If you look at the “Action Center” link up there, it takes you to an important page where you can find links for taking “action” on various subjects—all marked urgent! (These days, taking action is pretty much defined as communicating with your elected employees in Salem.)

One suspects that Onward Oregon readers don’t suffer from a shortage of appeals to “Take action!” communicated via e-mail, telephone, letter, smoke signal, and (probably) telepathy. There are a LOT of important things going on, and whenever the Lege is in session, nothing good is secure.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and eternal appeals to “TAKE ACTION!” is the price of eternal vigilance. Just watching the train wrecks and the close shaves is not enough–you have to actually speak up in your own voice if you want your hired hands to care what the white-hat lobbyists say to them.

I know, it seems stupid that you have to keep telling them “Fix Measure 37” over and over, but the deal is this:

Unless you are a real big contributor, politicians often suffer from a form of Alzheimer’s: they vaguely remember having seen you before, but nothing that you said recently sticks, so you have to be persistent and say it over, and over, and over again to make sure it leaves an impression.

So, when you have a minute, send your electeds a real letter, or a postcard, or phone; e-mail only if you absolutely must. Be polite, be brief, but most of all be firm–pick one or two meaningful, memorable reasons that you want Measure 37 fixed so that we don’t lose some of the world’s best farm and forest land to subdivisions again.

There’s an awful lot of “urgent” things in the world, and there’s some that are important, but this one is both urgent AND important. Hit that link and TAKE ACTION to help get Measure 37 fixed.

And consider joining 1000 Friends of Oregon if you haven’t already, especially if you are one of the many non-Portlanders who want to save what’s best in Oregon from the predations of the sprawlbuilders.

[Note the economy and disaster preparedness links are selected because Measure 37, by promoting sprawl, will further stress and bankrupt small towns and county budgets, and this will become especially clear when the folks want urban levels of services in times of disasters, while they want to pay rural levels of taxes (if any) at all other times.]

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Disaster Preparedness, Economy, General, Livability, Take Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.