LYONS – The Wall Street protest movement is sweeping around the globe gathering followers and strength. Despite differences from place to place the protests share frustration with banks, corporations and the widening gap between rich and poor. No one knows where it is all headed but it seems certain to affect us even here in sheltered little Lyons.

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, this once again raises the age-old debate between capitalism and socialism; individualism and collectivism. And, it comes at a time when the traditional role of local government in economic development is being seriously challenged.

PUEBLO — I awoke in a cold sweat one night last week. I’d had a terrible dream about federal spending cuts vs. tax increases on millionaires.

What made the dream terrible and brought on the cold sweat, however, wasn’t the still-rotten state of the economy or the trench warfare each party has adopted with regard to how to make things right. Nor was it the “occupy” protestors across the nation, or all the millionaires and corporations that pay no income taxes.

Rather, it was that, in the dream, I found myself agreeing with Bill O’Reilly. Yes, that’s right. I was agreeing the often-obnoxious Bill O’Reilly, the guy who tells other people to shut up rather than acknowledge that their opinions are equal to or in any way superior to his own.

PUEBLO – If you own a combat helmet, you might want to dust it off and keep it nearby. It won’t save your life, but it may make you feel more secure when the refrigerator falls from the sky late this month or in early October.

LYONS – A long time ago, in fact when the Russians were still raping and pillaging Afghanistan, we had a visitor here in Lyons. This visitor was a European world traveler and had recently come from Kabul through the Khyber Pass.

We talked about the Hindu Kush Range and the Paropamisus Mountains as I showed him around Lyons. He kept shaking his head at how much these foothills reminded him of Afghanistan. Sure enough, it turns out that we are roughly at the same altitude, same latitude, same geology, same weather and just as landlocked as that most foreign of all countries.

Now that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination, I think he has to be the odds-on favorite.

Conservative Christians and Tea Party Republicans alike have expressed support for him, and if he wins the nomination, he’ll likely pull most, if not all, the votes from independents who identify with those labels.

LYONS – “This is a small town.” How you utter that phrase tells me a lot about you. Most people I know are clearly divided between those who yearn to live here and those who think of small towns as mini-federal disaster areas that politicians should fly over in a great show of pity and sympathy.