The Teacher

The Teacher: Part III Day of Declaration, Chapter 58

CHAPTER 58

DRIVING WAS A LOT BETTER THAN riding a horse, but the roads were still a mess. It was like America in the 1950s before the Interstate Highway System was built. Rebuilding efforts had pretty much completed the old style two-lane highways connecting most cities, but the freeways were still hit-and-miss. You might find a 10-mile stretch of completed four-lane thoroughfare, but you'd soon have to get off and make your way back onto congested local roads.

I was snaking along the streets that paralleled old reliable I-96. Approaching Lansing, on my way to East Lansing, I could see the dome of the Michigan State Capitol building off in the distance ahead of me. To the right I could see the massive construction effort to rebuild the rubble left behind when a series of quakes leveled I-496, the freeway that once went right through downtown Lansing.

It was like a war zone in reverse. The whole region looked as if it had been carpet-bombed, but all through the debris, like ants rebuilding a disturbed mound, there was an army of construction workers and hundreds of monstrous machines capable of munching on rock with the ease of a squirrel chewing open an acorn. They were grinding up the remains of the old road to recycle the raw materials for paving the new one. Road graders, bulldozers, backhoes, cement trucks by the dozens, dump trucks were being filled with tons of gravel and dirt by a battalion of earth-moving excavators of all sizes cluttered the work zone wherever you looked.

A complex road-paving device was laying down a double lane of concrete as it crept along; its massive mechanistic frame riding on rails staked to terra firma and looking like a train engine the size of a house. I could hear and feel the thud of pile drivers setting the foundation deep in the earth upon which bridges would stand. Looking in all directions, homes, offices, small businesses, schools, fire and police stations, power plants, grocery stores were being rebuilt...every kind of building that used to make up downtown Lansing.

The bee hive of constructive activity was breathtaking to behold and encouraging considering what it all meant—that life was slowly returning to the kind of normal that existed in the Before Times.

I knew that wasn't going to be good enough, that the Creator had higher hopes for our social, civic, and spiritual evolution this time around, but how many others were feeling the same way?

A FEW BLOCKS FROM THE CAPITOL there was a park right that had been taken over by anti-war activists. They'd pitched their tents and seemed to be there for the long haul. The Vietnam War, our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and later Syria, were distant memories, and yet this generation's passionate protestors were determined to make sure that the recovering American government wasn't going to go down the same path of power politics in achieving their goal of appropriating the world's resources in order to build up the wealth of U.S. companies. The Middle East had reemerged as a trouble spot and the protesters were there to make sure that this time we used diplomacy not bombs to achieve peace. A block from the Capitol I could more tents pitched all over the grounds.

Thousands of other protestors, most union employees, but also many teachers, firemen, policemen, and other government workers had gathered to express their collective rage at the governor's recent bill that with a stroke of his legislative pen wiped out years of hard-fought collective bargaining rights.

The conservative legislature used the recent budget deficits resulting from hard economic times, to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. They were occupying the inside of the Capitol building as well, making it difficult for the legislators to carry on business as usual. Organizers had actually gone as far as smuggling the more liberal-minded legislators across state lines into Illinois so that without the necessary quorum, bills couldn't be passed.