AFLLCO -- No matter what wonderful qualities you have imbued in your children, there are limits they will not be able to overcome at times. Their ability to become ranchers around Powell Butte, or if not theirs, that of their doubtless equally wonderful children, will be restricted by these resorts, it seems. If, due to their special wonderful qualities, they want to and manage to work it out within those restrictions, that means that it will be that much harder for some other person with all the moral virtues you proclaim to find or make such a place.

It simply isn't true that if everyone pushed themselves equally hard to achieve and gain for themselves, all could do so.

The water belongs to the people of Oregon you say, not just the people in a locality. Why stop there? Why should Oregonians have any special claim to what is in Oregon? Why should citizens of the U.S. have any special claim to what is in the U.S.?

The key phrase is rights allotted to those who qualify for them. The establishment of those qualifications is how "the people" decide how to handle our common waters. As with many common resources, "the people" on the whole tend to give some favor to extant residents in localities and to devolve the power to make decisions to the local or regional level -- each in our locality thereby gaining a bit of control over what may be controllable about the conditions of our lives, in exchange for someone elsewhere getting a little bit over theirs.

It sounds like these destination resort overlay maps are exactly one of the tools of qualification by which the people handle the questions of what to do with our common resources, and when and how to allow them to be appropriated to private use.

None of this is xenophobia, prejudice, envy or selfishness, not inherently, while a good bit of it is self-knowledge and local knowledge. Localism can be provincialism, even in cosmopolitan provinces. It can be cramped and narrow vision of life -- but it also can be a richly aware groundedness.

Your wonderful children may have the resources to adapt to foreclosed opportunities, and you've done well by them to give them that gift. But that doesn't justify a claim that it's okay to blithely make serial ad hoc decisions that cumulatively become a much larger decision without any kind of reflection or deliberation.

That is especially true if the ad hoc decisions foreclose opportunities or cause destruction for no good reason, or if they create losses much bigger than the gains involved, or damages that are irreparable with wider repercussions, as is increasingly the case with decisions involving the ecology of water, all around the world.

To put this another way, we've reached the point where the presumption should be that golf courses in the desert are nuts, unless a most compelling case is made otherwise. And that presumption is not prejudice, but reasoned judgment based on past observed experience and presently observed conditions and processes.

Nor that it's o.k. that the losses should fall mainly on some people or classes or groups of people, and the gains be restricted others or classes or groups of others. And it doesn't make people who want that kind of deliberation, some consideration of what's to be lost as well as gained and whether it's worth it, morally inferior beings somehow.

And even wonderfully adaptable children who make the best of things for themselves may feel losses, or simply never have the chance for some experiences.

And even the wonderfully adaptable may face unfair or unwise exercises of power, to which resistance or refusal simply to concede and adapt does not ipso facto constitute twisted emotions or deficient morality or personal energy or hapless, helpless victimhood. Actually, quite the opposite, it can be refusal of victimhood.

Steve, thanks for an interesting window into a piece of politics away from the PDX metro area.

Thank you, Steve, for sharing this with us. It's great to hear about a local issues that will impact livability statewide for all Oregonians.