If you ask the Town of Lansing to do anything for the rural community; they ignore you. And if you ask them again; you’re a troublemaker.
Their denial of the worth of rural residents is not just a passive thing: they actively, if that’s a proper usage, refuse to respond or acknowledge anything that comes from the rural community. Letters, emails, and documents disappear into the Town’s offices – and whether they are even opened and read is left to the imagination.
Their reaction to Cornell-affiliated agricultural interests, however, is almost fawning. I was there, a few years ago, when a farmer strode into a meeting: announcing that a landowner who rented to him [for chump-change] signed a much more lucrative lease with a solar farm company. Within days; the Town Board released a public policy statement condemning that action, and created a bureaucratic atmosphere of obstruction and denial for solar farm land usage.
More recently, famers submitted a unilateral restructuring of rural zoning to the Town of Lansing. It entirely removed most of the traditional land uses from the non-farming residents; and “streamlined” the approval of farming uses. There was no representation or participation by the rural community, and no debate. The farmers’ re-zoning plan was quickly passed without demur.
In the Town’s recent “loophole election” [where Cornell’s “Vichy” government won every Town Board seat] – not one of the Cornell/Progressive candidates visited, or had anything to do with the town’s rural community.
Cornell’s Progressives practice a de facto rural segregation as rigid as any racial one in our history.
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I have often been told that I will get into trouble for what I write about Tompkins County – but I have never been told that I’m wrong. In a county where the overwhelming opinion is that the government is corrupt, and that there is no meaningful participation by the people; why do people put up with it? Because they have been convinced that they are in a lifeboat – with dangerous seas all around.
An old-time farmer scoffed at the term “free range”: stating that; when chickens were raised packed in a giant shed under artificial lights; cutting a couple of small doors in the walls to allow outdoor access fulfilled the “free range” criteria – but the chickens were terrified to come out into this strange and different environment.
2024 is an environment locked in time, space, and thought: every Where, When, and How is portrayed as a dangerous choice. But what is more dangerous than having a corrupt and tyrannical government decide for you?