Copyright 2009 by the Hillsboro Free Press which grants permission for reprint as long as both Jerry W. Engler and the Hillsboro Free Press are credited.

You’re going to wonder if the kid’s become a scrambled egg, but I hope
you’ll keep on reading after you discover what I’m thinking about.
You see, I’m writing it for you. And, don’t take umbrage with me for
calling myself a kid. I once was truly one, and still can hardly wait to
see what I do when I grow up.
I’m sitting on a box thinking about wind turbines, pig farms,
colonization, Alexander Hamil­ton, Thomas Jefferson—and I’m not even Don Quixote.
I got started on all this today by reading that the Kansas House,
according to Marion County Planning Director Bobbi Strait, is
considering a bill which would effectively strip counties and cities of
their basic right to regulate land use within their jurisdictions.
She said it directly addresses the use of any wind turbine or other
equipment used for wind power. The Kansas Association of Counties is testifying against this bill, No. 2043. They say it overrides local
zoning regulations.
Here we go again. Why can’t poor boys have fun without dancing to the
rich boys’ tunes?
I suppose they’re going to be telling us this bill is necessary to
override all of the local impediments to giving us clean, abundant
energy quickly.
Don’t believe them on the face of it. Somewhere back there is likely to
be someone with money who’s been looking at this idea of windy Kansas being the wind-electrical generation Saudi Arabia of the world.
Somewhere I read the state actually is No. 3, but they always did let
Texans have more land and more blowing room.
Heck, the original meaning of Kansas even was some kind of Indian
analogy roughly meaning “people of the south wind,” or maybe folks with blowing deprivation.
The powers that be must be getting tired of the spectacle of more
ordinary people receiving good money for turbine leases. If they let
even people with smaller acreages lease space for wind turbines like
this kid wants, the wealth might get out of hand. Maybe they’ve already
sold the whole state to General Electric.
Money means control, more stability for those in power for their future.
When they dressed some of us Kansas kids in olive drab, our Colonel
Cantrell told us, “You boys lose the Vietnam War, and you’ll see
communes in Kansas.”
He was right. We lost the war, and now we have communes as illustrated by corporate hog farms. Only independent Kansas farmers were finessed off their land with money instead of at gunpoint. Money and guns—those are two ways those in power have to keep control.
Somewhere, somebody saw there was money and control for some folks in state government, and we got corporate hog farms. Many small farmers once called hogs the “mortgage lifters” of the farm. They could be reproduced, and grown quickly for reliable income.
Boy, is that history.
Now somebody wants to do the same thing with wind turbines before we get started. At least we know the demise of the corporate hog farm is written in its practices for some day in the future.
And it doesn’t have anything to do with the smell of pig farms. The
whole thing stunk before it got started.
If you take microbiology in any university, you will learn that it is a
life principle of microbes that they quickly develop resistant strains
to any substance used against them. This is illustrated in confined
conditions such as we see with strep and staph infections in hospitals
and nursing homes.
Large confinement hog facilities make good microbe breeding grounds
despite the best and most careful of intentions. Not only that, pigs,
just like rats, have similar systems to humans setting us up for future
disease. Witness the flu cycle with hogs, birds, and humans out of China.
What the big-boy weakness with wind will turn out to be, I can’t exactly
say, although I do know they don’t have a good way to keep the wind from blowing.
They may have to find a way to outlaw letting each person having a
personal turbine to make electricity to keep control. Or, maybe they
could move Texas from the south of us.
With this House bill, Kansas may be making a good start in our personal constriction while making it sound like liberation. Funny how it’s one of the wealthier states in natural resources, along with its neighbors, serving as a colony for the financially wealthy centers of control under the concrete.
When are we ever going to realize that it’s us that’s got the real
stuff? It’s us who have the true potential wealth to take care of us.
That’s how Hamilton and Jefferson came into the thought process.
Study your history if you’ve forgotten. Jefferson envisioned us as a
nation of independent “yeoman” farmers—like our idea of family
farmers—and small businessmen. Hamilton envisioned us as a federally centered controlled system with a strong banking system.
I believe this is one of our problems with pigs, wind turbines,
politics, social developments, and all other such serious nonsense.
Idealistically, we lower-denomination Kansans and other unbailed-out
Americans are Jeffersonians, but realistically we have come to live in a
Hamiltonian society.
Jefferson, one of my heroes, roll over again so you don’t have to see
the Kansas House take something away from the common good.
But what do I know? I’m only a kid.