Barack Obama was the master of sleight-of-hand branding, a tactic being borrowed from heavily by the folks attempting to make Johnstown New Afghanistan.
Recall Obama promised Hope and Change, and too many took those concepts as inherently positive. They weren’t and aren’t.
If people hope to lie, cheat or steal, it’s not a good thing.
If they hope to sow social divisiveness, it’s not a good thing. If they hope to convert our nation to communism or socialism, again, not good.
On an individual basis, should you go from a comfortable middle class lifestyle to the edge of poverty, that’s change, but not in a positive way.
Say you are seemingly healthy, but wake up tomorrow on your death bed. Change? Yes. Progress? Not really.
Obama didn’t invent the tactic of flowery labels. Politicians of both stripes tend to give proposed legislation grandiose, over-promising tags like Build Back Better. As long as you don’t look at the details, it sounds like something anyone could get behind.
And so it is that in our sleepy little Johnstown, some hypesters have gathered under the banner of Vision Together 2025.
A more accurate name might be Myopic Exclusion 2025.
The details keep changing with the goal unclear (myopia) and the gameplan has been to keep the public and even elected officials representing those people in the dark (exclusion).
In theory, Afghan refugees would be courted to resettle here and fill jobs not desired by the locals. The number of those Afghans keeps changing. Maybe 1. Maybe 1,000. Maybe more.
Of course, the Afghans would be settled in Johnstown proper, saving the surrounding suburbs from having to deal with any or all of the problems arising from the influx.
Already people taking public service jobs with the City of Johnstown have refused to move into the city and have gotten existing rules changed to allow that.
Presumably some of their reluctance has to do with the already troubled Greater Johnstown School District, which likely would not improve based on being tasked with trying to educate the latest immigrants.
There are problems both practical and philosophical with the concept of bringing in immigrants to take jobs, beginning with the stark reality that the Vision Together 2025 people don’t really have faith in what they’re proposing or they would be more welcome to the disinfectant of sunshine – public discussion of their plans.
Afghans don’t necessarily speak English, nor are they necessarily even literate in any of their country’s mishmash of languages.
They aren’t necessarily highly skilled. And, judging by how quickly the Afghan army quit when defense vs. the Taliban no longer was being handled by American armed forces, they aren’t necessarily willing to go to the wall for themselves.
But Vision tries to play the shame game by recalling this is an area once notable for its immigrants. It also was notable for immigrants who came here to blend in to the American dream, not to set up isolated enclaves with the hope of changing our communities to more closely reflect what had been left behind in the homeland.
There are vague promises that any Afghans settling here will be literate and skilled and therefore able to get and hold jobs. Details, as usual, are lacking.
There also have been, in keeping with a longstanding trend here, attempts to get the federal government to fund it all through the willing conduit of various local nonprofit, not-for-profit, or similarly described organizations that seem to exist mostly to keep an elite class well-compensated for being no more than middle men — or women — in redistributing tax money.
We wrote here in December that Johnstown has been downgraded from a once prosperous blue collar town to a place where crime and poverty are the growth industries.
Vision Together 25 would add Afghan immigration to that list of growth industries. And there is no guarantee their open-arms recruiting policy would be a positive for the town.
Sam Ross Jr's site 