To the Editor,
Okay, folks, the election is over. Time to get out the scissors and crop off the bottom of your Obama posters. Keep the picture, if you like, but get rid of the word “change.” You might be getting a bit of a change in tone, but none in substance. Maybe it’s not Obama’s fault; nobody’s got the backbone to buck the entrenched system, and maybe we could be thankful for a few small concessions like wilderness designations. But the show is still in the hands of the banking lobby, the military-industrial lobby, and the Israel lobby, and the rest of us poor slobs are still the dog being wagged by the tail.
No matter who’s at the helm of GM or Toyota, we’re assured that they’ll be stimulating sales with useless and wasteful doodads like tachometers on cars with automatic transmissions. And no matter what the foreign policy or who the general, we’re sure to keep making enemies with more and more effective ways ways of blowing themselves up and taking innocents with them when they go.
In the whole global picture I can name two “changes” I’d call positive; the price of a bottle of Bushmills (back down from $28 to $18 for the month of March), and an incidental side effect of the liquidity crisis, namely, that news commentators have been so pre-occupied with “the downturn” that they’ve forgotten to indulge in the ritual commie-bashing. Oh, and one more; the former Seattle police chief has come out strongly for the legalization of drugs.
Locally, in the San Luis Valley, we’ve got the Sun-Edison photovoltaic power station, but so far no hint of any expansion in that direction. Locals made enough noise to put the brakes on the Texam development at Wolf Creek and the subterranean drilling at the Baca, perhaps because locals have set precedent for building coalitions and serving effectively.
There’s been change at Colorado Central, too, not just in ownership and format, but the writing shows a steady improvement. And if two out of three regular contributors could find nothing better to speculate on and resorted to chatter about weather and snowpack, well, at least the chatter had some depth. What, after all, can a local say when asked by an out-of-state friend what weather to expect in early April? Maybe it’s like the state of the world; the tone might vary a bit, but the substance will pretty much be the same –blustery.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove, CO
