Progress - A Short Essay

 

Bulldozers and dump trucks invade the peace of a quiet morning in the countryside. They pull up the towering hackberry, oak and box elder trees by the roots, push them over in a fatal huddle and burn them to ash. Then they turn the grassy fields to mud and squash the buttercup bulbs that grew along the walkway of an ancient farmhouse that no longer exists.

Eventually the mud will be replaced by winding, paved streets lined with seemingly endless rows of cookie cutter dwellings, ugly in their sameness of trendy configurations.

Never mind that several birds lost their nests filled with hungry fledglings when the trees fell, or that the wild turkeys will stop congregating on the hillside to soak in the sunshine and share their complaints about the callousness of the human race. The deer will have to find shelter from the thunderstorms elsewhere. The fish in the creek will swim upstream to avoid being choked by the toxic dust that will emanate from the multitude of cars constantly passing by. The raccoons and possums will take advantage of the humans’ capacity for creating waste, and make nuisances of themselves until they meet their fate on the roadway some dark, cold night.

The country folk will move farther out into the boonies if they can afford to buy another place, which is quite possible since developers always seem to have more funds to procure land. Those who refuse to sell will have to get used to the encroaching sprawl, and shore up their fences and add extra insulation to their walls, to keep out the noise.

Is that what progress really is? Just noise?