December 11th, 2008
Yo, Rockford mayor and assorted other Winnebago County movers-and-shakers: Here’s a reminder for ya: If that Chrysler plant all the way over in Boone County shuts down, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.
Tuesday, Belvidere Mayor Fred Brereton and various suits from Boone’s public-private planning arm, Growth Dimensions, went to Washington to lobby Congress on the auto industry bailout. Like the bailout or not, one has to wonder where the heck was the Rockford-Winnebago County contingent?
Did the invite not come through? Did you get one and have something better to do? Did you not think about it? OK, the Boone folks’ trip to Congress is just so much window dressing; there’s about a snowball’s chance in the kitchen that anything those guys said would change one vote. But, darn it, they did it. They made the grand gesture; they showed the flag and made sure we all understood this was about the folks back home. Good for them. Someone in Boone County’s got some smarts.
This is the Rock River Valley, admittedly a moniker the newspaper made up and used so often than everyone else started using it, too. But, made up or not, the Rock River Valley is Boone and Winnebago and a touch of Ogle and Stephenson counties. The Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA for short) is officially Winnebago and Boone. The people who work at the Chrysler plant (and the GM plant right up the road in Cheeseland) live, shop, go to school, have their hearts repaired and generally do most of their business in Rockford and its surrounds. It’s a region, darn it, and as a region we can thrive.
But, we’re going to all go down if the two counties don’t present a united front. And, that D.C. trip needed Rockford and Winnebago County people at the podium. You were conspicuous by your absence.
On the same day that the Register Star’s front page had the Boone folks in D.C. pleading for the auto industry, Rockford folks gave us yet another artist’s watercolor of a downtown mall that’s supposed to be a “cool, hip image.”
Give me a car plant any day.
December 11th, 2008
Three words describe the baby boomer generation: rigid, righteous and reactionary. We get our teeth sunk into some cause, campaign or ideology and we’re as tenacious as a rat terrier.
Born roughly 1946-64, as teenagers and young adults we didn’t like the Vietnam War, so we got it canceled. We didn’t like big business (big anything, for that matter) so we tore it all to shreds. When we arrived in our getting-spending-and-child-rearing years, we got, spent and reared with a vengeance. Kids first was our mantra, right up there with spend every nickel we made (and could borrow) until a couple months ago when our profligate greed finished off Wall Street and all those “big” things.
Which brings us to today and my prediction that we boomers are going to decide that saving money — not spending it — is what everyone ought to be doing. We’re going to go all rigid, righteous and reactionary about it. The out-of-control consumer society we doted on in 1975 and then gorged on for the next three decades, died in October.
Boomers, rather than wallowing aimlessly in the passing of our 401ks, will demand (probably to the point of making laws) that everyone must save. We’ll try for means tests for how many children one can afford. We’ll limit new home construction to one car garages (well, maybe two), but definitely not three or, heaven forbid, more. We’ll demand high-density housing, not McMansions on sprawling lawns that require riding mowers. Invest in mass transit now because suburbs is going to become a dirty word.
We’ll make it fashionable to drive an old(er) car; downsize possessions (great for garage sales, except no one will be buying more stuff); wear for-real cheap jeans and not designer ones that just look cheap. We’ll cook and entertain at home, and look askance at those who flaunt their cash in any way. We will demand quality goods and services for reasonable prices — no show-off stuff. We’ll expect that an impressive portion of our cash be donated to charities that take care of those who can’t take care of themselves — and we will tax ourselves (and you, of course) to make sure government can provide health care, roads and bridges, vocational education, jobs and defense.
We will wear our newly found fiscal conservatism and social responsibility with pride and we will expect everyone else around us to do the same. If you don’t we’ll make a law. We will be rigid, righteous and reactionary about it, too, so don’t even think about questioning how a generation that spent itself into another Great Depression could now be so cautious about its remaining cash.
Boomers are already painting the first brush strokes of this new-found fascination. Give us another year or two, and we’ll be the artful masters of profligate savings. Waste not, want not.
