#46 A Horse is a Horse

Even though I sometimes complain about change, I don’t deplore all technological advances. Far from it, the greatest achievement of the industrial age, and the single strongest reason for our health and longevity, is one of my favorite breakthroughs; the modern sewage system. That first unsung sewage engineer was nothing to sniff at. He took the squalor and pestilence that can only come from chamber pots dumped in the gutter and made possible the squalor and pestilence you can only get when the sewers back up in great cities like New York and Washington DC today.
I’m reminded of a discussion I had once with a little old lady environmentalist at a meeting of a committee we were both on. Now I hate air pollution as much as anyone does. If we’re going to be bangin about in internal combustion horseless carriages we ought to at least be able to figure out a way to keep them from belching noxious poison all over the gull-durn place. But I also recognize that cars have their strengths. Among them the fact that you don’t have to go out to their cold barn every morning at six o’clock to feed them. Anyhow, it was during a snowfall, and people had a hard time getting to the meeting on time because they had to chain up and traffic was bad, etc. The lady, incidentally, had made all her money selling real estate back East, increasing its population density, then had moved out here to get away from the crowds. Anyhow, at the meeting she proclaimed self-righteously: “Back when we had horses instead of cars a little snowfall wouldn’t have upset things as much.”
“No,” I said, “Then again, it’s sure nice not having piles of fly-invested horse dung at every corner.” She just humpffed.
But really, it’s nice not having one of my feet splooching in the occasional apple the street sweeper guy missed. I grant that riding a horse in the snow is not terribly different from riding one in the sun, unless of course, the horse in the course of riding the course happens to trip on a rock so coarse that it breaks the ankle of the horse. But, let’s face it, a horse draggin’ a wagon is just as bad when it comes to slipping, sliding, and skidding into oncoming traffic. The biggest difference between a head-on crash then as opposed to now is that back then there were more dead horses involved.
Point is we tend to take for granted some of the progress that got us where we are now. Peeing in the street may be fine for the occasional drunk today, but at one time is was the norm for Mr. high-hatted dandy to undo his trouser buttons and let fly. Look in any old picture from the turn of the last century. There’re no automobiles all right. But the streets are still smoggy from the coal burning in everyone’s hovels—the richest man in the world didn’t have central heating back then—and you see these mysterious guys with giant brooms. Their job was to sweep the gutters clean of all the excrement, horse and human. At least now the only horse manure we have to put up with is when the powers that be try to explain why gas prices are so high.
America, ya gotta love it.