What Happens in Vegas, I wish would Stay in Vegas. But What Happens in Vegas is happening all over the world.
An older couple, friends of ours, venture to Vegas a couple of times a year. They return, full of awe, full of wonder, "The casinos, so beautiful and grandiose, so marvelous, stupendous, incredible, really, you must go. It's unbelievable and the place just gets bigger and better every year!"
And I remember how big Space Mountain was as a wide-eyed Disney-fied kid. Twenty years later I sat in the same old fiberglass rocket ship, knees crammed against the springing back of another seat of screamers. I watched the excitement and wonder in the eyes of my daughters and fought my personal disappointment. I found Space Mountain loud and empty and hollow, way smaller than I remember, fake.
Disneyland is Las Vegas, for kids.
I wish what was happening in Vegas would stay in Vegas, but it's not.
The only difference between Vegas and the highway leading through my town and your town and his town and her town and everybody's town, is, we're cheaper and tackier. Flippant flack-similes, bill boards, tacky rotten candy colored two-dimensional screaming neon acts of full frontal facadomy, plaster our eyeballs "HEAR! Hear! Buy It Here! No Money Down, no payments for forty two months, no credit, no problem" and radio and television ads sound like flippant flack-similes, bill boards, tacky rotten candy colored two dimensional screaming neon acts of full frontal facadomy.
Assaulting. Incredulous.
And totally unsustainable.
The Govern-Mint is printing billions of paper dollars into the economy to try and re-stimulate America's greedy heart, America's seemingly insatiable appetite "to have all and hold onto, until death do you part."
And death is exactly what it's going to take.
The tired old heart is quitting. The neon lights are flickering, dickering, bickering and soon will blink out. Everything is quickering, quicksandering, expire-ling down. It's all shutting down.
We fight against death, we struggle to survive but this death is a good thing. It is required. It is raucously and wonderfully required.
Years ago I flew to Las Vegas to meet with clients. They wanted me to design a home for them on what used to be the outskirts of town, in the desert. I remember standing on their one hundred fifteen degree wind-blasted lot and searing. I looked down and the hot, howling, stinging sands swarmed against my shoes, climbed past my calves, my knees, my thighs, my belt and my belly. At my chest I knew this place would one day die. There would be no more lights, no more City, no more City of Lights but I still took the money and helped them throw the dice.
The tired old heart will die. The need to buy won't fly. A new economy will emerge and it will not set its heartbeat to the rhythm of "to buy, to buy, to buy." A new generation is turning a blind eye to old Mr. Bill Board. This generation will not be coddled, coerced, cajoled or connived into diving in to buying just to buy. This generation will question what they really need to have. They will consider wisely and they will weigh heavily, the million-billion choices at hand before they buy anything. They will know the difference between want and need. They will not so much consume as exhume better models of trade.
Vegas the Vending Machine will give way to a more honest and less garish, pushing way of trading. Consumerism will morph into Conservatism, not Right from Left but from Wrong to Right.
Ways will be found to share and to trade and that expend very little energy. Mr. Bill Board will fade quickly from memory. We won't see or hear him screaming at us any more.
At least I pray to wake up to this coming reality, one day.
