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Some call it "progress" A Nail. Then Another Nail.By Rick Horowitz Good Neighbor George is working on his dream house. It's a beautiful day, and he's halfway up the ladder before the morning sun has cleared the trees. His tool belt hangs loose around his waist; his work boots are laced tight around his ankles. From his perch high above the ground, he looks left and right, up and down. The siding is cracked, and the window frames are askew. The gutters are rusted shut, and there are more patches than roof on the roof. "Makin' progress," he says to himself. "Makin' progress." Good Neighbor George likes what he sees -- but then, he's been working on his dream house for years. If he doesn't like it, who will? Not the people next door, certainly. They've been living with the commotion, the dump trucks and the flatbeds rolling by at all hours of the day and night, for longer than they care to remember. In fact, they can barely recall a time when Good Neighbor George wasn't working on that place. They want it finished -- the sooner, the better
The people down the block don't like it either. They can't drive past without blowing a tire or throwing the front end out of whack in some giant pothole. And the noise -- it's like somebody's setting off explosions over there. Good Neighbor George doesn't mind the noise. He doesn't even hear the noise. He pulls a hammer from his tool belt, grabs a two-inch nail and pounds it home. "Makin' progress," he says to himself. "Makin' progress." Then he takes a break. The people across the street don't like it either. It's not just that the thousands and thousands of workers Good Neighbor George has hired -- plumbers and carpenters and painters and landscapers -- are tearing up the grass and taking all the parking spaces. It's that, with all the plumbers and carpenters and painters and landscapers working for Good Neighbor George, there aren't any left for anyone else! The people across the street could use someone's help. There's a leaky basement pipe that needs fixing. A support beam in a front hallway that the termites have discovered. And that wobbly staircase railing right outside the bedroom is getting more dangerous every day. There are all kinds of repairs the people across the street could make if Good Neighbor George weren't using up all the workers on his dream house. That's the strange part, though, the part none of the neighbors can understand: As many thousands of workers as Good Neighbor George has hired, and as many years as they've been there, the place doesn't look that much better. Whatever work gets done on the dream house one day seems to get undone by the next. Which is exactly what the building inspectors said. It was the neighbors who finally got together and asked the building inspectors to come take a look at Good Neighbor George's dream house, and to make a report. This place is a mess -- that's what the inspectors said. Even after all this time, there's so much that's still broken! Good Neighbor George doesn't want to hear it. When the inspectors sent him a copy of the report, he sent it right back, along with a photograph of him in his tool belt and his boots. And across the top, he wrote, "Makin' progress." He hasn't changed his mind about that. Who cares about some inspectors the neighbors called? Good Neighbor George has his own inspector, who's doing his own report. A report about all the progress -- that's the report everyone should care about. Anyone paying attention to any other report is just jumping to conclusions. Jumping to conclusions is something Good Neighbor George would never do. Good Neighbor George -- up on his ladder, and still dreaming. Posted 9/6/07. For
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Rick Horowitz
