Welcome To Badlands Journal

----Gary McMillen
3 April 2006

Americans too young to remember the Vietnam War or those who have an iron-clad case of amnesia do not know how bad a really rotten war can get on the home front of the invader, passing over the millions of the invaded such wars kill. You are only beginning to get a taste of it. An immeasurable aid to national complacency about the Iraq Disaster is that it is being fought be other peoples’ children, almost exclusively from the nation’s less fashionable, less politically influential neighborhoods.

We used to have some self-respect and pride in the Valley. We worked hard, weren’t rich, but were deeply involved in our communities, in our agriculture, our economy, and in our environment.

The greatest threat to that self-respect – based on a sense of reality and truth – that we have ever seen is UC Merced-Pomboza. And all that is pathetically distorted about this land scheme masquerading as a university is epitomized in its first “Family-Oriented Fairy Shrimp Festival” to be held on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.

At their June 13 meeting, supervisors will take a vote on one of five options for how to handle developer-driven growth. Those options range from leaving the system as it is to enforcing a moratorium on any growth that requires changing the general plan. – Chris Collins, Merced Sun-Star, April 12, 2006