My home town died last night

[MadHound]

My home town is Columbia, Missouri. It was a fun, funky, liberal college town, a great place to grow up. I thought I might just live my entire life there. However over the years, cancer started creeping in and things started to change. There were two incidents that started the slide. First, in the mid eighties two of the Walton spawn came to town to live, and one of them, Kronke, was using his wife's family fortune to make a fortune of his own in various developments around the city. The second incident sounding the death knell for Columbia was in the early nineties when MONEY magazine declared Columbia to the best small city in the country. The floodgates opened and people came pouring in.

As the population expanded, its demographics expanded, becoming more conservative. We started seeing conservative fundy yahoos showing up on the school board. In 2004 Boone County went for Bush(though they did go for Obama in '08. A hate radio station started up. Don't get me wrong, liberal groups fought back valiantly, and managed to hold the line for almost two decades against the most outrageous effects of these insane assholes, but the people came flooding in, a lot moving up from Springfield Missouri(and if you know anything about Springfield you know just what a special type of RW yahoo fundies I'm talking about).

I move out in '03 for a number of reasons, some of which were related to this influx in population. I didn't move far, about thirty miles away out in the country, and I still was very active in Columbia life.

But yesterday's election has sounded the death knell for the great little town I once knew. Yesterday's election saw a conservative, Chamber of Commerce mayor elected, along with two yahoo fundies, teabagger types, elected to the City Council. To put the icing on the cake, a conservative fundy Mom, whose son was attacked in a parking garage last year, managed to push through a referendum on allowing cameras to be posted throughout downtown, thus fully invading everybody's privacy. Next up is the proposition to equip all cop cars with license plate readers to read everybody's plates and feed that info into a database so they can keep track of everybody wherever they go.

This marks a horrible turning point for my home town. All the good works, all the care and nurturing that went into making Columbia a great little city is being torn down before our eyes, and now it's only going to be accelerated.

It's a sad day when your home town dies.