell a transplant if they use “state route” in front of the number - to Hinesville from Richmond Hill was two lane and so maniacal to drive it scared some people, me included.

It also killed lots of people, and at one point

the carnage from traffic accidents came so frequently and horrifically a volunteer fire chief named Otis Willis over in Liberty County asked me to do a story and maybe get people to drive with better sense because his firefighters and him were getting PTSD from responding to awful wrecks. Otis later came to work in Bryan County, and was one of the best.

Anyway, that was back when folks read newspapers, before social media kind of revealed us to ourselves and made us heartily sick of each other.

Ah well. I had set out to write this week about cage fighting in the front yard of the White House, so might as well visit that topic a second.

As you probably know, the President of the United States of America celebrated his 80th birthday by holding a Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fight in his front yard on Sunday night, and live streamed it to whoever subscribed to Paramount.

I don’t, and so missed it, but then I am not much of a UFC fan. Watching people beat each other bloody doesn’t appeal to me all that much these days, for one thing, and for another the wrong people were in the cage to make it interesting.

Given the martial and some (me) might say looney mindset of our current Secretary of Defense, er, War, I might have paid money to see if he can back up all that smack against an opponent of equal size and paranoia.

It might also have been instructive to throw a few congressmen in the cage and see how they stack up going mano a mano.

Somehow, I have this mental image of Sen. John Fetterman squeezing Rep.

Buddy Carter’s head until he says “Uncle Sam,” so maybe not.

But all that spectacle instead of fixing things brings me to this. What if our local governments did the same? Cage matches and mud wrassling in front of the Courthouse or Administrative Complex in South Bryan? Or, say, wet T-shirt contests at City Hall, complete with hashtags about the Hill.

And how about a good belly flop competition?

There’s a pond over there by Buckhead East and judging by my last trip to Walmart, there are plenty of bellies in the area capable of displacing large amounts of water. I could probably compete in the shrimp division myself.

Remember, it’s all about Making America Great Again.

Your friend, Jeff.

Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.