As I'm crossing over the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, Carlin may be giving an account of Hannibal's journey over the Alps. Should I be toiling up Omaha's many hills, he may be describing the atrocity of Hitler's siege of Stalingrad or Stalin's own draconian orders to kill his own soldiers who flee or retreat.
Me: "Maybe this hill's not so bad, after all?"
A Carthaginian soldier's ordeal or the Russian civilian's horror somehow takes the edge off going another mile or trying to speed up a little.
Most recently Carlin was considering the relative toughness of societies and generations within societies. He asked: "All things being equal, would our generation win a war against American's of our grandparents' generation?" (my paraphrase)
As it happens, Carlin had already caused me to wonder at my own generation's ease and luxury, compared to that of generations past. As in, "I'm kind of a wimp, huh? And I'm raising some wimpy kids, too." It's not intentional, but there's just not that much that many of us need to do that entails that much physical toil. Consider how painful it is to endure the inconvenience of a remote control with dead batteries. Or having to charge our iPhones each night. Will these Dark Ages ever end?
During the most recent podcast, "Show 33 - (BLITZ) Old School Toughness," he said described the way Genghis Khan's descendants would keep the Mongol troops in fighting form by rotating them out of the urbane Chinese cities they occupied and sending them back to the wind-swept, desolate steppes from which they came:
It'd be like if you soldiers stationed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or New Orleans, and then you have to rotate them out to Omaha, Iowa City, Ames, Butte . . . places where you could get a good night's sleep. [~53:00]As he was making this modern analogy, I had been expecting him to say that troops might be sent out to Death Valley or maybe Montana (Butte, even?). Instead, he said, "Omaha," and I laughed out loud when puffing away on my ride back from Council Bluffs along the Wabash Trace Trail.
In a way, of course, he's right. You can get a good night's sleep in Omaha. It's harder in Chicago, especially if you live close to the El or a garage out of which the street cleaning trucks start emerging at ungodly hours in the morning, as I have had the privilege to experience.
On that note, I would say that life is tougher in the biggest cities than in mid-sized cites. In our largest cities, people make more money, but also have higher living expenses. They spend more time in traffic. They deal with more pollution. They are generally more stressed.
Comparatively, Omaha is a great place to live. Commute times are short (with a median of 17 minutes). The air is fresh and people are friendly. If anything, things are maybe a bit too easy.
Still, when you have more free time, as one does in Omaha, you can fill it with whatever you choose that is available, whether that's more TV (ugh), a concert (cool), or a morning bike ride with friends. I've met more people in Omaha who are involved in their community and encourage others to join them than I have ever even heard of in other cities. People who visit or study the city, usually say the same.
Does this make us very tough? Probably not. As Carlin says in the podcast, we may be living in the decline of the current American empire, but that's generally when the most fun is had, as he notes. I just wanted Carlin to know that some of that fun can be had in Omaha, too.
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