The Legislative slug out over whether the Wyoming Business Council should be funded with Wyoming tax dollars brings forward a fascinating political concept.
What path will Wyoming ride?
Governor Mark Gordon appears to be a big fan of cryptocurrency, alternative energy, and subsidizing hand-picked entities in the private sector.
But what could a conservative governor do? I’ve often written that we need to double down on agriculture and blue-collar jobs in Wyoming in a way that’s meaningful.
That is not the direction of Wyoming in the Gordon administration.
Nationwide, people are raising concerns about data centers possibly being linked to cancer and miscarriage. Data centers are breaking ground in Wyoming as we speak.
Many Wyomingites disagree with this use of our precious soil.
This reminds me of a word. Frayvelance: The haunting awareness that a place you cherish will one day be only a memory, lost to time. A notion the TV show Yellowstone invokes.
This notion surfaces in Wyoming politics. To some, their idea of the world feels intangible. Like something slipping into darkness, never to be seen again – but still felt through the mind’s eye over and over.
The fleeting feeling leaves a pit in your stomach. Like leaving Grandma’s house to find the glowing kitchen light fading out your rearview window. It’s a painful experience to feel as though you are already living past a moment you’re enjoying in the present.
That feeling comes with a sense of hopelessness. Then desperation.
Is progress all its really cracked up to be? Or perhaps we are all just longing for the nostalgia of a quiet dive bar with a Marlboro sign over the stained pool table. The wood paneled walls having heard too many talesover Windsor. Paying cash for our groceries and having extra for the movie later.
I’m getting the sense that the Wyoming voters miss the old days. A time when we never would have thought about who was using which bathroom. When kids rode their bikes until dark and nobody feared the unknown because society had a compass.
It feels like we’ve become dysregulated as a society and thus as a political divide. The dysregulation stems from sadness, unfulfillment and longing that nothing in this world feeds.
As the Joint Appropriations Committee is hearing from the bureaucrats this month about how many hundreds of millions they need of our money, I want to remind our public servants who they are fighting for. Remember the kids who sat through elementary school in masks. The citizens that couldn’t keep their heads above water.
The one who was a victim of the system. Remember them all. Build coalitions, infrastructure and deconstruct the institutionalized defects that come when the government tries to run anything. Do it better. Do it differently. Keep doing it no matter what they say to stop you.
Don’t be concerned about who is in which club; remember the work of the people.
Let the melancholy of frayvelance in its haunting, beautiful temperament, remind you of what you’re fighting for. We must protect the promise of tomorrow without letting Wyoming be sold out and lost in time, nothing more than a poignant Western romance, slipping through our hands. We cannot let her be sold in time.
This conversation is a reminder of what elections mean.
Cowboy State Daily columnist Cassie Craven is a University of Wyoming College of Law graduate who practices law in Wyoming. She can be reached at: longhornwritingllc@gmail.com
