This political lawn sign has been visible on Cayuga Street for the last couple of weeks. Impeach Bush.
The rest of the country may not be paying attention, but I just wanted to drop this quick note online to say that I’m with you, neighbor, and glad that we’re free to place political lawn signs in our yards, regardless of the campaign season.
To keep up on the the effort to impeach President Bush, check out After Downing Street.
My family enjoyed the Trumansburg Fair a great deal this year. My son made it onto the Tilt-a-Whirl for the first time, although his face looked a little worried by the end of the ride. My daughter was old enough to courageously ride the goat on the carousel. Yes, my daughter rode the goat, and I’m not ashamed to say it. She also took a ride on the painted train twice, and we all had far too much cotton candy. It was great.
We also enjoyed the parade, each in our own way. While my son went scrambling for every piece of candy he could get his hands on, I kept an eye out for political candidates. It would be an exaggeration to say that I saw more politicians than my son got candy, but not much of an exaggeration.
First to arrive was the car representing the Village Board of Trustees, with David Filiberto variously walking along side and hanging out the back, as seen here. Mary Bouchard was driving, and Rose Hilbert was in the passenger’s seat, in front of a sign reading, The Village of Trumansburg Board of Trustees salutes our Volunteer Fire Dept.
I counted three candidates for County Sheriff in the parade, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that I lost one or two along the way. How many candidates are there? Better check up on that one. Our own Pete Meskill, current Tompkins County Sheriff, was present, of course.
Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, who is up for re-election this year, walked the whole way, and still looked toward the end, when she passed me by. Democratic congressional candidate Michael Arcuri also was a walker, although his campaign’s contingent was preceded by a red sedan, with his campaign logo on it. Arcuri’s campaign was the only one I noted to have people walking along the sidewalks, handing out campaign literature.
Not a single candidate threw candy to my son. Shouldn’t that be a politician’s parade equivalent of kissing a baby? I suppose they don’t want to be judged by the size of their candy bars.
The Trumansburg Fair has begun, and the big news is that the beer tent is back, after an absence of two decades. Less intoxicating, but much more important, is the political presence that will be there.
Michael Arcuri will be at the Trumansburg Fair this Saturday, after marching in the parade. Arcuri is the Democratic nominee for the United States House of Representatives for our district this year. His presence gives Ulysses residents the opportunity to meet national issues face to face.
What many of us don’t realize is that our own congressional district is a center of national political focus this year. 2006 is the most dramatic congressional campaign in twelve years, and the National Journal has recently rated our district the 11th most likely to move from the Republican column to the Democratic column this year. That’s remarkable, considering that there are 435 districts across America, putting us in the hottest 3 percent of races in a very hot year.
We, in our district have the chance to make a disproportionate impact on the direction of the nation this year. Be a part of the effort to return America to the right track. Be at the Fair on Saturday to meet Mike Arcuri.
It’s a bit last minute, but word is finally getting out around Ulysses that Michael Arcuri, the Democratic nominee for Congress in our district, will be appearing here in Trumansburg tomorrow. He will be at the Fire Hall at 6:00 PM.
A representative from the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote Neighborhood Project will also be there. So, if you want to volunteer to help out the Democrats take back Congress this year, be sure to attend.
The following message was just sent out by Joan Ormandroyd, one of those great Back to Democracy people who really put their ideals into action. See if you can help:
“…there are 30 Burmese refugees arriving in Ithaca by the end of August and that there is an effort being made to find furniture and utensils for them. If you have any tables, chairs, beds, small appliances, etc. that you’ve been dying to find a home for…this may be the place! To donate contact Jon or Mary Perry (email: jp36@cornell.edu or phone: 279-2819)”
One of the great things about blogs that I forgot to mention in this morning’s reflections on the difference between newspapers and blogs is that blogs, unlike newspapers, don’t make a pretense of objectivity. This blog isn’t supposed to be objective, and that means that I can use it to promote activism in the causes that I believe in.
One of the causes that I believe in is the effort to end the Republican majority control of the House of Representatives. Oh, the Democrats aren’t perfect, but its plain to anyone with two eyes that the Republican grip on the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of our federal government all at the same time is taking the United States of America down a very dangerous path.
Why am I writing about this on a local blog dedicated to the Town of Ulysses? Well, the fact is that campaigns for the House of Representatives, while they deal with national and international issues, are run on the local level. The 24th district congressional campaign is being run here in Ulysses right now - if only through our apathy and inaction.
We in Trumansburg and Ulysses like to think of ourselves as a group of politically informed people. We like to think that, compared to the other communities around us, we’re pretty progressive. In a way, we are. The people of Trumansburg and Ulysses certainly have proved that we’re good at political progressive talk.
We complain to each other about the Bush White House, and the Republican Congress, and their policies. We even hold meetings to discuss and educate ourselves on the issues. That’s all good. That’s all necessary.
But do we act progressively? Some of us certainly do. There are a good number of people who participate in Back to Democracy, for example, who translate their progressive complaints into progressive action. No one can talk to these people and say that they’re not doing their part as American citizens. Kudos to them.
There are many others of us around here, however, for whom progressive idealism has so far been just a matter of talk. We complain about the government. We wonder how things got to be this bad. We ask ourselves why anyone won’t do anything about it… and then, we don’t do anything about it.
This afternoon, I’m challenging this second group of Ulysses progressives to take the jump from complaint into action, and to help in the effort to elect a Democrat to represent us in Congress, instead of the Republican representation our district has had for the last two decades.
I’m suggesting two concrete actions, and the first one is simple: Visit the DCCC and vote for Democrat Michael Arcuri’s campaign to receive additional support from the DCCC. A few little clicks and you’ll be all done with that.
The other action is more involved. It requires volunteering about an hour a week. So, before you take this action, you need to ask yourself whether having the Republicans control the government really bothers you, or not. If it bothers you enough for you to volunteer one hour a week, then sign up as a telephone volunteer with MoveOn to help them prepare for the heat of this year’s congressional campaign.
If the Republican government doesn’t bother you enough to get you to volunteer one hour a week, if the Iraq War and the torture of detainees, government wiretapping, Religious Right agenda, and all that just isn’t enough to get you to volunteer one hour per week until Election Day, well, there you have your answer about how things got to be so bad in America these days.
This week’s Trumansburg Free Press features an editorial by Steve Ferrari in which he dips his toe into our congressional race here in the 24th district, and quickly pulls it back out without bothering to discuss the race seriously. Ferrari couldn’t seem to find the space to even mention who the Democratic and Republican candidates are, but made space to toss a little bomb in this direction, saying,
“…it just seems like common sense that people would not write about things they don’t understand. We should be leaving that to the bloggers.”
You’ll see this kind of statement all the time from journalists, who seem to get a nasty rash just from hearing the word blogger. The national journalistic establishment has long derided the blogosphere as made up of hopeless fools and outsiders who could never get a story straight.
This same establishment was left blubbering and blabbering, of course, when Ned Lamont beat Joseph Lieberman - a result they had predicted could never come about, but countless bloggers had gotten right. The journalists reporting on the race were so cozy with Democratic Party insiders in Connecticut and Washington D.C. that they got lazy and reported the story that the Democratic leadership wanted them to report: That Lamont was just a kooky outsider who could never win the nomination by defying the power brokers (who just so happened to be the journalists’ sources).
Journalists hate to admit it, but sometimes bloggers get it right when the newspapers and other traditional news media get it tragically wrong. The story of the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is another example of this. When you see journalists saying that “no one could have imagined that the war in Iraq could go this way”, what they’re really saying is that they were incapable of such imagination, so busy repeating the official word from the White House that they never stopped to ask for facts to support President Bush’s wild assertions. It was the bloggers who sounded the alarm, and noted that real evidence to justify a war was lacking.
Mr. Ferrari shouldn’t be so quick to assign unreliable writing to bloggers as opposed to newspapers. The Trumansburg Free Press has recently had its own problems being criticized for reporting with a lack of accuracy and objectivity, as Mr. Ferrari well knows.
The thing that bothers me the most about Ferrari’s comment is that he’s exhibiting a snobbish attitude about communication that is not becoming for the editor of a small town newspaper. When we leave discussion on local issues to experts and authorities, sometimes there are some very basic questions that go unasked and important matters that are left unaddressed. We should all be writing, and all be talking, as a community, about the issues that affect us.
The strength of bloggers is that they aren’t as afraid to be wrong as journalists are. As for myself, I acknowledge that, on the blogs that I write, I turn out to be wrong sometimes. I regard being wrong, and being corrected by people who care enough to show me that I’m wrong, as part of the process of writing a blog. The discussion that results from my mistakes helps other people to feel more comfortable joining the debate, and results in some productive talk about what the truth is.
Sometimes, stories that I write about turn out to be inaccurate. A lot of the time, the issues that I write about turn out to be unimportant and uninteresting to most people. However, every now and then, on one of my blogs, I’ll hit on something that turns out to be important, but isn’t being written about elsewhere. Sometimes, it’s a story that journalists already have information on, but have decided they won’t write about. If there were no bloggers, these stories might never come to public attention.
Journalists often feel threatened by bloggers, because they believe that bloggers are trying to seize some of journalists’ turf. That reflects a simplistic understanding of what blogs are.
Blogs are not like newspapers, and they shouldn’t try to be. Blogs serve another purpose, one that newspapers cannot serve very well. Blogs are a forum for public communication, and for quick distribution of information. The information that’s found on blogs is often not as reliable as what is typically found in a newspaper, but on the whole, blogs provide much more complete and timely information.
Intelligent people who read blogs realize that they ought not to accept the information they find there without a grain of salt. They know that there will be mistakes, but they also know that by reading blogs, they will find information that they could never get in a newspaper. These readers also know that they can check the validity of the information themselves. However, if the blogs weren’t out there in the first place, readers would often never have the opportunity to check that information - because it wouldn’t ever reach them. If bloggers weren’t out there writing, the body of information available to the public would be much thinner and more shallow.
Let’s take the congressional race that Mr. Ferrari wrote about in his blogger-zinging editorial as an example. This race is an important local story, but it’s one that the Trumansburg Free Press has given only thin coverage. I spoke to someone who writes for the Trumansburg Free Press a while ago, asking if the paper would try to give more coverage to the race, and was told that the Free Press would wait to receive press releases to give the paper something to write about. The Free Press would not pursue information about the race, and would not be contacting the candidates on its own initiative.
Mr. Ferrari excuses his inattention to the story by saying that he’ll just report on the “local boy” running in the election - the Mike Sylvia, the candidate of the Libertarian Party, who will be lucky if he gets three percent of the vote. So what qualifies Mike Sylvia to be the “local boy”, in Steve Ferrari’s opinion? Why, he’s from Etna. Etna - that’s about a 40 minute drive from here. If that makes Mike Sylvia a “local boy” worthy of coverage, why didn’t Steve Ferrari go just 15 minutes more down the road and bring us news of the campaign of Bruce Tytler of Cortland, when he was in the race? If Etna is “local” to Trumansburg, why didn’t Ferrari bother to tell us about the Geneva candidate Ken Camera, who was a fascinating character - a progressive Republican? Ferrari’s excuse that he’ll only talk about the “local boy” just doesn’t wash, but there we are. Ferrari made his decision to not publish much information about this important story, and we readers are stuck with the spare consequences.
This is a problem that’s not unique to the Free Press and the other Finger Lakes Community Newspapers. All the newspapers in our area have given readers little information about who the candidates are, and what the issues of the race are shaping up to be. That includes the Ithaca Journal, and even the Utica Observer-Dispatch, though both Democrat Michael Arcuri and Republican Ray Meier are Utica “local boys”. Newspapers in New York’s 24th congressional district have worked under the weight of so much institutional inertia that they’ve brought readers very little information about this race - even though it’s supposed to be one of the most competitive races in a very hot congressional election year.
Bloggers, on the other hand, have written extensively about the race and its candidates - even before the race officially began. If you want to know what’s going on in this election, the blogs are the place to go. Print media has been a pale shadow, lagging weakly behind.
Keep this in mind when you read Steve Ferrari’s dismissive comment that people writing what they don’t know about is a task that should be left to bloggers: Often, when the task of writing about important stories is left to newspapers, the story isn’t written about at all.
I subscribe to the Trumansburg Free Press, because it’s a good resource that gives important information that you won’t find on the blogs - you certainly won’t find all that information about the Trumansburg area on this blog. But, just as I’m willing to respect that newspapers, although often slow and shallow in the information they provide, are valuable for what they do, I think that journalists like Steve Ferrari ought to have the largeness of mind to recognize that blogs have filled a very important and useful niche in making information available to people - a niche that newspapers never have and never could fill.
Good news for local activists: The Ulysses-based organization Back to Democracy is creating a new web site that already has a blog and soon will include many other functions and features to help people participate in their many projects. Back to Democracy has been a dynamic group for some time now, and this re-entry into the online world ought to help them expand their reach even further.
The Museum of the Earth, just across the town line in Ithaca, is sponsoring a fantastic array of fun educational experiences this summer. In a couple of days, one of those will take place in Ulysses - a gorge walk in Taughannock State Park. We’ve all walked the gorge many times, but this will be a chance to get a scientific perspective on what we’ve seen there.
The walk is on Friday, August 11, from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Call the museum at 607-273-6623 ext. 22 to get more information.
Trees are on my mind today.
There’s an important article in the B Section of today’s Ithaca Journal, with the headline: Huge redbud halts T-burg project. The redbud in question is on Route 96, on the righthand side headed south out of town, across the pond from the public school campus.
Anyone’s who’s been in Trumansburg for long (and many of us who haven’t - I noticed it within the first couple weeks of moving here) knows the tree. It’s large for its species, the largest in all of Tompkins County. Yet the largeness of the tree isn’t really what makes it so special. The shape of the trunk and major branches is smooth and artful, speaking of both age and weight. The ornamental quality of the tree is more like that of a japanese maple than an ordinary redbud.
This tree is a landmark, and a mark of Trumansburg’s unique culture as well. We care for our trees here. I don’t just mean that we take care of our trees. We actually care for them.
I’m a tree hugger. I don’t mind admitting that. But, I’m not a fool. I know that, in a village, there is a time for trees to come down. A maple tree outside my front door has reached that stage in its life where it it is not just unshapely, but downright dangerous. Anyone who comes up and down Cayuga Street very often has seen at least some of the aftermath of the tree losing a large limb this week, a limb nearly one foot in diameter. Anyone underneath that branch would have been killed, and it now appears that the rotting trunk itself is in danger of breaking, and falling on my neighbors’ house across the street, as well as the power lines there, and the street itself, of course.
So, on Friday, I called several tree trimming businesses to see if they could take the tree down. Each one said that the tree is too tall for them to deal with. On Monday, I’ll call NYSEG, and see if they can help out.
It doesn’t make me happy to do this. The tree is turning into a snag, and becoming home to a large number of animals, including a family of raccoons. But, the lives of people have to come before the lives of raccoons.
My point is that I’m not about to go out and chain myself to just any tree that’s threatened with being cut down. But, the redbud on Main Street is not just any tree.
The purpose of the Main Street Project is to enhance the character of Trumansburg’s Main Street. That redbud tree is a significant element in that character, and it just doesn’t make sense to do away with it. Yet, the plan of the Village at this point is to cut back several of the trees main limbs, a surgery that would fundamentally destroy the tree’s character and possibly threaten its life.
Deborah Nottke, who owns the property where this grand redbud grows, has obtained a court order to stop the work around the redbud tree until the issue can be resolved. I’m glad she’s done so. Nottke has been working with David Allen, a nurseryman, to come up with alternatives so that the Main Street Project can continue and the tree can be left intact. Apparently, the Village government has not yet accepted any of those alternatives.
Mayor John Levine has expressed an indifference to the tree’s survival, quoted in the paper this morning as saying, “There is no question that it is a nice tree, but on the other hand it is a very old tree and it is not going to live forever.” Mr. Levine, that redbud is not just a nice tree. It is a living monument. The tree is priceless precisely because it represents a generations-long investment in the beauty of main street. You can’t buy a tree like that. You have to plant it and wait, and hope that others will be able to enjoy it even after you’re gone. No sidewalk, no matter how nicely made, is going to make up for its loss. There are plenty of old things here in Trumansburg, and they’re what make Trumansburg special. It does not do to go tearing them apart without serious consideration.
So, this Thursday, at 7:30 PM in the offices of the Town of Ulysses, serious consideration will be given. There will be a hearing on the future of that gigantic old redbud, to explore the alternatives for the Main Street Project to work around the tree in such a way that preserves its integrity.
I spoke to Deborah Nottke this morning, and she says that anyone who values the tree can come to the hearing. It would also be helpful to call or write the members of our Village Board to express, politely, the value of keeping the tree intact.