The bureaucrats are at it again, my friends. With their greased palms and grand delusions, they preach the unholy gospel of 'expansion'—a term as loaded as a rush-hour on the I-35, and just as stagnant. They're selling us the I-35 expansion like snake oil at a sideshow, promising it'll cure our commuter woes, but all it'll do is bloat the beast further, until it bursts at the seams, spewing forth an endless torrent of automobiles and despair.
This isn't progress; it's madness—a high-speed chase to the bottom. They're betting billions on a horse that's been dead so long it's turned to glue. And what will we get? A wider chasm through our city’s heart, more lanes of carbon-coughing traffic, more noise drowning out the melody of local life. The expansion is an asphalt tumor, metastasizing under the guise of growth.
Who benefits? Follow the money and you'll find your answer in the oily handshakes of the construction barons, in the backroom deals where nature’s last will and testament is being signed away. The small businesses, the communities in the shadow of the highway—they're the sacrificial lambs at the altar of this false idol.
And the environment, what of that? We're in the midst of a climate crisis that's hotter than a Laredo parking lot in July, and these asphalt apostles want to lay down more blacktop? It's a carbon footprint so large it'd stomp the very life out of Lady Bird Lake.
Let's call this what it is—a boondoggle, a fiasco, a Texas-sized travesty wrapped in the flag of inevitability. But we're not buying what they're selling. We see through the smog. Expansion? No, this is an invasion—a declaration of war on the soul of Austin.
It's time to barricade the streets with our bodies, to arm ourselves with the truth, and to march on the Capitol with the battle cry of those who will not be paved over. If these concrete cowboys want to expand anything, let them expand their imaginations, their empathy, their capacity to see beyond the end of their nose—or in this case, the hood of their Cadillac Escalades.
Rise up! Let your voice be the honking horn that they can't ignore. Tell them we won't stand idly by while they turn our city into a highway hellscape. The I-35 expansion isn't just bad; it's a symptom of a society careening out of control, drunk on petroleum and power. So grab your signs, your spirit, and your sense of outrage, and let's give 'em hell. Austin will not go quietly into that congested night.