The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(01-26-2020, 05:44 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The local bog farmers seemed more concerned that I walk on the road and did not stray into his bog.  It was less that I would harm crops, but that his pesticides would harm me.  They were mostly friendly.  While the edge of a bog is a decent place to set up a shooting range, it didn’t much happen.  It has been a really long time since a native raider came out of the woods, or a British frigate had to be turned back by two light house keeper’s daughters armed with a fife and a drum.  (My teacher sister got quite hot because the state school testing board rated that incident as a mythic retelling, but the Scituate schools teaches it as an historical event.  All the Scituate students were dinged on the official required test.  The fife, meanwhile, is in a local museum.  The local area is full of the two women’s descendants.)

The local bog owners are upset that a few decades ago, the corporation that buys most of their berries found a few areas away from Plymouth County that could produce cranberries.  They developed those areas, produced a surplus of cranberries, and the law of supply and demand resulted in cut prices and desperate farmers.  A deliberate policy?  A lot of folks went bankrupt, and are still muttering against conservative policies that favor the corporations and elites over local farmers.  Conspiracy theories abound and make perfect economic sense.

No Industrial Age talk of a revolution or civil war.  Lots of muttering against conservatives and their policies, customized to center on one particular corporation.

A lot of old bogs are growing power these days.  The local area is generally hills and trees.  The old bogs are flat and already cleared.  Thus, there are former bogs now full of solar panels.  One local dirt mover is currently flattening hills near a nearby housing complex that has already converted the nearby bogs.  One of their selling points is cheap renewable power from off the local grid.  Of course, each converted bog represents some local farmer's failed attempt to make a living.

In the years after the local corporation put the pressure on local bogs, there was an increase in fertilizer that leeched into the pond across the street.  It became full of slime, much less usable for the summer population, for everybody.  We were less bothered in our pond across the street, and got a few extra beach visitors.  Eventually the local improvement association triumphed and the upstream bogs were abandoned.  It took years.

It turns out that the solar farms are much better than the windmills.  Too big.  With locals unaware of what was coming, the landowner would build a tower that makes local houses uninhabitable for some and decrease in value for all.  The local governments sided with the tower builders initially.  Anything to lower taxes.  They are rather quickly learning to keep the locals in the loop and be reluctant to approve new projects near residential areas.  Not keeping the local voters happy is a good way to get removed from government.  Locally, you want to keep the windmill towers well off shore.  The Massachusetts coast is too well populated to do much else.

My rented property is next to The Great Sandpit of Doom.  The area was once hills and trees with a few houses and cranberry bogs.  The hills were removed to create one great big flat area.  Some developers and town officials are attempting to turn the area into an industrial complex.  More closed cranberry bogs.  A retired couple that intended to spend their life there were forced, forced mind you, to accept lots of money.  Someone whose property was spread across two towns almost lost property value due to the threat of eminent domain.  Just think of the tax benefits!  But…. Not in my backyard!  Think of the traffic through the residential area!  The developers are absolutely ruining a perfectly good area for shooting up and prostitution!  Wetlands!  Coyotes!

In other words, small town politics as usual, including the demonizing of several parties.

So it goes with Greater Boston growing to the point of effecting towns near the Cape Cod Canal.  The locals generally welcome the increased business, but also want to keep the rural feel and tourist dollars.  The balance is still liberal.  This is still Massachusetts after all, and the elites do care more for the almighty dollar than their neighbors.  That is how they became elites after all.  Still, the neighbor’s fights are fought with legislatures and votes, not with bullets.   Not even with fife and drums.  

While Massachusetts may have its hoods, they are generally north of here.  I haven’t encountered them since flirting with the edges of Roxbury on my commute to Northeastern University.  Detouring by Symphony involved too much traffic.  The closest I came to a problem was a young kid on a tricycle who hadn’t learned fully about objects in motion staying in motion.  I think that was the one time I started to break well before the object of the potential collision turned his steering wheel but did not change course.  Of course I broke.  He was obviously going too fast.

I hear and have seen people in the middle of the country having their own battles between the family farm owners and corporate farming.  I can sympathize that elites and corporations hurting family farms are happening there too.  Corporatations generally have the reserve funds to jump on the periodic hard times that seems to come with family farming.  The people in the middle of the country could find unlikely allies in liberal Massachusetts, but they seem more inclined to assume hostility.  Not clear.  It is a matter of recognizing the enemy.

What is left of liberal politics when the violence, racism and tribal thinking is removed?  Not much changes.  We are not planning any wars, trying to put down any minorities, or favoring particular classes and religions.  In abstract, we buy into all men being created equal under law.  Oh, we don’t care much for the elites, those who hoard a lot of resources at the expense of the working people.  Still, that is minor next to the militias, the racism, the pro elite policies of the conservatives.

If you are dreaming of a Democratic equivalent of the Tea Party, our dreams may be far closer together than you think.

And if you find areas where all are not equal under law, we will try to correct that.  We are apt to fail.  Corruption, prejudice and violence are old and deep seated.  Only a few corrections can be made in any given crisis or progressive era.  In one crisis, we may get rid of kings.  The next, slaves.  Later, Jim Crow.  It takes time.

So many conservative policies.  So little time.

For what it's worth, I've never viewed us as being all that far apart domestic policy wise. We differed greatly on foreign policy and global policy. I don't have an attachment to a political party/term or an attachment to a particular side of an old forum or a group here either at this point. Like I side, the Democratic party completely turned me (lost my support) off long ago. So, I tend to vote Republican these days. I'm pro American worker, pro American family, pro American rights and pro American overall. I guess that what makes me more in line with the Tea Party today. I'm not so much dreaming it, I'm seeing it's influence with Republicans these days.