I knew that I always wanted to be a writer. I loved dipping my feathered pen into the bottle of ink and watching the wisdom sink into the parchment. The rat-tat-tat of the typewriter made my heart go pitter-pat, as I connected the dots and brought wisdom unto the world.
In my journalistic mode, I could dial up anybody on my Princess phone, watch that dial whirl, and capture the thoughts of anybody on the other end.
What’s that you say? You think that maybe my love affair with ancient technology doomed me to failed obsolescence; that my failure to forecast the future inhibited my ability to achieve my glorious objectives?
Oh, ye of little faith. That’s not how America works any more. Once you have a really pretty idea, the assumption is that the world will freeze in a position exactly as it was when you came up with the idea, giving you practically forever to achieve your objective.
Look at Connecticut’s dreamy mass-transit delusions, fueled in large part by federal money that doesn’t ask too many questions.
Connecticut picked a moment in time and, by God, we’re sticking with it. Dad got up in the morning, drove to the factory in the urban core by 7:30 a.m., and came home at 4 p.m. or so. We can design bus and train service that will get him out of his car and into mass transportation, be it a high-speed train from here to there, or a really wonderful bus-transit lane between Hartford to New Britain — because, after all, there are really a lot of factories in Hartford and New Britain.
We won’t worry our pretty little heads about the fact that suburb-to-suburb commuting by white-collar folks who value flexibility will make a hash out of our silly projections about how many folks will jump on the bus. We won’t think too hard about the real high-speed trains overseas, which connect large, distant metropolitan areas, not odd little clusters of people scattered hither and yon, interested in an occasional trip to a real city.
No, no, we aren’t going to talk about the delusional urban planners who think that thousands of us are going to rent those empty apartments and condos in Hartford, because that is where we want to live, free of the need for buses to and from New Britain. We’ll just give money to both sides; we don’t care who wins — or whether both sides are nuts.
When Florida Gov. Rick Scott wisely rejected $2.4 billion in federal money for a fantasy high-speed train that would saddle his state with lingering costs, Connecticut and a number of other hungry states begged for the money. Tomorrow? Next year? Ten years from now? Oh, everything will be just fine.
As it stands right now, when Connecticut’s new paid sick leave mandate kicks in, I’ll be able to take a day off from my factory job, drive to downtown Hartford and say hi to the folks at the Hartford Business Journal; then drive to the real downtown in West Hartford Center for lunch and upscale shopping; followed by a bit of middle-brow shopping in the retail colossus known as Manchester; then a bit of consulting with clients at the numerous office buildings in Glastonbury — all without benefit of a bus between Hartford and New Britain, or a high-speed train from here to Vermont, wherever that is.
If Connecticut is worried about losing construction jobs, if the mass-transit scam explodes, we could construct a monument to Cohen the Columnist. People would come to see that — maybe even on a bus.
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Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
