In Ann Arbor where I live, there are potholes galore, and many people complain about the city doing a piss-poor job of fixing them. As one local analyst puts it, “Ann Arbor Has Third Worst Roads in Michigan and Some Seriously Fed Up Residents“:
Since 2008, Ann Arbor has been at the top of MITA’s list of cities with the worst roads in the state of Michigan. With its Road Repair Millage that brings in $9-$11 million dollars per year in funds that, in theory, are supposed to be used for road repair, Ann Arbor in 2010, was judged to have the third worst roads of out of Michigan’s 1,800 municipalities.
Local politicos and city staff have tried to float all sorts of “explanations.” Hard winter is generally at the top of the list. As in, “My goodness, this was an exceptionally hard winter and that’s why there’s grass growing in those potholes.”
Fourth Ward Council member Margie Teall blamed Ann Arbor potholes on sloppy drivers. “If people would just drive more lightly on the roads, we wouldn’t have such problems with crumbling road beds,” Teall told anyone who would listen to her.
Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo, with a look of distaste in his eyes, blamed the city’s various union leaders for the proliferation of potholes. “The unions are the cause of the city’s pothole problem. Damn them.” It wasn’t immediately clear whether Rapundalo was damning the union leaders or the potholes.
I don’t know how to drive “more lightly,” much less persuade the populace to do that, so I have been puzzling over that statement to no avail.
As to how the city might be persuaded to fix the crumbling road beds, perhaps Ann Arbor women could do what the women of Barbacoas, Columbia are doing, and threaten to withhold sex:
Women of Barbacoas, a small town in remote southern Colombia, are using access to their netherregions as a bargaining chip in trying to sex starve the men of town and, by extension, the government into doing something about the sorry state of the road that leads from their hamlet of 40,000 people to the rest of civilization. Mudslides as a result of heavy seasonal rainfall has left the road in such a sorry state that the 35 mile journey from Barbacoas to the nearest town takes nearly 10 hours. The government has promised to fix the road, but so far has not followed through.
On second thought, that might not work in Ann Arbor, for a number of reasons. For starters, the idea would be rejected out of hand as sexist. Not only are there many women who work on road beds, but aren’t men just as capable of threatening to withhold sex from women as women are of withholding sex from men? The only way to make a sex withholding plan work in Ann Arbor would be for everyone to threaten to withhold sex until the crumbling road beds are fixed.
You know, like, when you’re being screwed, just say no!
More seriously, the main problem with a literal implementation of the Barbacoas plan in Ann Arbor is that “The Men” here are not charged with fixing the roads collectively. To make the analogy work, the taxpayers have to be seen as the women and government as the men, and then the sex withholding threat becomes a tax withholding threat.
In many ways Ann Arbor taxpayers — and by logical extension oppressed taxpayers everywhere — are like the oppressed women of Barbacoas!
We need to say no!
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8 responses to “Saying “NO” to being screwed”
[…] at the blog Classical Values, the author posted an entry today under the title, “Say ‘NO’ to being screwed.” Eric Scheie, who is running for City Council against Fourth Ward incumbent Marcia Higgins, writes, […]
I know Michigan is a big union state – Are unions blocking the use of ploymer or rubber modified asphalt?
The new types of pavement are more resistant to heat, cold, and weather. In the past unions have lobbied against the stuff because they will be repaving less often.
” . . . drive more lightly” Hi-lari-ous. Of course she’s in government. Seriously though, I’ve pondered this phenomenon of disparity between quality of road maintanence by location for some time. Where my wife and I live now, town of about 40,000, county of 90+ thousand the roads absolutely suck, to the point of being dangerous in places. Our area is hilly, the foothills of the Smokies in southeastern Tennessee, and roads naturally curve, climb and descend with the terrain but the quality of road construction here; narrow lanes, no shoulders, crumbling in places along with questionable drivers have led to us being forced off the road several times to avoid accidents.
The puzzle for me is that the county we lived in before (borders this one just to the north) had a considerably smaller population, unemployment that hovered around 10% long before the economy tanked and very little in the way of revenues but the roads there were and are superior by an order of magnitude than the roads here.
My wife and I have decided it all depends on management; mix of personalities, skills, motivation, conscientiousness and levels of corruption. It clearly, at least locally, can’t have much if anything to do with funding or lack thereof.
I say go south to Ohio and chop off a few thousand deflated heads, from buckeye fans. Place one head in each hole. As football season nears, the heads will swell and the problem will be solved.
I claim that there shouldn’t be quotes in saying no.
It’s really a kind of indirect speech.
Correction NOted!
[…] Eric Scheie provides the context for said denunciation: In Ann Arbor where I live, there are potholes galore, and many people complain about the city doing a piss-poor job of fixing them. As one local analyst puts it, “Ann Arbor Has Third Worst Roads in Michigan and Some Seriously Fed Up Residents.” […]
[…] am delighted to report that my proposal for sex withholding to force Ann Arbor to repair its roads (as is being done in Barbacoas, Columbia) was linked by P.D. […]