Musings — Chris-Takos

Taber, home sweet home… wait a minute that’s not my house. Mine was blue. It’s in the same place but where is my tree? Where did that veranda come from? Look at the door and the windows — while I was sleeping someone came and changed everything.
Is it just me or is anyone else curious about how someone can love a place so much, they run for office, and then embark on a campaign to change everything about “the place they love”?
These days, most people move from one place to another because of work, health, or family. This was not my case. My family moved to Taber from the west coast, because it offered us freedoms we had lost in Delta over the years. It was a difficult task to uproot a family, leave friends behind, investments, familiarities and things one still enjoyed about a place they called home. It was a sacrifice only a few people are willing to make, just for the sake of freedom.
In the few short years that I have been in Taber, I find myself having déjà vu. I can imagine how much harder it must be for folks that were born here, or spent most of their lives here and have to witness their town and their lives altered to suit the whims and egos of a hand full of people who are discontent with Taber and their own private lives but lack the courage to change themselves, finding it easier to impose change on others. It is the latest assault is on signage.
“It is either an eyesore or another of a million dangers we need protection from” to post a sign on public property. No more balloons, no more “lordy, lordy, Gwen is 40.” No more “Yard Sale,” no more “ Kool- aid, 10 cents a cup.” Give me a million breaks!
Do you really want Taber to become a sterile, pretty town like Tsawassan, B.C, where you can get a ticket for having a “For Sale” sign in the back window of your car? I don’t, I enjoy flavour, colour, texture, difference.
Downtown has lost a lot of business over the past several years, and now people are moving away because of these “ changes for the best.” Why do we have expressions like, “ If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, and, “Hindsight is 20/20.”
It might serve Taber best to search the past for guidance to the future. By the time the folly of these trendy social experiments is discovered it is generally too late, has cost everyone dearly, and the culprits responsible are long gone, with no consequences to pay. So if Taber is your “home sweet home,” why don’t you stand up for it. Write the editor and share your views. Show up at council meetings where you could be surprised, informed, entertained, relieved and infuriated all in one hour.
As I write this I realized the real reason why I do so. Yes, it’s frustrating to continually have the rug pulled from under your feet, but it’s heartbreaking that everyone I talk to about these constant changes (bylaw) shares my frustration, yet the “opposition” remains a whisper, a subject restrained in living rooms, coffee houses, the dinner table and the smoking zone. The locomotive of authoritarianism is picking up speed. Stop it now. It will be a lot harder to stop it later.