Range war: cops with guns keeping the warring factions apart; the government is on one hand, and some very poor people attempting to live an impossible dream are on the other. The cops must keep the people from placing politicians' heads on pikes. The people don't want to be zoned except for stooges from California who want to get rich quick off cheap Colorado land. They made their money selling out to new people from the Orient.
Cycles: the great Orange County land rush to Colorado has roots in its newspaper The Gazette, (owned by the Orange County Register) Colorado Springs' answer to right wing bible thumpers' daily dose of Mike Rosen and the rest of the crypto fascist neo cons who thrive under state socialism. These suck butts saw a chance to make a pile of money and there were the ever ready to please county commissioners who recognize a chance at buying into or off a dream for developers.
Eastern El Paso County long been known as a hard scrabble the last place on the Front Range where a poor man could throw up packing crates and old trailers and get by. Shanty towns with trailers and kids everywhere sprang up in the seventies and by the eighties many had built nice homes or renovated existing farm houses into pleasant homes or dumps depending on the skill of the owner.
The land itself is arid. Thirty-five acre home sites can support one thin horse and sandy soil; a possible thirteen inches of rain and high altitude allow for not large crops to make money. The poor work hard at jobs in town and though there are many properties that have improved agriculturally, it still takes a lot of land to feed a cow and calf; thirty three plus acres are a cattle unit. Water is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and some places 2000 feet from the surface.
The wind blows all the time and any plowing loses top soil from a region where the Dust Bowl began. They tried wheat up here during the First World War, wheat, corn, and beans, and five years later when the rain cycle turned to drought cycle most of the exposed soil wound up in Kansas. Cattle men chopped down the Black Forest that extended to Limon to get rid of pines that caused the cows to abort. Now their legacy of overgrazing and creating badlands are there to be seen along Highway 86 and US 24 along with the slums of today.
Kids called peckerwoods in the small towns Calhan, Simla, Yoder, Rush, Tructon, Edison have
very little to do except get high and the war on drugs sent lots of drugs our way, lots of drugs and lots of
drug warriors ready to jail the kid for weed or worse. Mexican American kids get it hard as do the very few
Black kids who have to face the White world every day. It's a hard scrabble out here. Listen to Nancy
Griffiths work. Talk to the single mothers hanging in, hanging on, keeping cars moving, kids fed, pumps
and leech fields working.
Add to this hardship the Darwinesque banker who is a mean critter out of Dickens and the land
sharks always looking for the weak to feed on; when they find a whole area weak, they pounce in a swarm
attack like the County Zoners. The El Paso Zoning War has shown the poor that even thinking about the
Western Dream of a healthy life on less than half a section of land is impossible. 180 acres can support a
family at subsistance level in current Colorado. When cattle were high, a lot of peasant level farmers
developed taste for vacations in Hawaii and mobile homes; now their dream has been sold at auction.
There are plenty of prisons for those who like to watch men copulate with each other and there are
lots of takers for that job; it pays six-fifty an hour unless one is working for the fed and then it's up to 11.00
an hour and all the money one can make supplying the prison with contraband. Privatization has taken
some of the glow off that sum; there are cheap wages at the private gulag and everyone gets to piss in a
cup.
The World of Sleep factory in Simla closed and the jobs went off to NAFTA land where the poor
work for less than 5.50 an hour and so profits stay high. They were facing lots of workman's comp from the
formaldehyde they used in turning saw dust into faux plastics. Turns out the stuff used in preserving the
dead might be bad for live workers, unless there is a border between the share holders and the dying
workers.
I hope this gives the outsider some sort of glimpse into the everyday life on the plains. So when the
commissioners started zoning which is the first step in forming the City and County of Colorado Springs
they poked the poor and prodded them to life. They are, of course, hoping for a land rush to the arid plains
and where the water comes from for this move is beyond anyone's imagination but there are rats in every
bank and boosters in every lawyer's watering hole.
Of course the politicians are going to take advantage of this: Betty Beedy is looking like the hero of
this fight. She didn't have to do much of anything except express outrage that the rest of the
Commissioners came after her district and told people they had conform to laws they did not want or need.
Zoning, a good idea in the East, out here has become a rich man's tool for moving on the poor. Some poor
people may not want to live in the white bread suburbs or the violent inner city slums. Where do the proud
poor go? Beedy the bigot will turn this travesty to her advantage.
Brown and the other commissioners are perceived as liberals by the vast majority of Eastern El
Paso County residents. They are learning never trust a liberal. Comfort breeds conformity, conformity
corruption, corruption violence. Suddenly the sheriff's department becomes an occupying army. One day
after the zoning passed a home owner is going after a trailer park. People who live in trailers are subhuman
to our recent immigrants from California and have to be moved on, that is the Liberal way...
The poor lost more than the freedom to improve and support themselves: they lost the right to be
poor... Continued later