By Jim Sack
I was in Istanbul a year ago, a city of 10 to 17 million. They don’t really know how many live there, hundreds more arrive each hour, the city has become nearly unmanageable. In May of this year I visited Moscow, another huge city on the scale of New York, but in a more compact form. A friend was in Beijing and Shanghai, tens of millions in each city. It goes on. There are scores of cities of those gargantuan sizes.
They were certainly stimulating, at first. Istanbul and Moscow were packed. Sidewalks were crowded, the subways reminded me of those chutes at a livestock yards carrying thousands of people (moooo) a minute to the next platform, the next car, the next stop, restaurants were packed, shops were a cacophony of shouts and demands, the streets were swollen with cars and busses and cycles, noises combined to a roar. People, people, people, people.
Each time when I returned to Fort Wayne I was struck by the wide openness of our little city, hardly anyone downtown, hardly any traffic (really), relative quiet. A retirement community, of sorts. It was like going from the mall to the middle of the woods. The comparisons prompted me to think about government and the independent life. Davy Crockett, Zebuleon Pike, Daniel Boone, the Oregon Trail and Kekionga came to mind.
Simply put, when America was younger the density of population was something like one person per a few hundred square miles. Families depended upon themselves for the majority of their sustenance. My mother, for example, grew up on a farm in a small village in eastern Kentucky. They raised their own livestock and butchered same. My mother, now nearly 90, was taught to slit the throat of a pig, to help cut it into portions, to preserve it and then to cut and serve it. They raised cattle, hunted deer, foraged the woods for berries and other edibles, including medicinal herbs, their garden fed ten kids and kinfolk passing through. They dug their own well, built their two seater outhouse, built their house, raised their barn, dredged a pond for their cattle, plowed fields with oxen and had an acre sized vegetable garden. School was a mile away, they walked, they wore flour sacks, shoes lasted through two or three hand-me-downs. Their farm was 600 acres and in the family from 1790. Consequently, there were not many rules or regulations to worry them, except those that were self-imposed.
When she moved to Indianapolis in the 1940s there were suddenly many, many more rules: buying for bus rides, negotiating cross walks, obtaining a beautician’s license. The city had electrical codes, traffic laws, social norms, police, fire fighters, water rules, drainage regulations, etc., etc., etc. In Lily, Kentucky, there were no stop signs, they had precious few codes or laws that had not stemmed from the ancient codes of the hills and the pioneer families that settled in that area. There were few head-on collisions between oxen and horse. Life in Lily was just much, much less structured and legislated. Traditions ruled. There was plenty of space.
We are a long way from Lily. Lily is a long way from Lily. As our population grows there are more demands for rules to govern our interaction. It was increasingly be the case here, as we add more people to our population. We can decry increasing regulation, but it seems inevitable.
The other extreme is Moscow or Istanbul. While in Istanbul I noticed that there were very, very few stop lights. Traffic seemed to flow well enough, each intersection was a cause for caution by each driver, they paid attention. There were so many pedestrians that cars simply had to inch through in places. Rules were established by those in the situation. In fact, merchants would tell me that they had to form their own associations to manage neighborhoods, to protect their businesses, to provide for their schools, to inspect buildings and utilities and resolve drainage problems. There were simply too many people for the central government to be effective.
It seems to me that our population growth has to be slowed or reversed or the stresses of living in Moscow or Istanbul, Lagos, Cairo, Bejing, New York, Shanghai, London, Tokyo, Kiev, Bucuresti and a few hundred more mega-cities will befall us all. We will all look and feel like to those subway riders in the chutes heading for the next ride to…where?
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