And after the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rejected Sunflower Electric's plan for a $3.6 billion electric plant expansion near Holcomb, I've decided to revive an obscure political movement from the early 1990s: I think southwest Kansas should secede from the state.
The secession campaign started as a joke among a handful -- a large handful -- of angry southwest Kansans. I was quite young at the time but if I remember properly, Finney concocted a plan for the state to take an excessive portion of tax money generated by oil and natural gas mining in southwest Kansas. For the children, of course -- that oil and gas money should go to support all the schools in the state, not just the "fortunate few" in southwest Kansas.
Never mind that secession is unconstitutional. Bitterness and resentment toward Topeka reached a boiling point.
Fast forward 15 years and we see southwest Kansas being bullied again, this time by KDHE Secretary Roderick L. Bremby and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius -- who said she "personally opposed" the Holcomb expansion, but offered a phony caveat about leaving the decision up to Bremby, her appointee. They are buffoons running southwest Kansas from afar, interfering in something they don't understand.
Never mind the inherent unfairness of rejecting a project that's been years in the making and complies with every regulation there is. Bremby and Sebelius had some eastern Kansas bullying to do and nothing was going to stop them.
I grew up in Lakin and learned realities of life much different from what my friends from Wichita and Lawrence -- and even Hays -- learned. Outsiders are often surprised when they learn what southwest Kansas is like: A four-hour drive to the nearest major airport (if you count airports in Amarillo, Colorado Springs and Wichita as "major"). No shopping malls in the entire region. No lakes. No universities. Three Wal-Marts in 20,000 square miles. Northwest Kansas also is remote, but even northwest Kansas has Interstate 70. Much of southwest Kansas is closer to Denver than Topeka; some is closer to Santa Fe, N.M.
My parents live closer to Texas Tech University than to the University of Kansas.
Such is life for southwest Kansans. Population dwindles, schools close and consolidate (when I was in school Healy and Leoti cooperated for baseball and players drove 20 miles a day for practice). Industry rarely develops and when someone tries, eastern Kansas bullies -- who have "everyone's best interests" at heart -- complain and prohibit.
"Global warming!" they screech as if they're afraid of the droughts that southwest Kansas has seen for a century. They could cut carbon dioxide emissions if they whined less verbally.
"The debate over this project is not about eastern Kansas trying to impede progress in western Kansas," Craig Volland, a member of the Kansas Sierra Club who lives in Kansas City, wrote in a column last week. That's the line eastern Kansans use every time they impede progress in western Kansas. It's more politically acceptable if they don't look like bullies. But that's all they are.
Bullies.
They get everything their way and snidely tell western Kansans to out-vote them in the Legislature, knowing that will never be possible.
That's where bitterness and resentment and anger come from. That's where a secession movement is born: In a state government that restricts and takes and controls from afar, without ever giving anything back or making an effort to understand. Every chance he gets, Ellis County vote-hustler Glenn Staab assures us that his Democrats "know Kansas doesn't end at the Topeka city limits." Every chance they get, they prove him wrong.
Sebelius and Bremby and the Sierra Club ought to visit southwest Kansas. They ought to try recruiting industry to a place with no airports and no interstate access and a state government that doesn't care. Try recruiting people to a region that's a day's drive to a city and a few years behind in technology. Try making a cell phone call -- you'll have to find the top of a hill along the highway. See what it's like to live in a desolate, remote, isolated region of the world. See how southwest Kansans have lived for 120 years.
Then listen to self-important bureaucrats in a state office 350 miles away.
When was the last time eastern Kansas provided state money to open a university in southwest Kansas? Sent water west to irrigate thirsty crops? Allowed for widening a major southwest Kansas highway?
Never.
But if there's a chance to gain from a southwest Kansas resource or a chance to make a political point at southwest Kansas' expense, eastern Kansas jumps. What's mine is mine and what's yours is ours. Don't like it? Out-vote us in the Legislature.
Now they suggest green energy -- like wind farms -- as an alternative to coal burning plants, forgetting there are no companies ready to build a $3.6 billion wind farm in southwest Kansas over the next five years.
Before hypocritical eastern Kansas bullies force their phony "Kansas belongs to all of us" motto onto others, they need to start living it themselves. Unless they're willing to give something, they should stop taking and taking and taking.
Until they're willing to understand southwest Kansas, they should leave southwest Kansas the hell alone.
Will Manly was born in Colorado but grew up in Kansas. From now on, he plans to claim Colorado. will@thestironline.com