The degree to which boosters completely fail to think out the things that they boost is one of the stories that repeats itself continually throughout history.
The law of unintended consequences.
Weld County, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Weld County, Colorado, is unhappy with the direction the State of Colorado has taken in recent years, with those recent years probably stretching back into the 1990s.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Weld County is a big blocky county in northeastern Colorado which includes Greeley, that city being its county seat. The county has a lot of oil and gas, being part of the oil and gas province stretching up into Laramie County, Wyoming and down nearly into Denver and it borders Fort Collins. Oil and gas makes up its bread and butter.
The state flag of Colorado at the time of my grandmother's birth in Leadville, Colorado.
It's unhappy for the following reasons.
Colorado has always had divides between its regions. The east slope of the Rockies doesn't get along very well with the west slope. The southwestern regions, first settled by New Mexicans, doesn't get along with anyone else (in my view, they may most closely resemble Wyomingites from Wyoming). And the rural areas don't get along with Denver.
All of which leads you to wonder why Colorado was so hip on boosting the Big Blight, Denver.
Denver, the Queen City of the Plains, was a giant version of Casper, Wyoming up into the 1980s. A large city even then, its economy was based on agriculture and petroleum. My father was born in Denver in 1929 when his father, originally from Dyersville, Iowa, was working there in the office of a meat packing company. He's later move from there to another meat packing company in Scottsbluff, Nebraska and then own his own in Casper. The point there is that he was from a heavily agricultural state, Iowa, and worked in the production end of agriculture first in Denver.
The oddly simple minded flag of Colorado from 1911 to 1964. After 1964 the "C" grew enormously in size, but the flag is basically the same and still oddly simple minded.
The oil crash of the 1980s made downtown Denver like a ghost town. I can well recall waking around in Denver as a college student. Lots of businesses where shuttered. The windows of the Episcopal cathedral had been busted out. It was bad.
So Colorado rose to the occasion. It boosted different reason to visit Denver, a lot of those rural entertainment themed.
And then came dope.
Colorado attracted a lot of west coasters who were fleeing the blight of California to come to Denver to make Denver west coast blighty. They were politically far to the left of the Coloradoans who had acted to attract them. They gained in the legislature, legalized weed, and Denver became the stupefied capital of the Rockies. That solidified political control in the left and in recent years the legislature has been acting like Democratic legislatures due, seeking to regulate oil and gas and restricting all things firearm.
D'uh.
All of this was predictable.
Now some of the rural counties of Colorado want out of Colorado. Some years ago there was an effort to take five of them out and form a new state. Presumably the proposed name of the new state was going to be Delusional, as that was never going to happen.
Now there's a petition in Weld County to have it leave Colorado and join Wyoming.
And Governor Gordon, on Fox News, gave it support.
Weld County has a population of 320,000, nearly the same as Wyoming itself. If it was part of Wyoming, it would control the House completely.
Moreover, Wyoming would now border weedy Denver, which is basically expanding into Weld County, and we couldn't begin to control what that might mean. Oil and gas might be temporarily safe in Weld County, and there'd be no significant firearms restrictions, but soon the Hippy Dippy Denverites would be electing representatives to the Wyoming House itself.
Our increased population might mean we'd get another Congressman, but between Weld County, Albany County, Fremont County and Teton County, there's be no guaranty at all that said Congressman would be a Republican.
Wyomingites would hate Weld County.
Truth be known, there's a lot of division in Wyoming already. Most of the state isn't happy with Teton County most of the time, but is unwilling to do the simple things that would address that, such as a real estate sales importation tax, or high income, income tax. That'd drive out the jet set, but we're not there yet, and by the time we will be, it'll be too late. Additionally, the entire state is suspicious of the southeastern farm counties to some degree, which Weld County would be another of, as they keep producing the radical anti public lands legislators. There is no public land there, we've noticed.
This proposal is, of course, not going anywhere. Colorado isn't going to let Weld County go and in short order the political forces that are boosting this will be subsumed by the expansion of Denver into Weld County. But the Governor boosting this secessionist movement is really ill advised.
Indeed, what Wyoming ought to do is sit back and consider the example of Weld County. The state is perpetually boosting "come on in" efforts, even though most Wyomingites have a "stay out" view. Colorado had that same attitude and people came on in. Now the areas of Colorado that remain what Colorado was before that want out of the state.
And, hence, a person must be careful what they wish for.
