Very Close

It was perhaps, the kind of sensitivity one comes to expect from being a fairly public citizen around here. “I heard you were dead” said one of the town hall regulars, clearly disappointed, as I arrived at the Board of Elections in Kingston for Shandaken’s recount last week. As it happened, I wasn’t. Better informed but also more polished the next day was 6-year old George Becker at the Phoenicia School. “Hey I’d heard you had a heart attack” he said, making solid eye contact over a strong handshake. “How are you feeling?”
I told him I was feeling very, very lucky, and also that I’m feeling great. But I’m also feeling really proud to have guys like little George Becker in my Cub Scout den, and parents that teach that kind of sensitivity most places I turn. So to the many, many people who’ve reached out to my family in recent days, we thank you. We’re all grateful to live in a place with neighbors like you. To us, that kind of caring is what matters in a community.
Why it is that fairly healthy 48-year old guys have heart attacks I couldn’t say. What I can say now is they can happen without any chest pain or some of the other symptoms one might expect to hear about. And they can also happen in such a way that it’s not readily apparent whatever’s going on is even a coronary problem. In my case after whatever went wrong, everything else seemed to go right. The ER docs and the cardiologists at Benedictine did everything perfectly, and the surgeons at Westchester Med Center had me fixed for good and back on my feet in a little over a day. No, it didn’t used to be that’s what happened after a heart attack and it isn’t always now. But acting quickly seems to be important when it comes to improving the odds.
My adventure into modern medicine coincided with that once-every-hundred and fourth Tuesday when we elect our local government and set the course our town will take for the next two years. Regrettably a full one-third of us just don’t care in the least about this. We don’t care whether our local government does as little as it can or as much as it can get away with, whether its talk and walk is straight or crooked, or whether our taxes are high or low. And many of us prove we don’t care by refusing to take 5 minutes out of our lives, once every couple years, to bother voting on the best people to try and run our town.
Two-thirds of us however, do care. And of those that do, we’re split right down the middle. Any way one counts, any way one cuts it, Shandaken is divided into equal thirds between those who tend to vote with the two major parties and those who don’t vote at all. But of those who do vote, that vote is split into almost exactly equal halves; one family at the voting booth going one way or the other, so goes political control of the town. Most places, this would be a good thing, suggesting an active, open public dialogue where compromise, even consensus-seeking, played a significant role in public decision-making. Here of course, most of us know the opposite has been true. The more it’s clear that half the voters support different policies and practices than the ones we’re currently following, the less we’ve come to expect their concerns will be represented at all. If that’s what continues to happen going forward, what it’ll mean, we think, is more of the tensions, more of the problems most of us hope to leave behind. If that can change however, our prospects are considerably better.
We congratulate Supervisor Bob Cross Jr. on his reelection, and hope his second term will be a very different one than his first. What we think is needed is the actual inclusion of those perspectives which are as widely held as those of the town’s Republicans but lack their voting representation (10 of 12 positions) on the town board and the town planning board. That choice is entirely in the hands of the administration. Our view is if it wants to build a future the whole town can live with, it takes more than the one-third of us who voted for any of the successful candidates. It’ll take, among other things, a willingness to let other views be not only be heard, but actually considered. That, were it to happen, would be an enormous positive shift.
We thank sincerely all of those willing to stand for public office this year, no small commitment or sacrifice for any of them. And we hope that all of them will continue to do what they can to insure the best possible governance for all of us.
For our part at The Phoenicia Times, we’re looking forward to a holiday season that’s about families, community, self-reflection, and the spirit of giving and learning. And we’re hoping that for everyone, this season just beginning will be one that’s filled with the light and promise of a better future ahead for all of us. Some of us to be sure, are more grateful to be here than others. All of us wish you and yours a safe and wonderful holiday season.
BP