The Monkey Wrench Gang

A Quote and my Ensuing Thoughts

“All this fantastic effort- giant machines, road networks, strop mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high tension towers and high-voltage power lined; the devastation of the landscape, the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies- all that ball-breaking labor and all that back-breaking expense and all that heart breaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for what? All that for what? Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride factories and copper smelters, to charge the neon tubing that makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropolis of southern California, to keep alive that phosphorescent putrefying glory (all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville, U.S.A.” (Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. (1975) p. 173)

            Do you ever think about how big the world is? Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the vastness, the seeming infinity of a million, a billion- the ships and hands and faces and personalities and thoughts responsible for my pen, my water bottle, my computer, and the vast sea of ideas and concepts needed to facilitate the miraculous assembly of anything. The people working at the factory, their families, the people loading the merchandise on to trucks then boats or maybe planes and then more trucks, all of which run on gas which came from more people and more families- the planes and trucks themselves- assembled and manufactured independently of their cargo and the think-tank dudes who sat around and said things like, “Imagine if we made something…round! Yes, round! And stuck this round thing on a platform and moved things with it…” and a couple centuries later, “Let’s stick wings on the things with wheels and maybe we can fly.” It completely baffles me, and subsequently causes me to dislike places where money is exchanged for material items. I once heard that someone figured out that money is a measure of the amount of work done to produce an item- if so, it seems like everyone’s in debt to their own feckless desires and to the faceless masses lost in the innumerable billions.