For years, industrial sites that once fueled the city’s economy have sat idle and deteriorating in and around residential areas. Now, the brownfields are presenting an opportunity for residents to re-invent their neighborhoods.
In his last days, the man had sat bound to his wheelchair to prevent slipping, a bib across his chest. No one at the memorial service was celebrating that. It was for the best, they said. His suffering is over. I meant to stop by, they said. Somehow time runs away from me. I am so busy these days, so very, very busy.
Watch out. There’s a vicious dog on the loose in Schenectady County and taxpayers are getting bit — in the wallet. New York state requires every city, village and town to have an animal control officer, also known as a dog catcher, and an animal shelter. Here we have prime examples of New York’s infamous unfunded mandates and the root of an animal control and sheltering crisis in Schenectady County.
The great 2011 economic grant competition for New York state is over. The money has been awarded. Now what? Right from the start this otherwise excellent idea for regional economic development looked like it might end up as an insider’s game of too many secret deals secretly arrived at under the pretense of public involvement. Unfortunately, it looks like I was right.
I’ll be away from my classroom several days this spring. I’ll be at professional development meetings. I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve been to some real galas.
In a remarkably courageous decision, given election-year hysteria and finger-pointing, President Obama has postponed granting a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, pending further environmental review. This was the right decision, I believe.
Bullying is usually considered to be a “no no” in public schools. As a matter of fact, laws have been passed and programs established to try to eradicate it in all forms. That is somewhat ironic when one considers Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget. Evidently, bullying in school is against the law but bullying schools is allowed as long as it’s being done by the state’s chief executive.
It’s the American dream. Buy a little piece of land, fix up an old house, have a family garden, some chickens, a cow, some pigs. Live off the soil and your own sweat. Spend time with your kids, not commuting to an office, and learn to preserve your own fruits and vegetables. Or, you can lose your mind totally and add a dairy farm to all the above.
Ours is not that Hemingway Lost Generation of the 1920s, wondering, alienated and alcoholic in Paris. Ours is the generation after that: raised in economy and discipline, giving if possible more money, more opportunity to our descendants than we ever knew.
It is true that life brings many challenges. It is true all of us experience personal failures as well as successes. It is true that the world is not perfect or even very fair to some of us. Yet, despite our personal problems, faced as we are by an array of public idiocies and injustices, it is also true that we live at a privileged place in history. This is often easy to forget.
What can we learn from the Hudson River dredging project as we prepare for hydrofracking in New York state? Common sense should have told everyone involved that you don’t pour mass quantities of any oil in any river, but it was expedient and apparently the grown-ups were out to lunch.
The Blenheim Bridge was like a time machine, a wooden tunnel that whisked them back through the years. And why do people gather at old places? Maybe we are hungry for history. We desire that tweak of the mind, that pinch of the soul that happens when we see an object that tells us about the handwork and habits, the ambition and industry of those who walked the earth before us.
As one of the people mentioned in an article in The Gazette (“Gun sale sting shows law gap,” Dec. 1) I’d like to respond to both the headline and to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s reported remark that “guns are freely available to all at gun shows.”
Persons raised to sainthood within the Catholic Church demonstrate the universal and timeless qualities of heroic virtue and unwavering fidelity to the faith. In other words, the honor of canonization is not for their edification but for ours. Such a dynamic has been in process for nearly three and a half centuries surrounding Kateri Tekakwitha, the 17th century Mohawk woman honored by the Church.
