corrente

After the water board membership meeting yesterday, and general arguing about water rights, cleaning the ditches, and who owes dues and such, apparently everyone sat around drinking coffee and yammering. Anybody who owns water rights can come to the meeting, and so I’m told there were about 20 folks, a real mixed bag. I wasn’t there because I was tired of the arguing after the last meeting. Only happens quarterly and most of us only superficially know each other. But one of the members came by to give me the annual ballot for electing board members, and to see if I’d paid my dues, and we had some coffee and he told me what was said. I came away not knowing whether to laugh or cry. He’s a flaming Libertarian, so a tolerant sort, if misguided. His report over coffee went something like this:

So, he says then, what has to happen is, we gotta stop giving away our water to the Indian tribes. And the other fella said, there’s treaties that say it’s their water, not ours. And he said, but they’ve got plenty. The government needs to stop all these damn entitlements. I told him, hey, didn’t you take a check from the government last year for drought relief? And he says yeah, but, and I just told him right there that he ought to send it back. This is the wettest winter in a generation. Hay prices are high. You don’t need it. And he says that’s different. It was for last year. I told him, shit, come on now, you know it wasn’t. You already had your hay crop in when you got that check. That’s different, he says. I didn’t know it was gonna be so wet. Hell, he’s got his hand in the government’s pocket and talks all this libertarian horseshit.

And ain’t that just the thing? Redistribute the wealth, but do it MY way.