No one should be surprised that the Herald brings its predictable thimbleful of imagination to the ‘Commerce Corridor’ story. Its editors and reporters are marching in lockstep in their insistence on a saccharine-sweet local interest angle and a patronizing storyline in which the quaint, pastoral and ultimately doomed lifestyles of ‘Foothills Folk’ are pitted against the inevitable and unassailable forward march of economic growth and commercial progress. The Herald’s editors and reporters are missing the story by a country mile.
Life vs. Lifestyle
“It’s not about“lifestyles”, it’s about Life!”, said a raised voice Thursday night at the Van Zandt Hall. A voice that echoed throughout the room.
If one’s lifestyle is threatened, a person in the habit of adopting lifestyles can simply drop their existing one, adapt and move on to a new one. It’s really just a matter of changing one’s clothes, recreation, taste in music, and magazine subscriptions. A lifestyle is simply a mode of living in which one consumes and accessorizes appropriately in deference to a marketer’s instructions.
If you have a life, you have no need of a ‘lifestyle’. If you have a life you are too busy living to carefully follow the rules laid out for a ‘lifestyle.’ And if you have a life, chances are you are going to stand up for it if its threatened, chances are you are going to fight tooth and nail for it if someone wants to sacrifice it to misguided ends.
Community
Not only is this a fight for life as people have come to know, expect, and cherish it, this is a fight for community. It’s a fight for the livelihood and sustained existence of the hundreds of rural communities that lie in the proposed blast zone of this project. While the fish and the trees have their lawyers, interest groups, and professional cadres who will go to bat for them, who do these communities have to fight for them? As a fellow who introduced himself as Bill Royer said Thursday night “What about the little fish,” meaning the people, “who live here?” Who do they have to fight for them? Only themselves, only eachother. But as this force, as I think we soon shall find out, is a force to be reckoned with.
Where do we go from here?
For the groundswell that’s beginning to rumble into a roar of opposition in Whatcom and Skagit County to the Commerce Corridor idea to maintain and build momentum it must reach out to and find allies throughout rural central and southern Washington. It must reject the insinuations already being made by Thom Jones of Wilbur Smith Associates that it is only a few stubborn, recalcitrant “Foothills Folks”, as the Herald terms it, who are standing in the way. We must work hard to explode the myth of a silent majority mutely supportive of a Commerce Corridor. We must reject out of hand the storyline that this is simply the issue of a few rural holdouts standing in the way of progress. This is an issue for everyone who cares about the future of Western Washington. This is an issue for everyone who believes that tract housing and blighted strip malls in every direction is neither the best we can hope to achieve, nor the most desirable of all possible futures for our region.
It is my belief that in their staggering arrogance, in their zeal to serve the corporate interests which bend their ears, our legislators have overreached. They have already spent half a million dollars trying to sell out what remains of rural Western Washington to corporate interests. They have bought neither a study of whether we need a Commerce Corridor, whether we want a Commerce Corridor, or if this is the best place to build a Commerce Corridor. The only question put to the Wilbur Smith Associates is “How do we get the Oil pipelines, Utilities, Railroads, and trucking interests to build the Corridor here?”
It is my belief that because these legislators have grossly overreached, have revealed themselves to be so bereft of common sense about what the future can and should hold that the people who believe in and are committed to their communities in rural Western Washington have a real opportunity to turn this thing around. While the media may have missed it, the people who were at the meeting in Van Zandt Thursday know that what happened at the meeting was that a rural Washington community in Whatcom County revealed itself as something worth going to the wall for.
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