[Vision2020] O'Neal says it all

[Glenn Schwaller]

Can't say I'm not surprised this hasn't been posted.  What a treat!  Enjoy
all!


Michael J O'Neal, MPDN 1/19/08

It's hard to keep crybabies quiet.

The back story to this scrap of wisdom runs thus. An out-of-area developer,
the Hawkins Companies, wants to put in a retail development just west of
Moscow. Five Moscow councilmen, three of them recently elected after running
on an openly pro-business platform, are now officially a nefarious cabal,
the "Hawkins Five," dubbed so on this page because they voted to sell water
to the developer after closed-door mediations.

Now *the United States has this thing called representative government*.
Voters, expressing preferences at the polls, elect people to office, then
turn over to those people decision-making authority. That way, everything
doesn't become a referendum. Every time a decision has to be made, we don't
have to run to the polls, or sit in hothouse meeting halls picking up the
flu from the guy with the wet cough behind us.

But *there's a class of people in Moscow who don't like representative
government, for it gives misguided little people license to vote*. Those
voters in turn have *the temerity to elect to office candidates who are not
aging hippies whose notion of economic development is coffee stands (which
use water) and tattoo parlors*.

What's their problem? For starters, the developers are from Boise. That must
mean they're curly-mustachioed, cigar-chomping carpetbaggers, in town to
offer the rest of us 40 acres and a mule in exchange for our water.
Reasonably, though, *the developers believe that business owners might want
to tidy up after us and that employees and shoppers should wash their hands
after flushing*.

But *these are all salutary activities*. People would presumably be doing
them anyhow, somewhere (one hopes), thus using water from the same aquifer,
unless of course they're really good at holding it so they can go use water
from someone else's aquifer. But then they'd be burning gas, melting the
polar ice caps, and drowning the giant Palouse earthworm - the point being
that *we all exist, so every single one of us uses resources no matter what
we do and where we do it. And if we don't have to leave carbon footprints
between here and Lewiston or Spokane to do it, something's been gained*.

*Further, these establishments might sell things people actually want, need,
and can afford, without turning to the Internet, as many currently do, thus
shipping away dollars and the tax revenues they generate*. It's likely that
*most of the products they'd sell won't be made of hemp or bamboo - or made
in co-ops redolent with patchouli*. So that means they represent sprawl.

The usual gambit employed by people who don't like a decision is to grumble
about process. Closed doors for them are always a bad sign, as they are for
my cat. But as I've tried to explain to my cat, mediations are always
closed. People are more inclined to mediate (another salutary activity) when
they know that a card they show behind closed doors won't get trumped later
in a lawsuit.

*So the crybabies, who didn't get their way in the last City Council
election, want to "recall" the newly elected councilmen*. They intone
solemnly that there should have been more "public discussion" and that the
Hawkins Five (one quakes at the very name) has "betrayed the public trust" -
by doing what the little people elected them to do. *Of course, the process
included no vigorous "public discussion" when the mayor unilaterally filed a
petition to quash Hawkins, but this mote of hypocrisy escapes the notice of
the hemp-and-bamboo crowd*.

Meanwhile, the little people are cattle. We're told that the councilmen who
voted in Hawkins' favor were "ushered into office by the Greater Moscow
Alliance," more cigar-chompers bent on selling off the Palouse in pieces to
the highest bidders. *Many of us little people find smug, elitist comments
like this a slap in the face. The council members were ushered into office
not by the GMA but by the citizens who chose to vote for them*. The GMA
didn't even exist when two of the Hawkins lapdogs were elected.

*But the voters, lobotomized by the GMA, were wrong. The people the voters
voted for voted in favor of something some people don't like. So of course
we must throw the sonsabitches out*.

*Get out the (organic) teething biscuits*.

Tellin' it like it is
GS
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