Jim Duszynski, in a Letter to the Washington Post dated December 5, 2004, asks Loudoun's citizens to "give growth a chance." That, to my mind, is a pretty large pill to swallow.

To be sure, Loudoun's current growth trajectory has its short-term economic beneficiaries. But if we continue to lead the nation in "giving growth a chance," good luck to you (and me) getting to work.

And don't expect our property taxes to stabilize. Asthma? Expect more of it. Oh, and about those things that drew us to Loudoun in the first place, or kept us here for the quality of life? Forget it. They'll be gone.

As Eugene Scheel and other local historians have pointed out, the irony of that earlier attack on Loudoun's citizens was that many of its victims were Quakers who, despite pacifist tendencies, were strong supporters on principle of the Union war effort. They ended up suffering with their secessionist neighbors.

The apparent irony of the current crisis in Loudoun is that the county's newest residents are also victims. But this is really no irony at all. Attempts to pigeonhole growth issues as East/West or Old-timer/Newcomer obfuscate the facts: Explosive growth is detrimental to us all. All of our barns are getting burned.

Rapid residential growth has not even provided the affordable housing that some in the development community would want us to believe. Affordable housing always seems to be planned somewhere over the horizon a long commute away. For example, developer interests have (so far) successfully derailed even forward-looking Arlington County's attempt to promote more affordable housing in new development projects inside the Beltway.

Just as it took Loudoun's nineteenth century citizens decades to recover from the "burning raids," so too will it take us decades to recover from the economic burden that the unwise development now being set in motion places upon Loudoun taxpayers, and the degraded quality-of-life that faces commuters and school children. While many of our historic antebellum mills and barns are gone forever, a healthy and bucolic countryside came back quickly from the ashes of 1864. The scattered, unwise development now being proposed is not something we can realistically expect to recover from in our lifetimes.

We can fuel that fire, or fight it by looking for better alternatives. We can only "give growth a chance" once. Once a coherent quality of life is gone, it's gone.

As for me, I will byde my time no more.