Z Olde Lights

In October, I attended a meeting of our city counsellors in my home town. In the meeting they discussed how while the present mayor is still elected there will never be a street light or traffic light installed, as it takes away from the Village effect. I left the meeting thinking, it is kind of a wonderful thing.
I get the need here, i guess its too bad we gotta get out of the way of progress.

Hey, I'm with you! You need to re-elect that mayor!

I loved Zihuatanejo back when I would walk home at night from town to the end of La Ropa by starlight, marveling at the magnificence of the Milky Way.

But mass marketing of tourism and the influx of thousands of folks from cities has attracted folks who are less tolerant of rustic living and more service demanding. Now we absolutely MUST have electricity and A/C and internet and street lights and paved roads and level walkways and lots of cars. No more lively evening conversations and backgammon matches with family, friends and strangers around kerosene lamps or walks home under starry nights, and no culture of early to bed early to rise. Now we have pollution of all kinds including light and noise pollution of all things. Consider yourself lucky if you still hear local trios singing baladas because now even the electric music is taking over. It won't be long until everything that was enchanting about Zihuatanejo will be a lost memory and in its place will be a grotesque Disneylandish English-speaking caricature of the lovely paradise this used to be.

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"Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got there. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it all for the first time and wouldn't change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard."
John D. MacDonald, "The Empty Copper Sea" (1978)

Old postcard of Playa Las Gatas looking towards Playa La Ropa - circa 1970