I continue to write a column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. It’s a small-town kinda column, ’cause we’re sort of a small town, but it’s also got an egregious deployment of number theory and nested footnotes, ’cause it’s a small town with a big damn university crammed into it. Anyway, this month we meditate on America, austerity, education, efficiency, transience, transportation, and the Traveling Salesman Problem–but, you know, it’s all *for the kids* and their *FUTURES!!!*
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: School Transportation
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If you’re looking to so weaken a society that you can drown it in a bathtub, I suppose you have two options: You can hammer on it with artillery and air raids until it is too shattered and skittish to get out of bed and get anything done, or you can slowly bleed it dry with a million little, seemingly insignificant mosquito bites.
No one flees their homeland over mosquitoes. No one takes up arms against a sea of mosquitoes. We just slap and scratch and kvetch and toss and turn and keep on keeping on.
Until one day we collapse, probably while carrying our kindergartners to school.
. . .
If you’re looking to so weaken a society that you can drown it in a bathtub, I suppose you have two options: You can hammer on it with artillery and air raids until it is too shattered and skittish to get out of bed and get anything done, or you can slowly bleed it dry with a million little, seemingly insignificant mosquito bites.
No one flees their homeland over mosquitoes. No one takes up arms against a sea of mosquitoes. We just slap and scratch and kvetch and toss and turn and keep on keeping on.
Until one day we collapse, probably while carrying our kindergartners to school.
. . .