I was going to simply post this in the OMG sex!!! thread, but it’s running long. So what else is new?

I’m curious to see that there are some folks who think Lancaster County used to be more moral than other places before all these outsiders moved in. The New Yorkers have brought their New York ways - pushy and arrogant.

But this includes sex on teh internets, or drugs, or liquor?

Our newspaper did a story a few years back about how, during prohibition, enterprising hometown breweries right here in Lancaster ran hoses beneath the streets to subvert the law and keep on brewing beer.

Someone else mentioned a certain downtown “health club,” which has been around for a long time. And I’ve heard, via e-mail, from a few folks who tell me stories about perversions that existed here long before the Internet made it easier to find or purvey perversions.

So we can go back as long as you want - 20 years, 50 years, 100 years - and I guarantee you, I absolutely guarantee you, that every kind of sin existed here that now exists here. Was there no prostitution, no alcohol before the “outsiders” ruined Lancaster County?

Come on.

And if we say it’s more pervasive now - maybe. But if that’s so, it seems to me to be a function of the fact that, simply, there are more people living in Lancaster County now. If one percent of our population trolls for teh sex - be it on the Internet or at a massage parlor or along certain streets in the downtown - one percent now constitutes a lot more people than one percent did 30 years ago.

But there’s sort of a curiously related phenomenon here, as well. In response to last week’s bit on the TNDs, I’ve heard from quite a few people who are, as we say, “not from around here” - moved here from New York in one case, northern Virginia in another. And these people are among the most insistent that Lancaster County not overdevelop, not become those places that they left.

We laugh about this and rightly so; people move here and want to shut the door behind them. But the point is, it is the outsiders who are among those fighting hardest to preserve Lancaster County’s rural character, it’s “exceptionalism.”

As has been mentioned in the other thread - when you look at the development that’s taken place here over the past three decades, who are the developers? And you will find in virtually every case - the developers are locals.

I’m not convinced that Lancaster County is a poorer place to raise your kids than it was in the ’70s, when I was a kid here. I simply think the vices that always existed are better-publicized.

But if Lancaster County is somehow the poorer, let’s be clear about who bears responsibility for that. It was not imposed from the outside. It happened from the inside out.