Smallpox?

[Tim May]

On Wednesday, September 26, 2001, at 11:43 AM, John Young wrote:

> David Honig wrote optimistically:
>
>> Zero unemployment, rents drop in cities, and smooth
>> skin becomes even more desirable.
>
> Not if New York City leaders get their way: high rents,
> pestilence, repulsive jobs, diseased bodies, will continue
> as intended for the Apple like other great cities of the
> world, with increased lies about their magnificence.
> Which they are for a few world class bloodsuckers
> who visit the scenes of their poisonous crimes now
> and then, bedhop ghouls at $30M pied a terres, spread
> their pox among the financial, legal and house help.
> Few of the titans rushing to rebuild New York live there
> full time, wise ones they are to remain missing.
>

As I write, this instant, I can see Monterey across the patch of the bay 
that lies between my house and that peninsula.  Crystal clear blue skies 
and a mild temperature. The glorious Santa Lucia Mountains, rising up 
from Big Sur. At night, the lights of the Monterey Bay Aquarium 
twinkling in the distance, the lights of the squid boats in the Bay. In 
the other directions, bucolic hillsides with scattered homes, farms, 
apple orchards, and a few vineyards. Three hundred feet below me, a 
country road winding its way into the redwoods.

Upwind of me, where the bad stuff would blow in from, open space, 
forests, and then the Pacific Ocean. 80% of the time the winds are from 
this direction.

If I need to visit a more densepacked area, I have Monterey and Salinas 
to the south, Santa Cruz about 15 miles away, and San Jose/Palo 
Alto/Mountain View/Silicon Valley over a ridge, about 40 miles away. For 
a trip into Gomorrah, San Francisco is 80 miles north, either up the 
beautiful coast route or inland via Silicon Valley.

I can't see why the alleged advantages of NYC ("You can get felafel at 4 
in the morning!") could ever justify living in such a antheap, such a 
deviation from what a hundred thousand years of evolution prepared us 
for.

(I note that most of the CNBC reporters I see everyday talk about their 
commutes in from outlying areas, mostly in areas of New Jersey about 
15-50 miles west of NYC. And no doubt many who work in NYC choose to 
live in Connecticutt, out on Long Island, etc. New York folks certainly 
know more about this than I do.)

I wonder if these attacks, with more to come, will push more people into 
what social theorists have been talking about for decades, the flight 
from the city.  In recent years, much has been made of the reverse 
flight, the gentrification of former ghetto areas in cities. This trend 
may reverse yet again.

If, as many of us expect, one of the upcoming attacks is biological, 
expect more to flee to outlying areas.

Cities are just such perfect soft targets.

--Tim May