Broken Escalators

The title of this blog is actually "Broken Escalators", at least for the moment. I really don't feel the need to have much of a title for this, and would probably be satisfied with just a "tinfoilhats.org" or "journal". This title just kind of came to me while going up an escalator in a shopping mall. And so, this is where it gets weird.

Escalators are one of the more decadent things that we have in this modern world. An elevator helps people who can't walk at all get up or down floors. That's a worthy goal. It also doesn't run except when people are actually in it. It probably doesn't really save an appreciable ammount of energy by not running all the time, and in fact, may use more by starting and stopping, but that is not the point of this. The escalator moves people from one floor to another, but it is moving people that are (presumably and hopefully) perfectly capable of moving themselves. Are we that soft of a people that we can't walk up 30 steps? What is the root of this? When did we get like this?

So, the thought of a broken escalator was more of a thought of what a future world might look like. A world similar to that prophesized by Tyler in Fight Club.

In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

It's not so much that I want to bring down society, nor do I really think that I'm turning into Chicken Little or preaching millenialism. Rather, more and more, I am finding myself thinking that this current state of affairs cannot last. Sooner or later, everything will fall apart, and I would posit that there is a good chance it will be similar to the fall of Rome. Perhaps not as pronounced, and we certainly wouldn't be in for an entire repeat of the Dark Ages, but we would be in for a major depression, globally, that would go on for quite some time. A contraction of the world economy, if you will.

Perhaps this is a bit of an over-the-top kind of concern. I'll leave the all-out doomsaying and tiliting at windmills for another entry, but now I'd like to tie it back into the title(remember what this about?) Imagine the worst. The government has declared martial law, and rounds up trouble makers of some kind(anarchists, communists, terrorists, refugees, homeless, whatever the group of day is) and their sympathisers, and puts them in various large buildings for safe keeping while order is restored. Imagine your local shopping mall with partitions up in various hallways and such to make separate rooms for various groups. The small stores still have the cages over the entrance ways, the larger ones have been opened to provide more shelter for people. Imagine the escalators not working because they cost too much to run.

I don't know that something like this would actually happen... It's not really a pleasant thought... but I would only be moderately surprised to see something like this within my lifetime.