A Year of Change, Mostly Good
If you have only limited spare time to read opinion this holiday season, we suggest you skip this editorial and turn directly to Jen Holz’s column “On The Farm” on page 26. Over these past several years, her reflections on our collective life have evolved into something many of us treasure. They embody a wisdom so deeply grounded in the core values we share here in these valleys that it’s become a great privilege for us to bring them to you.
These are hard times for many of us and little about the future looks easy or clear. Whether we speak or don’t speak them, we all share concerns for our families and our ability to provide for them. We share concerns for our friends and neighbors, our communities and our region and the world beyond. Our job as your newspaper is to try and bring you enough information to help everybody navigate the present and build a workable future for ourselves and our kids. Whether we’re succeeding or not, we leave for you to judge. But in our view, if we lose sight of the past, if we don’t learn from what we and what those who’ve built these towns of ours have been through, we’re in trouble. But so long as there are perspectives like Jen’s helping guide us, we think we’ll be OK because our humanity will remain intact.
If 2008 in America had a theme, it’s that real changes were needed and people’s recognition of that need seems to have been deep and broad enough to have changed our national political balance. We tend to vote for Democrats and so see that prospect as positive. And we do think it’s possible that confidence in our new president may well stabilize the short-term future and permit the beginnings of an economic rebalancing that makes more sense than what’s recently collapsed. What’s more, we take heart in seeing this prospect widely shared across the political spectrum and around the world.
That our collective, our political life has changed both countywide and locally is also evident. We welcome our first County Executive and the fiscal accountability the new charter has finally brought. In Shandaken, where it’s clear that voting majorities now lean solidly Democrat, no one who’s watched or attended a Town Board meeting would argue there isn’t a new and improved level of civility and cooperation evident both on the board and in the audience. As with the town’s previous GOP majority, questions of process have been regularly raised, but they have tended to be over smaller and far less significant issues. We think, on balance, that things are being handled better now by most everyone.
In Olive, which has long functioned better, if not more openly, change is harder to see. We do note with interest a rising element of the electorate’s more conservative side, seen in the strong vote for GOP Comptroller candidate James Quigley last month. But alongside that we also note the progress Olive has made with its sewer system, poising Boiceville to surpass Phoenicia as a local business center should the latter never okay its own sewer system in the coming years, and its openness with the press over the past year.
Our school system seems, on balance, to be working well. We’re pleased with the openness to new ideas evidenced by the board and with their thoroughness in engaging complex problems. Whether this board, under what’s likely to be very difficult financial pressure, will be able to maintain their current efforts will be anyone’s guess.
But as with our hopes up and down the ladder of governance we deal with, our hopes are strong. Corrections were needed, they’re being made. We’re strong people. WE should come out stronger for all of this.
God bless us all. Have a happy holidays and see you in early January, just before the big inauguration… BP