Deja Vu all over again

Grannie Annie and the old guy went for a little ride to check out the activity of McCook’s new housing development now named North Pointe Addition. So sorry that I missed the ribbon cutting by the City staff and McCook Economic Development Corporation. It looks like Amanda Engell is making a positive impact on our community.

For me, the heralded event was déjà vu as it should have happened some years ago. I was on the City Council and also had a finger in MEDC at the time. Successful farmer, friend and high school classmate, Claude Cappel came to the City to propose building a gated retirement community in the exact spot where North Pointe Addition is starting to build. Claude had already purchased the land and had contracted with a local architecture firm to lay out the housing plat.

Friend Claude had been inspired by tracking the development we see along Highway 83 as drive toward the City of North Platte. It is on the west side of the road just before you drive over the NPPD canal bridge and start down the hill into the Platte River Valley. In our younger years that acreage had belonged to the North Platte Agricultural Experimental Station where they did fertilizer test plots for crop production. When you notice now the area is covered with nice housing and well-kept yards. That was Claude’s dream.

Oh, but did Claude run into obstacles when he presented his plan to John Bingham the City Manager at the time. First off, the acreage, including what is now West 7th Street, was outside of city limits; adjacent to but just outside. That wouldn’t have been hard to cure. Then, according to Bingham’s requirements, the developer was required to install and pay for, streets and sidewalks, electrical, water, sewage and communication utilities before any construction of homes could be started. The City would not participate in any way fiscally but just inspect and boss the build.

Several of us on the City Council at the time tried to make changes to the street and utility provisions to have the City pay for the construction of those required items to later be paid back by the future residents.

Obviously, those City requirements having to be paid first by the developer put the project out of reach financially for Claude and his group of investors. So no development due to the City not being willing to work with MEDC and willing developers. Also why I chose not to run for a second term on the City Council!

So today we have a project moving toward building more needed housing for the future of our fair city with City Manager Nate Schneider and Charlie McPherson and Amanda Engell of the MEDC behind it. It took a while but your long frustrated old columnist is fully behind it also. Déjà vu!

Welcome to our current world of politics and religion. Quite a mixture. Somewhere around 4,000 years ago the Jewish religion took form. We Christians know the written evidence from what we call the Old Testament. The writers of that body wrote predicting the coming of a Messiah who would make the world a better place.

Then 2,000 years ago our Lord and Savior Jesus of Nazareth was born and in his short life fulfilled the predictions of the predicted Messiah. Christ’s disciples then formed the Christian religion to be separated from the governance of the Jewish hierarchy. It was on Christian principles that our beloved United States, the most successful nation the world has ever known, was formed.

Then, some 600 years after Christ, a second messiah called Muhammad was born and came to power over the people of more Arab background people that we call Muslims or believers in Islam. Their beliefs are of more warrior thinking than Christians and include the belief that they are encouraged to force to convert all people. Convert to their belief or die! Killing their enemies will get that warrior directly to heaven if they die in the battle.

Jewish people in Europe and America have always felt a bit separated from each other but for the most part have tolerated living together. Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party that he established, took it upon his responsibility to kill as many of the Jews living in Europe as his followers could get their hands on. We call it the holocaust. At the end of WWII with America’s backing and not so much the British the Jews migrated back to their original Holy Land and established modern Israel.

Israel chose to govern themselves as a democracy and became prosperous as they included the Muslims living within their territory as citizens with rights and access to jobs the same as those of Jewish belief. Their Jewish leaders also built an armed force second only to that of their friends in the USA.

Israel’s Arab neighbors had a hard time accepting the obvious prosperity of that small Jewish nation, in their midst, and kept chipping at them attempting to take back over what they considered their territory. Then came the big effort by a Muslim sect Hamas, doing a second holocaust, on October 7th, 2023. Israel understood that the only way to survive, as a nation, was to declare war and completely eliminate Hamas. They also counted on the help of the United States in that effort. However currently our senior political functionaries don’t really understand the importance of eliminating Hamas and are waffling in their support.

Now comes the student uprising on our more liberal college campuses. Our liberal politicians don’t really know how to stop those student uprisings funded by the likes of George Soros, billionaire, and others who hate the United States and would love to turn us into a socialist country. Sadly some of our political leaders today do lean toward socialism and are reluctant to stop the uprisings. The governors in red states Florida and Texas have a better plan.

Vote wisely in the upcoming elections.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail