Unequal States and Counties
The Trillion Dollar Heist
The Expansion of Valhalla
By Stephen L. Wilmeth
I have the McGarrity
Trilogy in the library.
The setting
for the books is in the Tularosa Basin where the rocket men came to stake their
cornerstone in the creation of death and destructive devices for the defense of
our country starting in World War II and increasing in apogee thereafter. The
trilogy crew came long before any of the advances in these killing advances and
wonders that fly, shoot, zip, zap, and irradiate were even a concept.
They were
the folks who dug wells by hand, lived in dugouts before they could afford to
build a house, drank Arbuckle’s coffee when they could splurge, learned it was
best not to eat rabbits in months with spellings that didn’t contain r’s, looked
forward to J. R. Williams’ brilliant cartoons, and came to realize what the
meaning of sovereignty in the federal West really meant.
They were
the real deal. They had names. They had hopes of a better life.
The problem was they picked the
wrong basin, perhaps the wrong state, and, as some are now realizing, even the
wrong country for the investment of their sweat and blood and guts. When the
nut cuttin’ began, they were treated no differently than any endemic population
before them. They were stripped of everything including their dignity. What
they came to realize long before we did was when the Great White Father spoke it
wasn’t words of wisdom and encouragement.
Unequal States and Counties
Trilogy
country today is Otero County, New Mexico.
Eighty nine
percent of it is owned by government in one form or another. Think about that.
Only one acre of every ten can be expected to provide planning and
accommodation for homes, industry, investment, and the tangible future for its
citizenry. Eastern states, in their ignorance toward the actual condition of
the West, have no idea of what that really means. At some point in time,
somebody (and bodies in numbers) ought to become awfully tired of the migration
of their tax money to an underutilized West because of the back to nature
fetish of federal dominion and its regulatory strangulation.
Let’s shoot this in another
direction. Only one in ten acres can be counted upon to grow families,
recreate, and stake a path toward future prosperity for anyone not connected to
the United States government or the environmental cartels. That is the
condition of fact and it certainly doesn’t bode well when this nation’s debt is
finally addressed by adult and fiscally qualified supervision. Both the state
and Otero County are going to be placed in high jeopardy when the federal
dollars are no longer hauled in by unit trains from points east of the 100th
Meridian.
The Expansion of Valhalla
Fully
expected by their constituents and antagonists alike, the staff of the New
Mexico Senatorial duo of Udall and Heinrich have crafted legislation to make
Whites Sands National Monument, the greater part of the big snow-white gypsum
deposit in the middle of the Basin, a national park. Ostensibly, their logic is
that the expanded layering of regulatory protection on the sand pile will bring
in lots of tourista dollars, marks,
and pesos.
Of course,
they had their model manipulators spit out a preemptive economic forecast to
prove the worth of their legacy maneuver, but that is getting to be a tedious
recapitulation of expectancy. Ask a million people the difference between a
national monument and national park and less than one percent could contribute
to the answer.
No, the
move is an expected expansion of a designation that will serve as the forward
operating base for future, expanded park designations in the southern end of
the county, nearby Dona Ana and Luna Counties. It is a green Trojan Horse of
consequence that fits comfortably into a drawer marked there is nothing like more government to solve the problem of more
government.
A Trillion Dollar Heist
To add
insult to injury, the announcement was made not in Otero County, but in Dona
Ana County next door.
Otero
County wasn’t invited to the party. They never are on these types of
environmental issues. They don’t agree with the action and, therein, is the rub.
They know the consequences to their future. The senators also know that and
opted to run the pony out for inspection in a county that will now nominate and
vote for any Dipodomys spectabilis rather than a conservative Homo sapien.
The iconic
platitudes were plentiful.
Save
this great treasure for the children, this
will bring in millions of dollars in new jobs and ecotravel adventures, and
this great opportunity is in our grasp to
do and do we shall!
The hypocrisy is stifling.
In juxtaposition within the 300
plus square miles of the white sands footprint, some 225 sections are national
monument now touted for park status. The rest remains in DOD lands where death
and destruction is planned and practiced. There is certainly no private
enterprise, though, and that presents the greatest irony of all.
There are more
than 3.93 billion tons of relatively
pure commercial gypsum lying on the ground and above the base structure. In
addition, there are millions more tons of less pure gypsum in sands and
deposits. That represents nearly a trillion dollars of gypsum in a worldwide
agricultural and commercial market. It is an incomprehensible natural deposit.
Moreover, it
is growing. A chemical reprecipitation of the gargantuan calcium sulfate
background continues to grow the sands. They are then spread by prevailing
wind. So, are there words that suggest any logic that some part of this sensational
natural resource cannot be used to benefit the local citizenry, in particular,
and mankind, in general?
The New Mexico senators don’t think
so.
Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “The amount of agricultural water savings and efficiency alone that
would come from the judicious use of this remarkable natural resource would be
incredible.”
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