I was going through some personal papers and found this copy of a letter I had written nearly 30 years ago. Re-reading it was almost as if it had been written yesterday, other than some events were dated. Pretty much everything else is current. It was written as I was finishing up my house and preparing to retire and the tax people were overjoyed that someone would actually move into a rural area. Over the years I have written a lot of angry letters to the local papers but I always included copies to those I was maligning. Sadly to say nothing ever changed because of my exercises in futility. I used to go to the local town board meetings, my complaints always were about the use or misuse of tax payer money to support those things that weren’t governmental  (such as Boy Scouts, fireworks displays, various donations, etc). I had a number of aggravations with the zoning board/land use/building permits at the county level as well.
I finally got worn down and gave up, elections didn’t change anything, mindsets never changed. Once a precedence is set it’s tough to change, even at the lowest level.
A lot of the letters never saw daylight, local papers often pick and chose the opinions that are not confrontational. I did get picked up by some other publications that reprinted my letters, however.
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