Sure, power is fun. There will always be those in local government who benefit from a broken system, especially in a small town. They enjoy taking kickbacks and the feeling of having a little bit of power in their otherwise powerless lives.

 

But what I'm seeing from ordinary citizens is the old "I've been here forever, and you can't come in and change my way of life", even if that old way has some glaring flaws. Nobody likes being told what to do. My small hometown in Colorado was forced by a bunch of woke virtue-signalers to make a change that nobody in the town agreed to. They didn't take time to understand, they just decided that everybody in a small town was an intolerant, racist hayseed, and they knew better.

 

Maybe that's the way Bring Back Sidney is coming off to some longtime Sidney residents. "We know better than you. We have higher morals than you so we're better than you". It's hard to help people who feel they are being judged as "needing to be helped".

 

I certainly saw it over and over again in my professional career. It was literally my job to find and fix problems, but when I did, people got mad. It didn't matter that the process ran faster and worked better than before - it was just that it wasn't their idea. In fact, the fact that it cut down significantly on the amount of work they had to do was a huge problem - it was easier to do the same ol' drudgery that they knew inside and out rather than take on the new process that they weren't so good at, and it made them anxious that they might not be viewed as being competent after all.

 

Four months into my new job at Cabela's, I found an error in an old template that wasn't used very often. I said to one of the senior members "I think something's wrong with this template". She slammed her pen on the desk and said, "You weren't hired to THINK." Welllllll, that's not what I was told at my interview, so I showed it to the manager, and he agreed it was wrong and said to fix it, which even further angered the senior team member. To me, this was just an error that needed to be corrected. To her, though, through her lens of understanding, I had just pointed out that she had missed an error FOR YEARS and made her look incompetent. Everyone missed it, not just her, but she wanted me to ignore the problem and perpetuate the error. To her, that was better than having her pride injured.

 

We all know those parents who make excuses for their kids instead of admitting they've done something wrong. I volunteered a ton of time helping to run a local non-profit, and I had the audacity, the AUDACITY, to suggest that a set of parents should be making their kids follow the rules. HOW DARE I!! I initially tried to discuss it with a parent, and he got defensive right off the bat. He claimed it wasn't his kids, and he put the blame on some mythical adults. So, the next time some equipment wasn't put away properly (five times in a row) I simply put the equipment away where it couldn't be mistreated any more. Guess who got mad. Ever since then, those parents give me dirty looks whenever I see them in public. It isn't just the fact that their kids were caught, it's that their egos are bruised. In their eyes, I should have continued cleaning up after their entitled little brats rather than making them look like they have bad parenting skills.

 

That's how it's playing out in Sidney right now. A corrupt tax assessor was swindling people right under the noses of the commissioners and the voters who elected her. Her county co-workers put their trust in her. To them, getting her voted out of office makes THEM look bad. And like my previous co-workers, they would rather perpetuate the corrupt situation where their mistakes weren't being pointed out, rather than fixing the problem. Rather than admitting they had been wrong.

 

The Bring Back Sidney group has been trying to put forth a logical premise under the assumption that people will see the logic and agree with it. But it turns out that it doesn't matter how great an idea it is, it's WHO is making the suggestion. The Bring Back Sidney group is made up of mostly "transplants", people who have moved to Sidney in the past 10 years. And I guess the fact that these people are saying "we want to help improve our new home" is being misunderstood as "you old guys have been doing it wrong and we know better".

 

Sidney's past history has certainly played a part in creating and enforcing this perception against new people. The story goes that all kinds of unsavory folks inundated the town during the Gold Rush days. That's how Sidney became "The Toughest Town on the Tracks". Shysters came to town with the specific intent of capitalizing on naive people with newfound wealth. It continued when outsiders came in for Ft. Sidney, oil and railroad expansion, the Sioux Army Depot, and Cabela's, and the changes they made to the town weren't necessarily welcomed.

 

I saw that division when I worked at Cabela's. True, there were people who moved to Sidney only to take a job, and they didn't really care to integrate into the community. On the flip side, I heard locals referring to "THOSE people on the Hill" the ones who thought they were better than the long-time citizens, who they saw as getting special treatment. Cabela's had brought a ton of money to the area, so it seemed like Cabela's employees were being unfairly catered to.

 

It's easy to see why people in Sidney have a low opinion about new people moving in, but it's not a helpful one. That's where this whole "they're just here to stir up shit and then they'll leave" mindset is coming from. Historically, it happened.

 

Change is hard for some people. I recently heard an entertaining story of how parts of Sidney were regularly flooded, so it was proposed to dig a huge flood ditch through the town. The Good Ol' Boys who solved the world's problems at the local coffee shop every morning were against it, saying it would "ruin the town". Later, after the ditch saved the town from destruction, and homeowners and businesses saved money because they no longer had to pay for flood insurance, oh, of course they were for it the whole time! So, I'm hoping that's how it shakes out for the changes proposed by the Bring Back Sidney group. It's going to take time, and it's going to take proof. Already, people have seen how a small group of voters can make a change to the county government so that they, their friends, relatives, and neighbors are receiving fair property tax assessments. Maybe in the future they will see their property taxes go down. Maybe people will start trusting the police again. And in the end, I hope the "naysayers" will be pretending they were on board the whole time.

 

People need to remember and be comforted by the fact that if the people of Sidney are collectively for or against something, it will show up at the voting booth.