Shit, Garbage, and Old People

The three recession-proof economic sectors are sewage, refuse, and the elderly. The fourth is sick people, but rhetorical units of three are more powerful than four. And the sick and the elderly form a collective bloc that is exploited in basically the same way, by a unified industry.

You'd think that food would be recession-proof, because everyone needs to eat, but food production and distribution are vulnerable to too many variables. Once the food gets eaten, however, it becomes a much more uniform product. It all runs downhill. The money is in directing the flow and processing the effluent. It's going to happen. I used to see that on a bumper sticker.

Trash in the industrial age became a trickier problem than it was when everything was more readily biodegradable, and there were fewer people chucking it. Even in areas that don't go in for a lot of fancy attempts at recycling, someone needs to dig a hole, transport unwanted items to the hole, and dump them into it. Strip away the illusions from a lot of our waste management programs and you eventually come to a hole anyway. Trucks full of rubbish drive up, unload, and trundle back out again for another load, because we keep unwrapping things. Even when it seems like no one can afford to buy anything, trash keeps spontaneously generating. Most of the products we buy are just trash in waiting.

In this intricately connected world, almost everything seems to pass through the bike shop eventually. In our own little refuge we get money that came from trash and money that came from sick and old people. The shit business is a bit more compartmentalized, because sewage treatment facilities are usually overseen by government entities at some level, even if the design, building, and operation are done by contractors. However, in an area with a lot of septic tanks, a go-getter can buy the right kind of truck and build up a client list. And then there's the portable toilet business. "Your 'business' is our business."

Sick and old people are just another waste product of society. Depending on the age and the severity of the illness, a sick person might be returned to functionality as a tool or a cog in the machinery of society. As for the rest of them, we care for them out of what? Compassion? Superstition? Empathy? All the above. Imagine yourself in need of care or at least of comfort as you fade out. We hang onto people for a number of reasons. While they're in need, a good businessman can rake in a bundle from whoever pays their bills. At the end, a funeral industry takes care of the body. Somehow it doesn't seem quite as lucrative as the big three, but it's kin to both shit and garbage.

With this in mind, we the living take the cash that flows and feed the system with ourselves. If someone comes in dripping money, is it wise to question where it came from?

No one looking at my life choices would ever accuse me of being wise.

Bike infrastructure in a certain self-absorbed lakeside village just got a serious shot in the arm from a "health care" executive who has blithely pledged a half a million dollars for an ambitious construction program centered entirely on mountain biking, with a few enhancements for path riding, mostly to help connect the mountain bike facilities. So far it seems to do diddly crap for road users. It's hard to help road riders. Real transportation infrastructure is a vast circulatory system with many user groups vying for priority consideration of their wants. But if the grand plan for youth opportunity relies on kids being able to ride their bikes to the various places to practice their skills, they're going to need safe ways to get there. Who knows? Some of the little whippers might also discover that they'd like a bike that doesn't feel like such a pig on the pavement. More likely they just hang tough until they get their driver's licenses, so they can buy a truck and haul their toys to various venues near and far.

The trail and parks plan will improve the fortunes of a friend of mine in the business of designing and building such things. He gave up the road a long time ago, probably back at the end of his paper route years. An intrepid adventurer and energetic worker, he knows what he likes, and participates in trickle-down economics with few qualms about the ethics of the funding. Does it matter that you're not making the world as a whole a better place as long as you're making your own neighborhood more fun for yourself and your own kind? "People" to most people usually means "people like me."

The funding will get filtered through a 501(c)(3) non-profit, so that the benevolence is tax-deductible. Being nice should always make business sense. Big philanthropy is just tax evasion with good PR.

When it comes to funding, I started asking way too early in life, "Whose blood is this?" I couldn't always trace it very far, and you have to get money from somewhere. My jobs grew out of my interests and knowledge. In the yacht business and related industries you're in a world completely dependent on disposable income, but growing up in the culture made it seem normal. Lots of worker bees toiled away in the industry and supporting institutions. I was one of them for a few years, before my interest in human powered exploration drew me away from the shore.

If you're not prepared to bite the hand that feeds you, you are not free. That being said, wolves, coyotes, and feral dogs live hard lives and get shot at, while lap dogs and useful breeds get vet care and comfy beds. If Wolfeboro turns into a mountain biking destination, it may improve the shop business, or it may just draw competitors more cynical and less concerned, to finish trampling our aging bodies into the dirt. The overall family behind this current benefactor is already well on the way to turning the town into their own little theme park as it is. On the one hand, we're all a bit grateful to them for subsidizing local landmarks that were no longer able to survive as independent entities in today's economy. On the other hand, it brings us inexorably closer to being members of their household staff, at least indirectly.

Little towns live on their looks these days. Just in this area you can see the ones favored by their bone structure and complexion enjoying the attentions of sugar daddies, while the ones less blessed have to make do with the more frequently abusive relationships offered by rougher companions. There hasn't been much of a real economy in rural New England in decades. As the big forest products industries pulled out and abandoned their extensive timberlands, recreational uses have struggled to pick up the slack. The forest survived as a cash crop. The long harvesting cycle allowed people to play on quite a bit of it between cuts. As that stability has dwindled, the locals figure out ways to pimp out the local attractions to transients who will pay to use them.

In towns that had long ago abandoned resource extraction, where small industry had faded out, the economy has depended on attracting people with money who just like it there. Since the alternative is complete collapse, judgement is suspended. Only a rare idiot will look beyond and wonder what would keep us all afloat on a longer term basis if the current system of enabling the wealthy and tickling them for a trickle eventually runs out of fuel.

Thank you, your lordship

The Walton Family Foundation has established a utopia for bike enthusiasts -- primarily of the off-road persuasion -- around the company town of Bentonville, Arkansas. Because I know someone on the inside, I get to hear about the great work they are doing in their own fiefdom, as well as in other places through generous grants. How fortunate for cyclists that someone in the family is interested in cycling.

Initiatives like the Waltons' promotion of cycling infrastructure, the Gates Foundation's worldwide efforts in aid of global well-being, and billionaire Hansjorg Wyss aiming to buy up 30 percent of the remaining relatively wild land in order to retain a barely sustainable planetary ecosystem put a golden light on a small percentage of the super-rich who happen to like things that are good for rest of us. But it all exists at the whim of the aristocracy.

We're in the mess we're in because the majority of the money has favored destruction. Walmart is regularly criticized for devastating small town business districts and paying its staff so poorly that they need taxpayer assistance to survive. Wyss sold his medical device manufacturing company to Johnson and Johnson, an even bigger corporation fully vested in America's profit-driven, patient-consuming health care racket. He still holds stock in medical research companies equally enmeshed in the current system of medicine for profit. That philanthropic money doesn't grow on trees.

The problem of philanthropists digging one hole to fill another goes back at least to the 19th Century. The great union-fighting titans of the gilded age established our standard of opulence and laid the groundwork for targeted philanthropy in the modern era. But it's all a variation on the whims of the nobility. You know the Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

I have wondered whether a more even distribution of wealth would just lead to more people owning destructive toys and chopping up ecosystems into mini-estates. The current crop of oligarchs sets the tone, because they're really just normal folks like you and me, only unbelievably richer. Mitt Romney -- really just upper middle class with a net worth of merely $250 million -- had a lively conversation with El Queso Grande about all the different machines a person could use to burn gasoline and churn up the lake in pursuit of fun. One of the Walton boys has his own Bell UH-1 "Huey" helicopter he likes to play in. And when I lived on Tuftonboro Neck, some rednecks rode their dirt bikes around a pretty little grassy field, gouging down to subsoil and shredding the air with the rasp of engines, where I had previously seen deer and foxes enjoying peaceful evenings. Only they weren't your average kickers, they were from a famous hotel family that owns an increasing percentage of shorefront along that section of the lake. Normal people. Who wouldn't, if they could afford the equipment?

Left to pure democracy, the planet's survival would probably face no better prospects than it does now. People tend to look at what's right in front of them at any given moment. They'll vote up or down on individual issues without connecting them to each other. We like to keep things simple. I'm no different. But everything is connected, and not in some touchy feely way -- although that is also true. It's all physically tangled together. Cut the tangle and you might sever the expensive and irreplaceable power cord to your favorite piece of electronic equipment along with the that wad of half-worn shoelaces someone threw in the drawer with it. The poor aspire to prosperity as demonstrated by the already prosperous. Normal people want to move up the pyramid, and not to undermine its foundation in case they do get to rise through the tapering layers to its pointy peak.

We thank the nobility for their charity. We ask them for grants and use the facilities they are so kind as to provide. We accept that this is their world because they bought it when the rest of us couldn't. So we can only hope that enough of them want to take good care of it.