The wages of sin: Awesome or fearsome?

Pastor Prevo,

The Concerned doesn't see eye to eye with you on many matters, but we've been growing increasingly worried about an approaching social upheaval we're sure your church can help all Alaskans avoid, no matter their sexual orientation. The problem is at least several years away, so there's plenty of time to get our ducks in a row.

No doubt you've heard people talking about the possibility of another petroleum boom coming to Alaska, this time a gas pipeline. According to your Web site, you've been Anchorage Baptist Temple's pastor since 1971, so you must remember what happened the first time. The Concerned remembers too, and this time we want to be ready.

Last time, people from all over the world came to Alaska expecting lucrative jobs, and many found them, but many others did not. We remember hearing about welders' helpers earning nearly $100,000 in a single year, about people paying off huge school loans over the course of one season. We distinctly recall seeing -- more than once -- a naïve young man ambling out of a downtown bank and down the street while openly carrying a bundle of cash the size of a Fairbanks phone book (circa 1970). Even we The Concerned were tempted...

We remember the little inconveniences like waiting 45 minutes for a dial tone; watching rents skyrocket overnight; hearing about people eating five enormous meals at workers' camps while we drank powdered milk and went weeks without seeing a head of lettuce. But all that seemed minor compared to the flood of vice and iniquity that came north to terrify Alaska's children and enable us to lose our car in a single hand of poker.

You might not remember it, but a tsunami of gangsters, con artists, drug dealers, pimps, gigolos and prostitutes started to hit small-town Alaska in the early '70s. We even had to start locking our car doors at stoplights all across the state to keep hookers from climbing in without even so much as a how-dee-doo! And during those days, towns built bars faster than they built schools. Actually, come to think of it, that wouldn't have been so bad except that all the best bartenders got jobs driving trucks on the haul road, and finding a decent drink was nearly impossible.

Several more people will have to die before we could tell you everything we know, but our entire young state seemed to get loaded all at once -- twisted on a wide variety of illicit drugs and playing for high stakes at illegal casinos in seedy backrooms and Conex boxes stashed in the woods. Pornographic magazines littered the streets, flapping in the stiff winds of change.

While we were glad to have lived through those heady times (and their jarring end), we think Alaska has matured too much to deal well with such swift change again. Drugs and vice have gotten considerably more sophisticated since then, so the problem could even be worse than before. This is the politically correct 21st century after all, and many of us have kids and grandkids now. Alaska has grown up and refined its sensibilities, and so have we.

Some folks might dispute that, but we have definitive proof. Recently, residents of one of Alaska's most notoriously wild towns, Talkeetna, held a donation drive to build a "Monkey Bar." To our surprise, they weren't talking about a tavern featuring a live chimpanzee who begs drinks and bums smokes from patrons as they light rows of flaming shots with fiery hundred-dollar bills... They were talking about playground equipment.