Carroll County as a private club?

   Perhaps I was wrong about Commissioner Richard Rothschild not having a vision; the list of principles that he read for the record this past week as a quide for what he thinks should be in the county master plan show that he does, indeed, have a vision. Few of us would argue with it.
    Few Carroll County residents might question the ideals of big homes, lush lawns manicured with riding mowers, long, winding driveways.
    Who would not want to live in and enjoy the environment he and commissioner Robin Frazier see being possible, if only the government didn't take so much in taxes:  "Large homes on large lots," with nice set-backs off quiet, county-maintained country roads. Patios and perhaps outdoor kitchens with built-in stainless steel barbeque grills, a pool. Someone to keep house. A cook, maybe. Nannie?
     More people should enroll their children in private school, don't you think? The parents are so much more, say, substantial. Call it family values; our family values, of course.
     That's a nice vision, really. Like Cinderella, after the Prince matches the shoe to her foot.
     Problem is, most of us are living a life more like Cinderella before the ball: Less-than-palacial homes, but all that we can afford, taxes or no. Crowded roads to distant jobs, high gas prices, rising costs for food, clothing, and the constant nagging fear of losing the job - or jobs - that make sustenance possible.
     Most of us are glad to have a house with a back yard, or at least in a neighborhood where you can get to a playground, an open lot, or just a safe place for kids to play outside.
     The problem with the vision of Rothschild and Frazier is that it is limited by blinders; blinders they wear as part of an ideology that has as its root the premise that those of us who achieve are nobler, more deserving, special, and -- well, threatened -- by those who can't afford to keep up.
     Their vision is exclusionary; Us versus Them. Fortress Carroll against the less deserving, more problematic, sometimes chaotic, always needy, and much too diverse masses that populate most of the rest of Maryland.
     Carroll County as a private club for white, well-to-do conservatives who want only those neighbors who think like them.
     Howard and Frazier would save us from becoming another Howard County, which, despite having the highest standards in public education even at the national level still is, non-the-less, too urban. We don't want to be like Howard County, judged by most standards as having the most livable communities in the East, and certainly in Maryland.
     When you begin picking apart the holes in the "vision" of Rothschild and Frazier, you find that many current residents of Carroll County don't really fit in.
     They oppose the kind of residential planning and location that permits teachers, firefighters, police officers and middle-ranked salary owners to find affordable housing. Indeed, they find the term, "affordable housing" objectionable.
     They also break out in hives when you use words like walkable communities -- maybe it's the community word, which is too close to being more like sociable, another word related in their heads to socialism.
     The principles they would like to impose on the new master plan use terms like "we", and "the people," but the word that drives their agenda is "constituency," which consists of people who have already arrived, have theirs, and don't want others messing up their personal landscapes. And that conjurs up different images -- not a vision -- that many find darker, exclusionary, short-sighted, and wrong for average, everyday folks who were the bedrock of this county when I was growing up and then raising a family.
      The so-called principles put forth by Rothschild and Frazier are not my principles. Nor is their attempt to "guide" the county planning commission leadership. It's an attempt to hi-jack the processes which by law are set forth to keep short-sighted, narrow-minded, selfish and misguided elitists from enhancing their own status at the expense of the dreams and ideals of those still seeking a better life.
     The question still to be answered is, will the public see past the smoke and mirrors, ideology camoflaged as conservatism. Will we give up moderate ideals of sharing common resources to ensure good public schools, public playgrounds, convenient and affordable housing for a larger share of the existing polulation?
     Recently, we have seen the hard Right employ the stick and carrot approach with some success: The stick of fear of people Not Like Us, and the rhetorical carrot, blurred with limited vision, which keeps us from seeing that the majority of us might just fall into the category of Them to the Rothschilds and Fraziers and others seeking political powers.