Politically Correct Decoration by Committee

For as long as I can remember, the City of San Antonio strung those big old-fashioned coloured bulbs from the trees of the Riverwalk every Christmas. They would spend months, it seemed like, putting them up, checking them for burned-out bulbs to replace, and they would light them up for a month or so, then spend a month or so taking them all down. 

The county courthouse dome from the Riverwalk

Our present city council, not content to let San Antonio enjoy the lameness that is its hallmark, decided to get out in front of the politically-correct trend toward eco-friendly lighting, and spent who knows how much to replace the nearly quarter of a million old-fashioned bulbs with newfangled LED lights — millions of them. These new lights are brighter, the City points out (implying that brighter is necessarily better) and the two million or so lights we now have to decorate our Riverwalk with use half as much electricity as the 200,000 old bulbs did: ten times the bulbs, twenty times the light, for half the recurring costs. 

Not knowing how much the new strings of bulbs cost — knowing only that, when I price them in the stores for my own consideration, I still consider them too expensive — I reckon that, with as many lights as the City puts out every year, that reduction in annual costs is probably enough to make the purchase price worthwhile. 

So I was all gassed up to get downtown this year and see these newfangled lights, and have now done so.

The new lights certainly are brighter. In fact, they are positively garish in their glow. This might not be such an unpleasantry, if the lights were strung gracefully from the branches overhanging the water, as the old ones used to be. But these new ones are wrapped tightly around the trunks and major branches of selected trees, in the already-dated style popular in the early 1990s, to make the trees so illuminated seem like so many dead victims of lightning strikes. Colorful, yes; bright, yes; pretty, in some ways yes. But not nearly as attractive or as graceful as the old dangling strands of barely-bright lights were in years past.

I sure hope that next year, and on into the future, the people who decide how to use these things will devote a little more thought to the decorations than they did this year.