Letters

In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or Country; and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.” Eat them, he said, and end famine, overpopulation and stressful street scenes.

In like vein, I offer a modest proposal to deal with the prodigious proliferation of unendurable traffic, making life for the over-taxed “publick” a living hell. The whooshing of vehicles from dawn to dusk and cacophonous din of the trucks disturb sleep and peace. Behold, tiny village lanes now become highways — with here a speed bump, there an admonition not to turn right (a source of mirth) — unable to defend against the onslaught.

Therefore, let every homestead on beleaguered residential streets from the ancient canal through the Village of Southampton and beyond be commercially zoned. Let every atavistic hovel-holdout be condemned and demolished. Or, like the “olde” Rosko barn, be “restored” by enshrining its form in a cement-and-stone mausoleum.

The virtue of this modest proposal is instantly revealed. Previously reviled white mega-mansions, empty of taste, purpose and citizenry, need little to convert to commercial usage. Hovel-holdout owners, removed to condo camps, will no longer bother police and code enforcers. Tensions between residential fables and the juggernaut commercial reality will slacken, and the problem of “affordable housing” will be solved by worker barracks above the street-level commerce.

As asphalt and faux stone, the preferred setting of the white, strip mall mansions, cover dirt and flora, there will occur a natural diminution of the ad hoc landscapers with their ear-splitting leaf blowers and other machinery. Fortuitously, the deer population will decrease: not, as in Swift’s time, by overhunting for venison feasts, but by being forced into the open and thence decimated by cars and trucks.

Some “persons of desponding spirit,” per Swift (they always exist), will mourn for the old ways. Government must not concern itself with them. The rezoning of all village residential streets to commercial, with regulations removed, will push residential real estate north, with new enclaves of white and black structures for living creating new millionaire territory. While, south — not to worry — the ancient palaces and estates will be slowly lapped up by the sea or drowned in unpleasant and diverse sewage.

Of immeasurable advantage will be the clarity and cleansing of the old political lies, confusions and wounds arising from contradictory purposes, and with that the dissolution of the planners, boards, task forces, master plans and other semblances which fostered them in the name of amelioration.

In all modesty to Jonathan Swift (no relation to Taylor): Bon appetit!

Frances Genovese

Southampton