We, the people of the shale...

With recent history as my proof, as the next election cycle would draw near, new political blogs would sprout up on the local scene faster than weeds.

And much like their horticultural counterparts die as the seasons change, just as fast as the election cycle would pass into the history books, the great, great majority of those fledgling political blogs would quickly fade away.

With that typed, I ain’t seen nothin’ like this unique explosion of localized blogs looking to sway the public’s mood against the invasion of natural gas drilling outfits. Only a painstakingly obvious environmental conflagration in the making put upon a concerned public could cause such a remarkable phenomenon.

And what this suggests to me is that, Harrisburg…we, the people of the shale, have a problem. A big problem.

But, coincidentally, Harrisburg has a big problem, too. A big problem, as in, gross fiscal mismanagement.

The thing is, when you are reduced to wetting your prehensile lips and offering a warm, moist mouth to the genitalia of the gambling lobby and the gas drilling lobby as well, what that demonstrates is that there isn’t actually a coherent financial plan in place. Anything but.

There’s no 5-year plan, no 10-year plan either. All that there is the never-ending pursuit of new revenue sources to squander. New revenue streams that never seem to amount to financial solvency for the state or prosperity for the long-beleaguered residents of the state.

The long and short of it is, for the government to be able to continue to grow, and for it to be able to continue to shower increasingly untold riches upon those blindly loyal constituency groups that continually hang from it’s bloodied teat, that overgrown field next to your tool shed needs to be transformed into a heavy industrial site.

And your water supply? Ah, we can always truck water in. So shut up, pay your increasingly confiscatory levels of taxation and never mind that teachers as well as federal, state and local government workers can retire and collect their overly generous pensions long before they risk turning gray.

Point blank--Harrisburg spends far, far more than it “earns.” And because Harrisburg outright refuses to adopt fiscal sanity as policy, your potable water supply is little more than another roll of the dice to those who have turned the state’s capitol into what I deem to be a suitable site for low-yield nuclear weapons testing.

It’s simple. And I do like simplicity. They obviously don’t care about your general welfare, your overall safety. And at the risk of sounding as if I have upped and joined the Marcellus Maguires with an auto-loader in hand, why should I care about theirs? I say we nuke ‘em all and let Allah figure it out.

Short of nuking them for lack of popular support, how about if we vote out of office every single elected official that outright refuses to make a concerted, a definitive stand against this lurking, this ever-circling environmental disaster in the making is concerned?

Sure, Superfund sites can and do get made pretty close to whole and right by the outlay of enormous sums of money long after the indigenous populations have fled to safer and healthier environs. Love Canal, anyone?

But in keeping with the simplicity bit, why create a Superfund site in the first place? Why keep on repeating the same mistakes?

Why? Because Harrisburg desperately needs money all over again. And right after the further acquisition of and the further squandering of new revenue sources all over again comes the feigned concern for the general welfare of the walking, talking and now feverishly squawking revenue streams--namely us.

As for those growing multitudes of fledgling anti-fracking bloggers, whether the self-centered and self-aggrandizing buffoons in Harrisburg want to hear it or not, continue to make your voices heard loud and clear. Perhaps, even louder.

Tell them our water supplies should not be jeopardized so as to fill the coffers all over again, only to have those engorged coffers drained all over again.

Tell them that our future generations should not be saddled before they come of age with the gargantuan costs associated with making the environment somewhat palatable again.

Tell them, we, the people of the shale demand our remonstrance!

Tell them, man.

Later