EDITORIAL

Worth Fighting For

In a desert half-a-world away, Americans are dying. They're dying to protect our safety and they're dying for democracy: the idea that people have a right to chose their own present and future for themselves. If some of our sons and daughters are going to die, those are as good a reasons as there are. We think our government's made a terrible, misguided choice, but it's done, and from here we can offer little but prayer that things will turn out as well as they can.

The war is a sacrifice that we as a people are making, and the idea of sacrifice underlies nearly every value system, nearly every system of religious belief throughout the world, including that of the people we're waging war against. Whatever the politics of those people are, we're now on their land, with their families huddled somewhere nearby. To them, America's military must be like something out of a sci-fi and they're fighting as we would probably fight if the roles were reversed. It's doubtful they're much interested in our notions of fairness and propriety about how war is fought, any more than we'd be interested in theirs, if our families were huddled against their missiles.

Many Americans will die in Iraq in the coming months and some will probably die elsewhere, maybe much closer to home, as a result of this war. In comparison, everything else seems trivial, just as it did in the days after September 11. It's hard to take very seriously the issues we'd otherwise think might be important. But we owe it to ourselves to try, because the strength of our country is its values, and those values need to be protected now more than ever. The enduring power of any republic, any democracy, is how well it can hear the voices of those in the minority, those who don't hold the reins of control. In New York State, we're facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis, with a far worse than usual set of choices to make. In recent years, this process has always come down to the same three guys in a room: Governer Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver.

Maybe this spring, the time's finally come to throw some light into that horse-trading tent. There's a lot at stake, and what doesn't get factored in will most assuredly show up one way or another on our tax bills at the county, school, and town levels.

Closer still to home is our County government, for whom money seems to grow on its taxpayers trees, and our concerns are just cows on the track; enough of a nuisance to effect the schedule once in a while, but a small problem in the scheme of things. The most recent town hit by this freight train is Wawarsing, all but excluded from any planning role where the County's working on it's second biggest project, a casino with some
Indians from Oklahoma who've come up with a $15 million/year transfusion to the Legislature from their medicine men. Public input on this? Zero. Why bother?

With an unbreakable majority of an unconstitutional Legislature, who cares what anyone else actually wants? The story's pretty much the same with the County's even bigger private-but-publicly-backed development, the one stretching west from Big Indian over the Delaware county line. Ask the people who live in that town what they want? Not a chance. Much easier just to take a little vote in the County Office building. These are just two examples from the past few months, together representing some $600 million in construction and God knows how much in grateful appreciation. Heck, throw in another $130 million to bond and build a jail through some Australian contractor, and the scope of what's going on with our County Legislature comes into clearer focus. No accountability, no concern with what anybody in the county actually wants, insane tax increases, add it up yourself. It doesn't take any particular party affiliation to see it for what it's become. Ulster County isn't a democracy, it's someone's empire.

These past two weeks we've seen the most perfect spring thaw in years. The streams and the sap have both flowed hard, the songbirds are coming back, and in the early morning you can see in the mountains the first tinge of pink of the first buds. What we have here is priceless, and like most priceless things it needs the protection of those who treasure it. If we don't protect our ability to determine our own future right here, it'll be gone soon. That's true whether here's Olive or Shandaken or Warwarsing or the county we all help float. If the people of Iraq have a right to chose their own present and future - and we think they do - then here's the question for ours: Are democracy, self-determination, and home rule in Ulster County worth fighting for, town by town and house to house? Because if they're not, then we probably deserve exactly what we've got, in spades.