By Peter Galuszka
A half a century ago in rural places like the tobacco and corn fields of Eastern North Carolina, there used to be billboards with strong and aggressive messages. One said: “This Is Klan Country.” Another advocated: “U.S. Out of the United Nations.”
Both represented frightening, hard-right elements. The source of the first sign was obvious. Another, slightly more presentable group had put up the second sign. That was the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative organization founded in 1958 that hated communists, pushed U.S. unilateralism, and purported to uphold so-called “American” values, which, at the time, were codes words for Anglo Saxon “Christians” upset about everything from growing globalism to integrating the races at home.
Now, people of the same ilk, Tea Partiers and other hard-right types, are extending decades-old U.N. paranoia to down-in-the-weeds smart growth policies that set up limits such as lot size, where growth should go and how services can be matched to growth.
In an intriguing article in this Sunday’s Richmond Times Dispatch, reporter Rex Springston outlines how this cabal apparently based in the Richmond area and in the watery Middle Neck has targeted the smart growth campaign. They have helped delay comprehensive plans in Henrico and Chesterfield Counties, oppose the use of electricity meters, bike paths, and cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
Their rallying cry is the so-called “Agenda 21” which is a policy established by the U.N. back in the early 1990s promoting the then-fashionable ideals of “sustainable development.” Given that the document came from an international group representing countries of all income and development levels, it pushes such guidelines as grouping housing for the sake of efficient resource use.
The anti-Agenda 21 crowd claims that the plan would strip away home ownership. It would end private farming and would apparently push people into Stalin-style collective farms or somesuch. Erecting smart electric meters in individuals’ houses for more efficient use of electricity is part of a plot for mass surveillance by Big Government. Naturally, George Soros, the billionaire, left-leaning financier, is behind this. Yet the Republican National Committee and Next Gingrich have embraced getting rid of Agenda 21.
Close to my home in Chesterfield County, anti- Agenda 21 types have helped delay adoption of a new comprehensive plan which had been designed more or less around smart growth policies. Growth would be concentrated around existing highway and commercial areas and not allowed to hopscotch hither and yon. A “green zone” in southwestern Chesterfield where I live would be kept green. Tea Party types threw wrench into that one, saying it would take property rights away from owners.
One wonders where these clowns were back 20 years ago when Chesterfield’s growth-happy board of supervisors gave into every idea any developer had. That is why schools are overcrowded and police and fire services are short-changed. My small subdivision has shifted school districts three times in 10 years to help the county rectify its disastrous planning.
The Tea Party people like bad planning because it represents “freedom,” I would guess. It seems extremely odd that they would drag in a sleepy, two-decades-old UN proposal as their whipping boy. Their claims that it is fostering global socialism is as nutty as the John Birch Society itself.
One wonders, with the global economy deciding where jobs go more and more, how these people deal with the 21st century world. Their solution seems to be to dress up like Patrick Henry in colonial garb, wave their rattlesnake flags and tell the rest of the world where to go. The rest of us will be paying for the consequences.
