Bellows (part three)

(Click here for part one.)

(Click here for part two.)

Did Ohio do? Or, to put the question less succinctly but with greater accuracy: did Ohio do what Ohio had to do which had to be done? Would you like the truth? I don't know. Hindsight affords clarity but never certainty. I can say I see now how the decision could have been perceived as gutsy or insane. Though many factors were considered, few outcomes could be predicted, and only now can we see the terrible power of desperation. Sure, less death would have occurred in a more sparsely populated state, a state where the key economic indicators were already kept higher by a stronger citizenry. But the critics only see the side of the coin that fell face skyward: pick it up, this tarnished half dollar, the one I found under my pillow when I lost my first tooth, the one I carry with me to this day, the one that has often aided me in making the hardest decisions, the one from which I've always derived my greatest source of hope: turn it over now, feel the beveled edge slide between the tip of your finger and your thumb, and look at the other side of the coin, the side you can't see: witness carnage. The creation of new cities on the lands of our enemies by our nation's youngest and brightest minds, blinded by lack of experience and led by ideals into defecting: city after city, raised only to be razed. Uprising and riots, fire replacing horizons: pain, floods of blood. I am no judge, I am only one with vision. And I will always choose an accident over inevitability.

Percentage points aside, Bellowsville--"Let this magnificence, this approaching artwork," I'd said, the day I'd signed the paperwork, "be my finest calling card, my success"--was no failure: without failure, we can't claim to know the answers are, or even necessarily the questions: the city is beautiful. Wealth and the wealthy who carried it poured into it from both coasts. Their reasons may have been wrong-headed, in that they, I believe, have seen the city from the beginning to be a sort of glorified resort, a place to escape the demands of the real world, like a secret room they always hoped would never belong to anybody more than themselves. Hide but don't seek. A place to achieve a temporary respite from the burdens and tribulations of the old cities of matte stone where we make decisions about new cities of glass and metal. A city survives by the work done within it, and as a result of the new citizenry's collective attitude toward Bellowsville, little real work was performed in the downtown skyscrapers--taller than anything you'll find in New York or Chicago or even St. Martin's Cloak, that former front-runner in the race to be the finest possible work of the hands and minds of man--and less profit was captured within the city limits than was exported outward to the corners of the country. Not that the venture hasn't put a penny or two in my accounts--everything has long since broken even. People still need bread and beer and movies, and in this time of desire for instant gratification, we're unwilling to wait for the day's mail. "Locally owned" and "locally manufactured" have become buzz-phrases sent to the architects of new cities by the angels charged with overseeing such activities from their heavenly perches. Still, though: it's fair to say those first five years were relatively lean ones for we receiving what we'd hoped would be glorious fat.

The slums were what flourished with impudence. It wasn't the arival of the poor came that surprised us; we'd done the research, read the reports; Ohio was littered with poor; the poor long for opportunity; and opportunity can mean nothing more to the destitute than having a vision, the ability to see near them things they could consider hoping to achieve, were they to drudge up within themselves another ounce of survival instinct and consumerist lust. What better place to be than where affordable apartments were placed between towers of glass and metal that bent the morning sunlight into rainbows on one side, and expanses of trees and shrubbery on the other that barely concealed the rich as they pranced about like fawns and baboons playing badminton and eating sushi and drinking Flaming Dr. Peppers? Nevermind the bridges that arced overhead connecting one to the other, the relative lack of roads leading out of the slums. New roads could be built, certainly, new chances to achieve manufactured the same way the ground under their feet was made seemingly overnight. Correct? No: it was the amount of demand for access to our slums that caught us off-guard. We'd built them long and narrow, intending to take only as much space as the river would later require, with little expectation that what we did build would be filled, believing we could easily reform the poor we could in time to make them respectable and valuable members of our wealth-trodden society. But so many came so quickly we had to create a waiting list, our Value Assessment, Realignment, and Training teams could not properly indoctrinate a tenth of the hopeful poor; people camped over mile-wide tracts of land in the lawless areas beyond Bellowsville's borders. That the waiting lists recycled fairly frequently was due to the skyrocketing suicide rates; hope can be a deadening thing.