The worst menaces to the lifestyle and stability of Asheville and Buncombe County are drug dealers and land developers. The former destroy lives; the latter ravage landscape.
It should be obvious to all who live here that we are being overwhelmed by this rapacious pair of invaders. Our resistance, such as it is, remains largely futile. The drug problem has become so rampant that the courts and the police cannot properly protect us. In lieu of effective official protection, we organize a ludicrous flashlight vigil to express our anger and frustration. Meanwhile, our mountains keep tumbling down—big money prevailing as it generally does in America. Our county and city governments, even when they pretend to put up a good fight on our behalf, usually relent, vis-a-vis the unremitting maneuvering of the ruthless despoilers running roughshod over our beautiful land.
In order to control these invaders, we must take drastic measures. As for the drug dealers, they should be culled from the neighborhoods and sequestered without benefit of habeas corpus, their constitutional rights negated by the social crisis they have created by attacking the constitutional right of citizens to live their lives free of predatory fear. The drug dealers could be detained for an indefinite amount of time at a fenced-in McCormick Heights, the housing project they destroyed becoming their own personal prison. And while the A.C.L.U. howls its indignation, the medical resources of the region could be used to treat the numerous cases of drug addiction no longer being fueled by the dealers.
As for countering the land developers, the concerned citizens of the area must, en masse, get personally involved, replacing ineffective ordinances and unwilling public officials with acts of civil disobedience, a la Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. If you’re not willing to lie down in front of a bulldozer or chain yourself to a tree, you’re not sufficiently committed to saving your land. If you’re not eager to leave your poovey coffee houses where, over lattes and croissants, your hollow rant has become a specious substitute for positive action, you will have contributed nothing to protecting the lifestyle you so stridently profess to love.
Should civil disobedience fail, the most drastic measure of all must be taken: the return of Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang. Hayduke lives!
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