Editor,
I've been called a grumpy old man and maybe I am. Maybe I have a reason to be. It could be. I'm grumpy because I don't believe I should be forced to pay $43 a month and $80 a year for property tax for something that was dumped on me by an ex-councilman-developer and his puppets. It was an item I didn't need or want.
Folks just down the road are free of this injustice. They believe we are fools for letting it happen. Maybe we are. We didn't put up much of a fight. A few people did, but they didn't get any help, so apathy won.
Most people didn't have to put up a fight because Hooper city did not have enough money to bother them. The city squandered all their money in the mid-section--$18.5 million for 900 hook-ups.
A petition that was not honored, revealed the people in the majority didn't want this white elephant, but that's as far as it went.
The ex-councilman-developer ignored the people and with the help of his band of puppets, pushed it on us for the benefit of himself, developer-friends and to also make a hometown engineer rich. It's very unfortunate that we didn't have a mayor with enough gumption to give his people a vote. That's how complacency works and that's what the "magnificent seven" were counting on.
If not laying down and playing dead when self-centered, power-hungry individuals proceed to push us around makes one a grumpy old man--so be it.
I'm proud to be a grumpy old man. I have friends who are grumpy and with a big of luck, others might get to be old and grumpy some day.
I believe one of the greatest things Abe Lincoln ever said was, "To sin by silence when one should protest makes cowards of men.
Ed Venstra
Hooper
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