American Public, Governments Officials Fed up with

Rural Sprawl
From banana news (www.bananaws.com)
Unregulated Animals Graze Urban Lawn Hedges and Sniff City Exhaust
As the economy continues to wander aimlessly across the GNP
landscape, Americans have begun to express their anger over the
uncontrolled growth of rural sprawl into the pristine urban and
concrete environments of the country. Invading rural clutter such as
trees, deer droppings, crop pesticides, country music stations, USDA
farm subsidies, and food, in particular have drawn the ire of urban
residents who have pronounced themselves “fed up” with lack of
government regulation of rural sprawl. A recent White-Green, and
Yellow, plaid paper jointly published by USDA’s Rural Research
Service and the Urban Parking Lot Institute provided a rash of
statistics which provide vivid evidence that public rage over the
dispersion of rural America into the urban and suburban environment
is not misplaced or the result of a “perception effect” arising from
country music’s dominant role in shaping rush hour radio
commentary and anger.
The interagency plaid report provides numerous examples of rural
sprawl’s influence on city life. For example, appendix chart, AR.1 of
the report reveals that over sixty eight percent of “suburban homes
owners” have spotted an outdoor fresh vegetable stand, with no
laser scanner, background music, and/or Hollywood magazine, within
two miles of their home. Another plaid paper chart, AR.14, reveals
that, within the past year, fifty four percent of urban homeowners
have witnessed a deer-like creature with antlers, and/or “maybe
horns”, chewing on private lawn grass, privileged hedges, or a down
and out public lot's rural weeds. And footnote two, of chart AR.14, of
the report, states that thirty six percent of urban homeowners claim
that, at least once in the past year, they had been forced to slow
their car “to a first gear crawl” to avoid beaming panic freezing
headlights into a suburban herd of invading “horned mammals;
which they said were either buck deer, beef cattle, or longhorn cars
from Texas.
Chicago Judge Harbarger, was quoted by the report from his
suburban home in Forest Park stating: “These nights every time an
urban siren goes off in the neighborhood, before anyone can stand
their attention up on end and fully absorb the joy and melody of a
fine ear squealing urban shriek; some hound dog from the upper
Wisconsin Peninsula starts howling out the hillybilly dog blues and
ruins the finest and proudest sound of the city. When I was a city
newspaper boy townhomes and apartments owned Chihuahuas,
European Poodles, Scot Terriers, or city cats who could absorb the
shrillest city siren scream without even raising a tail. But with the
spreading rural sprawl of today, every half-hickle-body is bringing
sniff hungry hunting dogs right into the heart and heat of the big city
whose howls are ruining the sound of Chicago's red, white, and blue-
light serenades and sirens. And don’t get me started about these
country crickets that are spilling the whackers out every City Park,
church yard, and school ground each summer.”
The joint agency plaid report primarily blamed the uncontrolled
growth of rural sprawl on a lax county and state regulatory structure,
USDA farm subsidies, and greedy wildlife, which “will stop at nothing
to eat wild greens, reproduce wild life, and defecate waste and
diseases into what once was a perfect, concrete gray urban setting.”
Chapter three of the report, in particular, focused on the mammalian
and reptilian underclass that has created what report calls “the
lagging roving edge” of the nation’s rural sprawl:
“Whether it is alligators on Florida golf greens, coyotes in Colorado
suburb’s, deer in Virginia driveways, or rabbits all over the place,
invasive rural animals have shown no respect for the basic rules of
city life or an appreciation of the environmental limits we face on this
earth. That is, our investigation found mammals gorging, growing,
and groping, as if this earth’s supply of food and resources is infinite
and can be sniffed at, devoured, sniffed over, defecated on, and
sniffed on forever. These urban invading animals, be they raccoon,
squirrel, deer, rabbits, skunks, and in the urban south, snakes and
possums, ignore highway safety and do not practice basic urban
hygiene such as washing their paws after using the outdoor sniff-
spot. It is of little wonder that many end up flattened across the
yellow painted lines in the middle of our most splendid urban
highways.”
The report’s other chapters present several other indicators which
reveal the extent to which rural sprawl has penetrated even the very
center of American cities. For example, according to Chart AR.24
elevated big wheel trucks make up fourteen percent of downtown
urban traffic. Chart AR.25, in turn, reveals that city emergency rooms
have been inundated with urban drivers who have fallen out of the
driver’s seat of these elevated rural trucks and landed twelve to
fourteen feet below onto the hard cement floor of urban parking
garages. And footnote 16, of the plaid paper report states that
rescue squads in over thirty four central cities of the United States
had to answer calls, and use expensive fire ladders, to retrieve
hundreds of urban drivers from the heights of the more recent
“upscale” models of big wheel rural truck cabs.
However it was Chicago Judge Harbarger who provided a Chicago Sun
news reporter the most sprawling opinion on the entire matter, after
the report’s release had set off a round of shrill commentary over the
judges’ urban siren tastes:
“When my generation wanted to embrace rich soil, smell fresh
manure, swallow a big sky, and blend birdsong into the background
of every thought, we simply rode out to our grandparents place,
drove the tractor round the pasture, and used an entire afternoon to
help grandpa drive his truck four miles into town, and or put up hay
in the barn. Now young city dwellers visit their grandparents by
sitting in one those upper-elevated truck cabs and taking a cell
phone picture of themselves in a stratosphere cowboy hat, and, then,
e-send it to their grandparents on facebook or some other half-
literate computer communication channel.”
In the wake of the report’s publication Secretary of Agriculture, Tom
Vilsack, denied that USDA’s newly formed “Urban Extension Service”
is part of, or indicative of, America’s growing rural sprawl problem.
And he announced that USDA’s Urban Research Service is evaluating
options for reducing rural sprawl. At a conventional for the National
Coalition of Big City Mayors and Urban Dairy Farms, in a downtown
Detroit cow pasture, the Agricultural Secretary provided the
following suggestions for stopping rural sprawl in its dirt tracks:
a) -Construct moats, walls, and turrets around major U.S. cities.
b)-Provide state agencies with funds to dig water holes away from
human population centers where wildlife and irrigated farms can
compete for scarce resources in a natural Darwinian setting.
c) –Locate vats of hot oil on top of city walls between each fifth
turret.
d)–Spray natural smells, on roadway traffic signs which rabbits and
deer can use to sniff-read traffic signals.
e) -Cluster farms around a central cow and farmer, or USDA subsidy.
f) –Restrict transmission of country music to “note of mouth
performances”, and/or,---- the wind.
g) -Teach urban gangs how defend their turf against wild mammals
and how to knife-fight deer, raccoon, and possums.
h) -Lower the ceiling of parking garages and reduce bridge height to
block high wheeled rural trucks or pedestrians wearing stratosphere
cowboy hats .
i) –Locate each USDA office within olfactory distance of fenced-in
livestock pen.
j) -Provide farmers and other rural residents with maps that are
missing any city with a population over ten thousand people or a
Wallmart.
k) -Locate Wallmart’s within a 100 feet of every new built rural water
hole and force them to compete with wild animals, and irrigated
farms in item b's Darwinian struggle for existence.
The Secretary of Agriculture’s comments were quickly incorporated
into the lyrics of six country and western music top hits and
broadcast on radio stations across the country. After listening to the
Nashville top forty, Judge Harbarger told reporters that he was
satisfied with most of the USDA suggestions for stopping rural sprawl
but added country music could never match the pleasure of a urban
siren going off in the middle of a drawn--out stretch of a George
Gershwin melody. The judge then said that he written the Secretary
of Agriculture to suggest that all vegetable stands located within
four miles of any city with a population of 40,000, or over, be
mandated to provide all vegetable buyers free laser made holograms
of at least one Hollywood star dressed in the most embarrassing
stratosphere cowboy hat of the year.
Banana News (www.bananaws.com)