same time . You name it : the banking meltdown one day , the feared floods in Fargo , North Dakota , the next ; the forced ouster of the head of General Motors one morning , followed soon after by the street demonstrations in London during the Group of 20 summit . We all tend to fret together about one crisis at a time ; undoubtedly there will be something new for all of us to be nervous about together before sundown tonight . So the goal here was to come up with something utterly unlikely -- something that , in 2009 , you would n't think would bother people -- and find out if it does . Tumbleweeds . That , just picked at random , was the test case . `` They can be a pretty big problem out here , '' said Scott McGuire , a code enforcement inspector in Greeley , Colorado . `` When the wind is right , they 'll pile up right to the roofline of a house . Seriously -- people ca n't see out of their windows or even easily get out of their homes . '' There was something
Editor 's note : CNN contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose current book is '' When We Get to Surf City : A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll , Friendship , and Dreams . '' `` Tumbling tumbleweeds '' have been romanticized in song , but they 're no fun in some parts of the U.S. -LRB- CNN -RRB- -- `` Do we like them ? '' Patrick Victor , a game and fish commission employee in San Carlos , Arizona , repeated the question back to me as if I had proved my lunacy by asking it in the first place . `` Do we like tumbleweeds ? '' he said . `` No one likes them . They 're not like in the cowboy movies . We consider them garbage -- worse than garbage . There is nothing to treasure or cherish about a tumbleweed . '' We were talking about tumbleweeds because of a theory I had been pondering : In this country , because of the immediacy of news , it seems as if everyone from one coast to the other is worrying obsessively about the same thing at the