Why people shouldn't be living in Phoenix, Arizona, or any city on Planet Earth


If you've ever been in Phoenix in the summertime, you may have wondered "Why would people live there?" It gets HOT in Phoenix. Not warm, not uncomfortable, but life-threateningly, dangerously, fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. During the big heat wave recently it was like standing on the sun. And there's no other way to describe it, the city should not exist, it's a monument to man's arrogance!

And I agree. So, the question is, where should people live? If you're in Phoenix, chances are your first thought is: San Diego! To which I have one word: earthquakes. I've lived in Southern California, and believe me, if you're a worrying person like me, it's not easy getting a good night's sleep thinking about that. Don't get me wrong, I love coastal California, but putting several huge cities on the San Andreas Fault is really just a monument to man's arrogance. Or confidence. Or faith.
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
My first thought along these lines was when I was delivering newspapers on a dark and cold Sunday morning in the dead of winter in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The temperatures there regularly fall to thirty degrees below zero. And if you're not sure what that means, that's about sixty degrees BELOW the temperature which ice freezes. So as I stood there in the snow, with my newspapers, I really wondered what in the world people were doing living there? I was there because I was born there, and believe me, I got out of there as soon as I graduated from High School, got a car, and learned to read a map.

OK, so now I know what you're thinking? Where, exactly, on Planet Earth should people live then? How about a Tropical Paradise? Of course there are things called Hurricanes, and Typhoons.

Let's see, how about where a LOT of people choose to live, along along the eastern edge of what is known as "the Ring of Fire". That's where Tokyo is.

Yeah, I know now it sounds like I'm just picking on cities. Pick any city on planet earth and I'll give you a reason that people shouldn't be there. And now you see what I mean, because it's all about compromise. The people in Pompeii were happy there, with the beautiful weather, and the delicious grapes, until that darned volcano erupted.

I live in Phoenix. I shrug my shoulders on days that are insanely hot, and am glad that I'm not out in it, and that I have great air conditioning in my car and house. My friends in California don't spend a lot of time dwelling on earthquakes, they focus on the cool ocean breezes. I'm sure the happier people in Pompeii were enjoying the wine, not looking at Mt. Vesuvius. And that's how it works. The big blue marble is a very dangerous place for people to live, but it's the only home we have. That's us, that's home.



Image at the top of this post: Flying over Phoenix, Arizona in the 1950s

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more