Beautiful Day

My apologies to regular readers. I was at a conference in Virginia Beach from Thursday until Saturday. Friday afternoon featured a beautiful 88 degree day without a cloud in the sky. My hotel sat right on the water so I enjoyed an afternoon with the surf and sand.

At some point during that afternoon I turned away from the Dean Koontz novel I was reading to survey my surroundings. I walked down to the ocean and waded in to my knees (water was too cold to go any further!) To one side I saw two somewhat plump children about ten years old defiantly running into the surf. Our nanny staters would bemoan the fact that the children had grown slightly overweight. I saw it as beauty. How wonderful to live in a nation where so much is so abundantly available. How rare that is in history!

I turned to look at the line of hotels extending about a quarter mile to the south and miles to the north. All moderately sized, they came in different forms, but not much variety of color. From behind them, you could see the multicolored (mostly pastel and white) shops across Atlantic Avenue. Our environmentalist friends would bemoan the presence of endless citadels of humanity and pine for the days when Virginia Beach was a pristine and savage place, scrub trees on the sand, swamps a few hundreds of yards inland. They see humanity as intruders upon the world and seek to limit man's reach as much as possible, no matter what that might mean to real, everyday people. The proliferation of hotels in Virginia and elsewhere creates a competitive environment where establishments must offer good service at reasonable prices. Reasonable prices mean that people on average or even poor incomes can scrape together money to take their children or just themselves to a decent vacation. Environmentalists not only want to limit the number of hotels and cottages, they also want to drive up the price of gas and shrink the size of vehicles. How can an inland family squeeze into a compact and pay outlandish prices for gas to go to the beach. Travel educates and broadens the mind, even if it just goes to the beach. Environmentalist policies would drive travel beyond the affordability of many people who can scrape together money to do it now. In an environmentalist world, travel is only for an elite few, namely themselves. They want it this way because they see common men, women, and children as invaders upon their secular creation, destroyers of a static sense of nature that they invented and has no basis in true reality.

Progress is cheap vacations, cheap power, cheap food, and drained swamps. Regress is rising prices, rising scarceness, and fewer opportunities for travel. The self-styled "progressives" believe in rolling back the progress of the industrial world, limiting its benefits to a few, and creating artificial scarcity. Virginia Beach is currently a symbol of the triumph of American civilization. Even lower middle class and poor have leisure time and money to enjoy a few days at the beach. A few more years in the hands of the so-called "progressives" and those opportunities will disappear.