Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Questions Not Asked

I have not been able to attend any of the Mayoral forums as of yet but I have kept up with how they went through all the reporting and the Twitter logs available. It seems that I and Steve Austin are in agreement in the notion that - so far all the questions have been about things that are already water under the bridge.

We are going to be selecting a person the lead the city into the future, not worry about how it should have been handled last time. The problems looming on the horizon are much more worrisome than whether there is full disclosure about some private business project in downtown. What I want to know is- How are we going to handle thing like "Peak Oil", climate change, or some of the other situations coming down the road but not yet fully manifest. These are questions that our young, "creative class", social media savvy bloggers and reporters have avoided completely.

How will our future leaders solve the dilemma of the residents of our outer suburbs when the price of fuel is out of reach to the common person? Our edge subdivisions are not being served by mass transit and the idea of regional transit is not on the radar. How do they plan on feeding the masses when transportation costs could be roughly 1/2 the going price in the stores? Where will the tipping point be when the agricultural land is more valuable for food crops than equine crops? That may be real value of the PDR program.

I have seen how some of these "progressives" have brought in officials from other cities ,where there has been some modicum of success, to explain their methods. The situations and conditions are never the same in all cities, even during good economic times, so the results will always be different. It is the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" in action. Those same officials, operating in differing cities, would not have fared as well as a general rule.

Our city leaders of the past few decades(especially from the '70s) have failed to secure the infrastructure and facilities to ensure the basic necessities of life; sufficient potable water, locally generated energy or alternative power sources, locally available food sufficient for all residents... and we have known that the day is coming. As we have seen with RWE and now E.on, the divestiture of the global corporations controlling utilities (and probably soon with food) is coming.

Where will these new leaders take us in this "Great Reset"? That is the line of questioning that should be taking place. Had I sent them in by social media, they would not have been asked and had I been there in person, I would have been considered as "off the wall" as Skip Horine.

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