Billboard Blight

I hate billboards. That's my position, so if you're an owner of a billboard conglomerate, or if you are so everything-is-beautiful crazy that you like them, you can skip this.

I remember driving in the Missouri Ozarks, down around Branson some years ago. When I left on this trip, I was interested in seeing the natural beauty of the Ozark Mountains. These are "mountains" so worn down by time that they really are more like hills. But the region is beautiful, heavily forested with big springs and wild rivers. However, this vision of beauty is blotted out around Branson by what almost amounts to a highway wall of billboard advertising. I was angered and saddened then, and things have not gotten any better in the meantime.

If you've ever travelled down I-70 in Missouri, you know what it means to completely mar a landscape with these nuisances. We're not talking quaint little signs that some guy on a ladder could go out and resurface in an afternoon. We're talking enormous expanses that are so huge that they need skyscraper grade support columns. They are equipped with a blinding display their own spotlights, and I think they should have aviation warning beacons, if some of them don't already.

A few years back, people in the state got fed up and finally tried to make a law that no more new billboards could be put up. They didn't even try to address the blighted ones already in existence. The Billboard Lobby (you wouldn't think there would be such a thing, much less an enormous and effective one) went into action. First, they blanketed the state with a huge increase in billboards that would be grandfathered in if the bill passed. Then they tried to get the courts involved, saying that this bill would limit their free speech. In the end, they won and defeated the bill, probably filling the campaign coffers of the legislatures that "supported" them.

During this period, we were thrilled to be presented with two new billboards at the end of my street where it ends at Highway 50. I don't need to reiterate that they are ugly and a blight on the landscape and produce serenity spoiling light pollution at night. My point here is that they are not even being used. As you can see by the picture, the only thing they advertise is that someone needs to put an ad up on them. They're basically advertising that they are not only an ugly nuisance, but unneccessary too.

And that is the real tragedy of the story.