As Lent begins

PLATTEVILLE, Feb. 18 — Today begins the Christian penitential season of Lent, as you will read when you get to page 3B of your favorite weekly newspaper.

I wonder if I get a special dispensation from violation of the commandment about taking the Lord’s name in vain given how often I do that, or use words that are similarly frowned upon in public, while attempting to do most of what people with two functioning legs can do given that I am one short for now.

Practice of religion is fading from American life, and perhaps that’s not surprising given what Lenten sacrifice asks us to do — to not do things, or do things less often, that are bad for us. Self-control and self-discipline seems to be increasingly difficult tasks for human beings.

That includes the self-control and self-discipline to not be a hypocrite. Social media featured on Presidents Day numerous “Not My President” sentiments about the current president that were not made about presidents with a D after their names. That ignores the fact that (1) 77 million Americans had a different opinion in November 2024, and (2) presidents you didn’t vote for have the same status as presidents you did vote for, like that or not. 

I have a solution, however, for Presidents Day disagreements over support or lack thereof for presidents — sacrifice (that is, eliminate) Presidents Day as a holiday. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, so we should not be honoring people who exert far too much authority over us merely for their ability to get more of their supporters to vote for them than their opponent gets his (or her) supporters to vote for him (or her). Presidents specifically and politicians generallly are supposed to be our employees, not the other way around.

The people who identify with the No Kings movement might want to reflect, for instance, on their party’s unseemly near-worship of Franklin Roosevelt, the generation of Kennedys that were elected in the 1960s, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Maybe eliminating Presidents Day would force the party that allegedly believes in smaller government (though its three-time presidential nominee obviously does not) to live up to its assertion.

But as I have written here often, government that is closer to you has more impact on your life than the feds. As far as I know the federal government has nothing to do with the proposal to install a four-way stop at the U.S. 61/Grant County B/Abing Lane intersection north of Rockville (see page 1), but the state Department of Transportation certainly does. 

Four-way stops are the worst form of traffic control. Too many crashes prove that the presence of stop signs, or blinking red lights on top of stop signs, or rumble strips preceding stop signs actually result in all vehicles stopping at a stop sign, even if conflicting traffic is coming into that intersection. And yet it’s going to take the state five years for a more permanent solution that at least should (barring someone doing a “Dukes of Hazzard”-style jump over the roundabout — don’t laugh, it happened in Platteville) result in less-lethal collisions. But there remains no substitute for driver awareness.

While the state is slowly designing a roundabout, perhaps the state and Grant County should look at upgrading County B between Platteville and 61. This was brought up to me by a reader not long after I got here in 2012 given increasing traffic to get to Potosi’s new tourist attractions that either require travel on County B or Grant County O (the latter of which is certainly scenic but not a road someone unfamiliar with the area might want to drive at night or in bad weather) from the east of Potosi.

Elsewhere in this edition can be found a story and a Letter about data centers, which have the same level of popularity as wind farms and solar projects. This is a case of opponents not believing proponents’ claims that such issues as giant water or electric consumption are not really problems. (Perhaps because there appear to be no consequences for developers’ getting it wrong.)

One would think that a better location for a data center would be a brownfield — an already-used and then abandoned building site — or at least land within city or village boundaries instead of gobbling up undeveloped rural land, independent of whether a particular brownfield site would be big enough. I have however yet to see a brownfield data center development in Wisconsin.

The data center debate is also a case of the belief that, as in wind farms and solar projects, the costs — sacrifices? — are being borne here, and the benefits are not. No one seems impressed, and no one should be, with municipal payments by developers or renewable energy facility owners, since no one appears to be enjoying lower taxes as a result, and the demand for more power or data capacity is certainly not coming from here.