Let’s use our connections to do good

Abdo, Sullivan, O’Connell: I swear! All this small-town conspiracy talk spoiled all the fun at every party this spring. But now it is summer, and hopefully we can move on to more pressing, urgent matters like Spectra Energy’s pipeline path, and a very real and evil conspiracy by big-energy and paid-off politicians to cross our county with pipelines, and create an even uglier, less-inviting crisscross of gigantic public utility lines at great profit to them and great loss of natural beauty to all of us. This, I believe, is the real threat to our small-town country life.

Abdo, Sullivan, O’Connell and People of Rappahannock County: Please, think big! While we are battling over smalltown real estate, there is a war being waged on our county. One outcome of that war has already resulted in a gross and unsightly scar across our county — those gigantic blue-gray power line poles, which destroy our view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It appears there will soon be a second, more dangerous scar buried in the ground, one which could easily bubble up to the surface at any time and create a very large toxic scar, which nobody would dare cross to enjoy the Blue Ridge.

Abdo, Sullivan, O’Connell and People of Rappahannock County: Let’s meet and together figure out how to best contain or even remove some of these ugly scars. Why don’t we, as a county, draft state and federal legislation to address the problem? With all the high-powered politicians mowing grass and eating at our inns, surely they have time to help us craft legislation to present to our state and federal representatives. How about legislation that would force all of these infrastructure projects to travel the same routes, and to put them underground along existing infrastructure — like under Interstates 81 and 66?

Abdo, Sullivan, O’Connell (and all your important friends): Tear down those power lines and bury them along with the gas lines, under interstates (and protect all of our investments), please!

JEFF RILEY

Huntly PS: A fan of Scarlett O’Hara and Ronald Reagan, I am a full-time resident of Rappahannock and the child of three very expensive (trillions of U.S. tax dollars) wars where gigantic public utilities have been built, bombed, rebuilt, rebombed, etc., who believes, therefore, that this great nation has the money not only to safely contain and hide our utilities in public interstate corridors, but to remove existing infrastructure and replace it there.