Blind spot

People in Vegas don't watch where they're going. And it's contagious.

I've seen it in the casinos, the stores, the sidewalks, the roads — people moving one direction and looking somewhere else. I'm starting to do it, too. I catch myself cutting people off as I walk down the street or through the grocery store; twice now I've almost run red lights, straight into left-turn traffic, while my attention was elsewhere. One of those times I stopped with two-thirds of my car in the intersection, the contents of my back seat dumped on the floor. I can't even remember the last time I was close to running a red light.

True, all metro areas have their distractions, but this is something more. I think this particular aversion to watching where you're going is an essential part of Vegas — in fact, it's one of the cornerstones of what I'm calling the Vegas-American Dream.

Vegas is a sustained boomtown. Sustaining the boom requires a certain willful blindness about basic realities. Locals ignore that we're living in a desert, and visitors ignore the odds against them striking it rich on their vacation.

Boom.

Consider this: The theory goes that every hotel room requires 5 to 7 people to service that room — be it construction to build the room, hotel staff, casino dealers, and the doctors, lawyers, grocers, video store clerks, etc. to serve the servicers. And despite the real estate downturn, new construction continues. Three developments on the Strip alone will add about 11,000 new hotel rooms in the next couple of years, and there's also the Union Park plan for downtown, a host of high-rise condo projects, and plans for a new casino-hotel anchoring a subdivision out by Kyle Canyon.

This at a time when the water in Lake Mead, our main water source, has dropped so low that one of the pumping stations isn't expected to be underwater much longer.

But this makes sense when you're in the grips of the Vegas-American Dream. No matter what the odds, you can't win if you don't play, so throw your chips on the table!

Reminds me of our invasion of Iraq. (The dream is contagious.)