It's only partly my fault

So... while blogsurfing this morning I ran across a post about change.
Not personal change, the loose change in your pocket, climate change or environmental change ...wait! It is kinda about environmental change, but more like about attitude change, or maybe how it doesn't change fast enough.

Anyhow, the other blogger was posting about how her community is reacting to changes (not well, frankly). That almost immediately struck a chord with me.

I moved from a much larger metro-type area of run-on communities to rural Northern California about 40 years ago. At the time the local population was about 18,000 souls. The entire market area was maybe 90,000 - 125,000. (today there are 90,000 in the city, which makes it larger than the city from where I moved) . There were two things that struck me when I moved here:

1. Most of the newcomers wanted to shut off the flow of folks into the area
2. They also wanted to change how things were done to how it's done where they came from

About the only change that has really occurred here is the major industrial base in the area has almost entirely disappeared. But the locals, for the most part, had nothing to do with the disappearance of the big mills (lumber and paper). The largest employers now are government (federal, state, and local) and two hospitals (there used to be three, but the county hospital couldn't manage on the funds it received because folks with insurance went to the other two).

Anyhow, things have changed dramatically and just about anyone who's been here for five or more years doesn't like those changes because they don't meet anyone's expectations. Many of us moved here to get away from traffic, chain stores and all the things one sees in just about every suburban community...

...and it turns out we brought them with us along with additional challenges

If I were younger, I might move to New Mexico

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