Burns: Education, medicine hold keys to economy

By Roger Morris Western News Publisher

Technology, education and medical care remain keys to the success of small rural communities, U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns said during a keynote address at the Lincoln County Republicans' Lincoln/Reagan Day Dinner at the VFW in Libby.

"The landscape in the state has changed and new technologies have helped us," Burns said.

Since his first election to the Senate in 1988, Burns said the world has become a smaller place.

"It has gone from the size of this building to the size of a basketball in just the term of my service," he said.

"If the premier of China gets up Monday morning with a cold, it affects us all," the senator continued. "How do we survive in that world?"

By having a top educational system and a top medical care system, Burns replied to his own question. He cited the need for telemedicine and distance learning and high-speed access for data transfers to and from the rural communities.

"We have to keep working on the infrastructure," he said. "We have to have a dream for the next generation. The genius of America is we have always worked hard for kids, we want them better educated than we were."

Burns said, "It is the ingenuity of communities that builds today."

He said the government can't "do it for us. The answers are found right here in Libby, Montana."

But it takes courage and it takes vision, Burns said.

"Elections are about our future and our kids," he said. "It's not about Conrad Burns. It's about you."

He referred to his own re-election later this year as a firewall to the Democrats taking the Senate back.