register |  login
› LOUISVILLE AND SUPERIOR
Loading Ad
Visit Other Hubs:
ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Tower
RECENT STORIES

Will the economy change our voting habits?

Contributed by: Eva Kosinski on 10/9/2008

There aren't as many of us anymore who still have living parents who went through the Depression; if you talk to those parents, however, they are convinced we are going through a replay. They remember that things didn't really fall apart in 1929 when the stock market crashed.

The real difficulties came later, as jobs disappeared, products available before became scarce, and what goods were available were costly. Whole families ended up homeless and in bread lines. Those who cared more about money than ethics turned to the underground, where prohibition gave them a good living, even if the rum-running was illegal. Some, like the Democratic patriarch Joe Kennedy, even made their fortunes. The entire civil society was turned on its ear, becoming something darker, more paranoid, and downright dangerous. My mother was the oldest of 4 children raised in Boston by a single mom during that difficult time. In the first few months after the crash, none of the truly awful stuff that happened later was visible. Only as time went on and the deficiencies in the economy ate away at the infrastructure, did the true enormity of the disaster strike.

We have some things going in our favor that weren't available then. In those days only the men could work. Women who got married were expected to stay home and raise the children. In the cities, men left their families because if they had dependents, those women and children could only be helped (by aid to dependent children) if they were abandoned. The psychological cost of that was beyond measure.

We have a degree of communications capabilities (if they last through this period of upheaval) that far surpass what was available then. Folks can talk to one another, find solutions, get info on how someone else fared through hard times. Jobs are posted online, countrywide, and even internationally. Chat groups on the Internet provide an outlet for the anger, places to network, and ways to keep from isolating.

One thing is clear; our idea of a crisis is being redefined. Where in the past we were focused on optimizing an ideal community, we now need to look at things like the number of folks who may not be able to keep their homes (a problem well underway before the stock market got hysterical), the number of people who may be jobless, unable to afford to keep up their homes or their vehicles, and unable to get new credit. Tax money we contributed to keep Wall Street rolling will have to come from paychecks already stressed, and in the case of seniors, cut into money that they have saved for years, only to have taken away when they really need it.

Communities that have gotten themselves involved with Tax Increment Finance schemes will find themselves with half-finished projects and long-term debt. Communities considerably more prosperous than their neighbors will worry that they might be targets for thieves. Desperate times have historically led to desperate measures. How we deal with these new realities will be critical to our success.

How we vote will matter. If we put on the blinders and believe the huge losses from our monetary system will have no immediate effect on our lives or our communities, we will continue to vote for those who are optimizing the perfect community. And when the repercussions hit, we will be totally unprepared.

We need folks with good common sense, who understand that debt is not a good idea for our future, who will work on the nuts and bolts issues and help the families that will be struggling in the next few years. We need to let the people decide how their money will be spent -- they have less of it, and at this critical time, taking it from their paychecks to let the Commissioners spend it for them is irresponsible.

If we go on the way we have been, letting Denver dictate how our communities grow, keeping us from making independent decisions for our county and our communities, recommending that we invest in development to help FasTracks, with Inter-governmental Agreements based in a completely different fiscal atmosphere dictating our every move, trying to stick to an ambitious-in-the-best-of-times 30 year plan drafted by a committee of idealists who believe the government should dictate how we live, we are surely in big trouble.

Maybe we need to make a higher percentage of our land resources into gardens to get through this crisis. Oops, we promised we wouldn't do that. Now we get to go through a many-month process negotiating with our fellow communities, also in stress, to get *permission* to change the rules back. Not helpful in tough times.

We need to be able to move quickly to respond to problems that will arise in the next few years, and we need folks as Commissioners who are able to let the citizens decide what they need (and back them up when the pressure comes from Denver) to survive this mess.

I'm voting Libertarian because the Libertarian candidates don't believe in trying to use ordinances to control people's lives and they don't believe in rules (like the ones we have in some of our county communities) like forbidding homeowners from renting out a room to a student or someone who isn't family, so they just *might* get enough spare cash to actually keep making those mortgage payments, which will let them keep their home.

Libertarians don't believe in zoning home businesses out of existence; it's the big guys who've failed us, not the small businesses. If folks can't get jobs with the big guys anymore, why can't we let them work from home and start their own businesses (complete with actual business signs)? Any money they bring in will help the community through hard times, and keep homelessness at bay.

Hard as it is to accept, we need to understand that times have changed and we are looking at a landscape of the future far different from what we thought we'd be seeing. Those Libertarians who complained about the fiat money system and over-expansion of credit were right.

Will we once again just go with the familiar, and take the chance that doing what we've always done, the overextension of both county power and bowing to the will of DRCOG, the kind of "thinking" that's gotten our country into this mess, will somehow magically help? We need to try something different, something closer to common sense, closer to the needs of the people in the communities. Randy Luallin, Ralph Shnelvar, and Bo Shaffer are on the ballot. They deserve your vote.





SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story



Talk Back : submit comments to the story

*Note: you need to log-in to add a comment or rating.

CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Eva Kosinski

Louisville , CO

Eva Kosinski has posted 129 stories and 16 comments since joining on 12/18/2005. Eva Kosinski 's average story rating is 4.82.
SAVE AND SHARE THIS STORY
STORY RSS FEEDS
WANT TO WRITE FOR YOURHUB.COM?
Want to see the stories you write and the photos you shoot featured in the YourHub.com Thursday print section available all over the Front Range and with home subscriptions of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post? All you have to do is register, then post a story or column, start a blog or tell everyone what events are happening in town. We will print the best stories, columns, event listings, photos and blog entries in our print sections.

ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Ad

Loading Ad
ADVERTISEMENT
Loading Ad

This YourHub.com community is produced by The Denver Newspaper Agency
Web Development and Channel Analytics provided by Indigio

terms of use //  privacy policy
the staff //  advertise //  help & faq
buy photos