In Pursuit of Special Interest

I love my town!  We have so much history, great people and wonderful activities.  There are so many opportunities to volunteer and we have awesome committees and commissions in the borough.  The restaurants and businesses, that are here and thriving, are some of the best around.    Our fire departments and police departments are simply fantastic and help serve in the community along with their regular duties, but there comes a time when we stretch these entities too thin with too many obligations.  Public works becomes an around the clock job and commerce is interrupted for an activity that is not necessary nor is it an established event in which the above mentioned are prepared for in advance.

For instance it is rumored around town that there is to be a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving Day.  Now while that might sound like a lot of fun and bring citizens together on a holiday, but the added pressure it will place on our police force is not something that any group that is given the responsibility to protect and serve a community should have to deal with.   The trot would take place on a Thursday morning which means that officers that are on night shift Wednesday night will complete their 7pm to 7am shift and then be held over till 11am.  Once the trot is over with they will be allowed to return home for 8 hours to eat a bit of turkey, sleep maybe 5 hours, shower and report for duty at 7pm again Thursday night.  It is true that every job has sacrifices and that we all have to make them, but I am not sure that I want someone who is carrying a gun to be forced to work under those conditions because a special interest group  decides that we need yet another activity on a holiday. .  Public Works will also have to work overtime to place barriers and remove them along with trash cleanup instead of spending time with their families and friends on this special day.   Yes, Downingtown has wonderful holiday celebrations such as the Christmas Parade, Ghost Walk, Good Neighbor Day and the like, but these things are in the schedule way beyond and past what some of us can even remember.  The police are ready to serve on those days and rarely is it like the above scenario.  The Ghost Walk does not even need police presence and very little from Public Works.  Good Neighbor Day is synonymous with Downingtown and the 4^th of July and the Christmas Parade benefits each business on Lancaster Ave that choses to stay open that day.  But what benefit do we gain from forcing officers to work less than reasonable hours?

There is a race scheduled for the last Saturday in October that sounds like a great idea until one realizes that it possibly will close down streets where commerce is present and will cause money to be lost to those employees and the borough.  Normally most of the businesses are closed on holidays so parades and activities don’t interfere with the buying and selling of goods.  However, to have a 5K race on a non-holiday weekend which is the end of the month a time when a lot of businesses close their books for that month, there is no benefit other than to the race promoters and to whom the money will go.  I’m wondering if the registration fee will go to pay the money that will be lost to employees of any of the major (and minor) businesses while the race is going on.

I guess that my peeve is that while activities and events can be fun, entertaining and a draw for the future what good does it do when in the end it costs us, the taxpayers, so much more.

Do You Remember?

I can still tell you the exact timetable of my day on September 11, 2001.  I am sure many of us can and when we really think about it the pain is still a little raw even after 11 years.  How can you be older than 14 and not remember some little piece of that day?

Yet today I came across something disturbing to the memory of that day.....conspiracy!  There are still people out there that think that the government killed all those people.  That there were no planes and no terrorists that day, just explosives and operatives.  Jesse Ventura is one of the conspiracy nuts who would like you to believe that, yet again, it's all Bush's fault.  Intelligent, or at least what I assumed were intelligent people still hold on to the deluded assumption that this was all one big cover up for a governmental boo boo.  Most of these people don't reside on the East Coast or even in NY.  They did not see the planes hitting the towers or the crater in the ground from Flight 93 or hear the messages to home and a final, "Let's Roll!"  I am not sure how they can still hold on to an idea that has been debunked by better people than I such as Popular Mechanics whom in 2008 gave their conclusions based on the NIST Report.  People who know how buildings work and fire destroys and metal does collapse with intense heat and yet there are those who poo poo these very facts and chose to believe that it was all a set up.

I do not put my whole trust in the government, but with engineers and architects who state unequivocally that the towers came down because of the heat, that the Pentagon had a plane flown into it and there is a crater in PA because some brave souls saved more lives than were lost, I cannot understand how anyone could be so deaf, dumb and blind.

The thing that makes me the angriest is that instead of keeping these deluded ideas to themselves on a day that should be for remembrance of lives lost they have to try and infect future generations with their, OK I will say it, whacked idea of what happened that day.  Instead, shut your mouth, bow your head and say a prayer for the souls that were lost, because after I am done with that I will pray that YOU find clarity.