The Sound of Progress

PA DANG! This I am PA DANG! told is the PA DANG! sound of progress PA DANG! More specifically, it is the sound of a pile driver PA DANG! operating a couple of hundred yards PA DANG! from my house. It starts at 7 a.m. and ends at 7 p.m., pounding into the soil fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes off.  PA DANG! The pile driver is pushing giant metal rods about fifty feet into the red Virginia clay and these, in time, will support a new elevated subway line.  There is approximately one PA DANG! per second,  so a little quick math tells me there are roughly 21,600  PA DANGs! per day, or 151,200 per week. Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of PA DANGs!

The project, which will completely alter the life of my small Northern Virginia town, is all about taxes and revenues.  The hope is that building up the area with massive parking lots, office buildings and fast food franchises will prove inviting to new businesses great and small. This, in turn, will lure more potential homeowners and renters into an area that presently is mostly freeway, large malls and car lots. Yes, there are parks and walkways included in the presentations made to the local citizenry, and I’m sure a few industrial sculptures will find their way here as well. But to the best of my knowledge, there are no provisions for school, hospitals, police or fire stations. This is worrisome as the schools, elementary, middle and high, are already operating at more than maximum capacity. In fact, most of them are already festooned with temporary trailers that have become permanent fixtures of the landscape. What worries me as well is that this project will add square miles of impermeable surfaces to an area already prone to poor drainage and erosion.

Everyone is very excited about the project, save for the people who —like myself—already live here. We’ve attended dozens of meetings held to educate us to the benefits of this enterprise, and we’ve noted our concerns, but here’s the problem: when you start dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars invested to generate even greater sums in profits, the little voices get lost.

The first time I heard the PA DANG! of the pile drivers, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. A day or so after the noise began, bulldozers came and tore out a large chunk of the woods situated just beyond my house. Sometime earlier this week, a couple of portable toilets magically appeared exactly in my line of sight to support the workers who make the PA DANGs!

 

In the very long run, my small 1960-era house will probably increase in value, and so, of course, will my taxes. Whether I benefit from this will depend on my surviving the tens of millions of  PA DANGs! scheduled for the next five or so.

Frederick Douglass once said that if there is no struggle, there is no progress. I’m struggling. This must be progress. PA DANG!