The colours. The Colours. Leaves in the fall are a wonder to behold. Until the season lives up to its name, at which point you’re beholding the wonders all around your yard. If property values reflected the cycle of life, you would just let the leaves become mulch for next summer’s flowers and grass. Unfortunately, people see their properties as an extension of their bodies, making fallen leaves the dandruff of the yard, something vaguely embarrassing that * Must Be Dealt With *.
Thus the time-honoured tradition of raking up the leaves and bagging them by hand. However, this often clashes with the more recently time-honoured tradition of creating machines to replace human labour. In many cases, the battle of time-honoured traditions is won by the leaf blower.
As their names suggest, leaf blowers are machines that blow leaves off your property. They can be powered by gasoline or electricity, although one thing all brands have in common is that they are powered by a potent combination of laziness and spite.
Leaf blowers are not perfect. Compared to artisanal leaf dealing with:
Leaf blowers are noisier;
Leaf blowers are more expensive to buy and maintain than rakes and bags;
Leaf blowers are less energy efficient.
The worst aspect of leaf blowers is that they don’t actually solve the problem: the leaves remain on the ground. All the blowers do is shift the problem to your neighbour.
(Unless, of course, your neighbour has a leaf blower, in which case you may end up in a blower war. Vikram Gimbulputtee and his neighbour Seth Gridigutz entered into a blower war that lasted over 11 hours. For the last seven hours, they were in what is known as a blower stalemate: because their blowers were of equal power, when they were both blowing at full capacity the leaves remained in place. The two men would probably be there still, except Gridigutz’ blower battery ran out of power, causing him to suffer a humiliating defeat buried in leaves.)
Naturally, something so pointlessly destructive is a great metaphor for our society.
Say, for example, that you’re the CEO of a large corporation. It happens. Say further that this year’s multi-million dollar bonus relies on cutting the production costs of your products, but union contracts do not allow you to pay workers as little as you would like. What do you do?
Leaf blower your factories to neighbouring right-to-work states, of course. (In a more naive time, factories would be leaf blowered to countries across the ocean on the theory that, in galactic terms, those countries could be considered close enough to be our neighbours.)
When you leaf blower jobs to other countries or right-to-work-without-labour-laws states, a lot of your own people end up without a job. Many of them will not be able to afford to live in homes, so they will migrate to the streets. This might be a problem if you have a conscience, but, honestly, who gives a second thought to the lives of leaves? Much easier to leaf blower them from social services to the neighbouring department of police services.
As long as homeless people aren’t cluttering up their yards, most citizens don’t really care what happens to them.
Another example would be climate change. We’ve known for decades that human activity has caused the warming of the planet, with escalating damaging consequences. However, we have consistently leaf blowered the problem to a neighbouring time period. It’s as if the leaves have become carnivorous and are devouring small animals; as long as somebody else’s pets are on the dinner menu, we don’t have to worry about it. Given enough time, carnivorous leaves will become everybody’s problem, but the leaf blower society isn’t good at thinking through the long-term consequences of its actions.
The leaf blower is the perfect symbol of modern society: it gives everybody the illusion of doing something to solve a problem while merely moving it out of sight. It sucks to be a neighbour of a leaf blower society, especially if you can’t afford to contribute to leaf blower proliferation, which inevitably results in you being on the wrong end of a leaf blower gap.
Nobody said modern lawn care was for the faint of heart.