Why Democrats (not candidates) need to STOP ignoring and/or demonizing rural voters...

[2naSalit]

62. It's a laundry list but I'll just go with

Public Land issues and how much more it matters to everyone than most imagine. Yes they belong to We the People, but the government manages them and they suck at it in DC due to corporate influence.

The vast majority of Americans see public land as their favorite place to go camping or participating in some favored recreation on weekends and vacations but they have a far more serious effect on the survival of us all and too many fail to see that. And just coming here on vacation does not oblige us to totally accommodate every tourists' desire, though that seems to be the mindset of our visitors who rudely inform us they expect that, and these are the American tourists.

There is no realization about how the public lands, purposely set aside for more reasons than cattle grazing and ATV rides, sustain us by way of natural processes. Sadly, we Americans, as a whole, expect that everything on earth was put there for us to use as we wish with little regard to how these places, yes even the sage deserts, make it possible for us to exist, yet we don't seem able to notice that we can do something about how they are managed. At present, they are managed, for the most part, in such a way that extractive industries have had free reign to chip away at them to the point where we are all endangered, yet nobody really pays attention until they go on vacation. And having some respect for nature is absent in many Americans, thus, much of the problem's origin can be found in how we "use" our favorite places when going out to play.

Saturday evening I went to a dinner party and met a nice gentleman who was very intelligent and seemingly aware of many issues facing the citizenry, but he had no clue about most of the concerns involving public lands and how they are managed for destruction while most regulations and rules to help sustain during and after use are ignored by the industries and a large number of recreationists.

That is one issue where I will fight to the mat, but I'm burned out from educating and protesting and lobbying. Where I live, I am surrounded by public lands, Wilderness, BLM, NF, NP, and state conservation lands, and still it is not enough to protect what we need to sustain us at survival level in the near future. But let's approve some more mining, drilling, timber harvest and cattle chopping it all up, I'm sure we'll learn our error as we take our last, desperate gasps.


Just sayin'.