Over the weekend, people who enjoy feeling anxious had plenty to feel anxious about.
Locally, we have a proposed highway reconstruction project through the downtown business district that threatens to ruin the summer tourist season for both businesses and tourists.
CDOT Region 5 wants to reconstruct the highway this summer, because that’s what they do.
Downtown businesses would prefer to have the highway project magically happen somewhere else. Maybe in Bayfield?
For some reason, Daily Post editor Bill Hudson evidently feels the need to spread feelings of anxiety with another of his multi-part editorials.
People in the Middle East have even more pressing things to feel anxious about, according to the global media. I came across a headline in the Washington Post, attached to an op-ed by commentator David Ignatius.
The Middle East is on the precipice of the wider war no one wants.
I find this concept confusing. How can something happen, if no one wants it? If there’s one thing I’ve learned, through painful experience: When something happens, someone wanted it to happen.
Even something as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. We want that to happen.
Here in Pagosa, none of the businesses want the highway reconstruction to happen. But someone wants it to happen, and that someone is the Colorado Department of Transportation. CDOT knows very well that the rest of us don’t want it to happen, but they believe (perhaps with good reason) that we will be happier after it’s completed.
It’s like hitting yourself on the head, repeatedly, with a hammer. It feels so good when you stop.
One good thing about a highway project, like the one planned for this summer… the selected contractor will have 382 days to complete the project, or else pay a penalty.
The pain will end.
One bad thing about a wider war in the Middle East… it will have no clear ending date. (That’s not the only bad thing about a war. There are actually so many bad things, we can’t name them all. But the lack of an ending date is one of them.)
This helps explain why no one wants a wider war. No one. According to Washington Post writer David Ignatius.
But I have a hard time wrapping my head around how a war can happen, if no one wants it.
It would be bad enough if CDOT were reconstructing a highway in the Middle East, and no one wanted it. But a war is way, way worse than a highway project. Way more expensive, and way more deadly.
Who would want such a thing?
According to Mr. Ignatius’ op-ed, the two countries poised on the precipice of a war no one wants, are Israel and Iran. Israel suspects that Iran is providing military aid to the Palestinians, and maybe that’s why Israeli planes destroyed a building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus, Syria… killing two senior members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, senior commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hadi Haj Rahimi, along with five other officers.
I know very little about war, but I suspect Israel wanted to destroy the building in Damascus.
Iran staged a military response on Sunday morning — a mostly ineffective response, according to American media outlets — in the form of missiles and drone attacks.
It’s very possible that someone actually wants a wider war in the Middle East. I’m not going to name names, but I bet David Ignatius knows who they are, and maybe doesn’t want to tell us?
Things are less confusing here in Pagosa. We know who wants the highway reconstruction, and we also know approximately when the project will end.
We can look forward to that feeling of relief.
But for those of us who enjoy feeling anxious, we have plenty of opportunity lately.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.