Illogicism: The ideological form of idiocracy, except more personalized, and more dogmatic. Illogicism is becoming the only neologism I can think of that accurately describes some things I witness on a day-to-day basis. I don’t know if this is a recent trend, some unique phenomenon to millennial, generation Y culture or the late-stage post-Fordist capitalism, but whatever it is poses a serious threat to my sanity.

The traffic light at the end of Garbers Church road is the pinnacle of illogicism. I come in from the side of Garbers Church near Wal-Mart, which means I have to turn left into the parking lot. Some days I am fortunate enough to pull up to the light as the traffic signal is shining a green left arrow. Other days, I am trapped at a green light because the left side has to yield to the opposite direction turning right into the parking lot. My problem with this is that when our light is red, and the people leaving the parking lot are going, the people on the opposite side can still make a legal right turn at that red light. This means that people coming from the Wal-Mart side of Garbers Church have a disproportionate amount more waiting time than anyone else.

My friends down the road at Spotswood High School frequently complain about the railroad tracks at the entrance to the school. Because school buses have to wait at every traffic light, the buses clog up the entire side of 33, causing major traffic issues virtually every morning.

I don’t just have problems with traffic flows. Businesses around Harrisonburg also adhere to the doctrine of illogicism. GameStop, for example, has three separate stores within immediate walking distance of each other. Two of them are even visible from one another and are just a five minute walk straight down Harrisonburg Crossing. Given the size of Harrisonburg, you would think that these GameStops would be spread out across town, which would maximize not only coverage and their profits but would also prevent the obvious competition that would occur between the individual stores themselves.

SweetBee and SweetFrog, virtually identical in every way, are across from each other on opposite ends of the shopping complex. Again, I understand the need for competition, but why would any person build a business when there is the exact same business across the road? Wouldn’t it be more optimal to build it on the other side of town, thus attracting the customers who live closer to said side?

I’m not necessarily asking for a perfect, utopian world that is ordered to my exact liking; I’m fully aware of the underside to this Orwellian desire for a compulsively purified world. I do wish, however, that there wouldn’t be such large structural issues at hand that make my day to day life either pointlessly more complicated or in general seem to have no justification.

We are beginning to live in an absurdist’s fantasy; a world where meaning and purpose are slowly withering away. Even profit motive itself, the primary driving force of capitalism, is starting to virtualize and blur, now becoming unrecognizable. It looks like things are starting to be ‘there’ just for the sake of being ‘there.’ Whether this is attributable to secular humanism, the nihilistic effects of post-Enlightenment rationality, or of a culture that is educated more by google than by books, I don’t know.

What I do know is that if I am stuck behind that traffic light on Garber’s Church one more time….