Sean McCullough
New Johannesburg

Salve, Questore. Benevolentiae!

     You said:

> WHAT HAPPENED?  I am so surprised!  When I was in Colorado Springs, not
> five years ago, I was in a VERY LIBERAL town!  Most people BURNED DOWN
> churches, much less attended them! ;)  The largest denomination was The
> Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints(better known as Mor(m)ons.

The Moronic Faith has NEVER been the largest one here; Morons have always
been outnumbered hereabouts by Papists. Ancient colonial Spanish influences
reinforced by most whites coming later being either Irish or Poles, don'cha
know.

And we never were all THAT liberal, either; but, to answer your "What
Happened"? question, what happened was this: As the domestic oil industry
collapsed, cutting millions of dollars' worth of paycheck spending, mega-jobs
were lost in Denver. These white-collar workers fled to the Springs seeking
work, until we could no longer absorb any more; and then the industries
employing THOSE people laid them off, costing us THOSE paychecks as well.
High fuel prices, coupled with the disappearance of the affluent society in
the 1980's, nearly destroyed our tourism business. (The only sector of
southern Colorado tourism which is still growing is the skiing industry --
and at the largest it can get it is still NO substitute for the SUMMER
tourism business which was once our urban mainstay!) The electronics
industry, which Southern Colorado wooed relentlessly because it was
supposedly "clean" industry, sent most dollars' worth of THOSE jobs out of
southern Colorado.....to Korea and Japan.

The above takes us from roughly 1980 to 1990.....and then the REAL big hit
was taken. Within the period 1990-1992, CF&I Steel shut down, and the USSR
disintegrated -- destroying the entire stable, middle-class job basis for the
southern two-thirds of the State. CF&I was unionized (and paid its bluecollar
workers accordingly); and military/aerospace jobs were both wellpaid and
stable. Both of those are gone now; the military is cutting back mercilessly
because most of the Cold War forces are no longer needed at all with no USSR;
and Pueblo was really gutted by CF&I's major downsizing. Although CF&I is
back in business (they were purchased from within bankruptcy), they will only
be a metal recycling concern henceforth. Never again will CF&I be in the
business of making iron from virgin ore and coke. And the payrolls reflect
this bitter fact.

Into this picture, come the fundamentalist organizations, flush with donor
cash, and willing to spend it to buy our society. The dollars which James
Dobson's Focus on the Wallets organization SHOULD have had to PAY California
in taxes on their defacto PROFITS went instead to build their new, handsome,
multi-million dollar headquarters east of the Air Academy -- and to influence
our elections, in which they should have had NO say whatsoever.

So that's what happened. The ilk of the owners of the Gazette Telegraph
newspaper managed to eliminate almost all significant resistance to their
religious-rightist agenda, by kicking out PRODUCTIVE industries, and
replacing them with televangelical organizations.

And all loyal HolySmokers -- at least, the educated ones -- know what THOSE
organizations produce in the way of "useful products and services!"

                                slainte -- Sean