Must push forward
I am wondering why the supervisors insist on going back to the past regarding distant developments like the Searle Road Node when the future beckons us forward? In the middle of the last century, sprawl was invented. Suburbs were developed. Living by commute to work, school and shopping was popularized. Then gas was cheap and most owned one car and maybe two. Since then little thinking has changed. That is the pathetic sadness.
This is the 21st century and much has changed. Gas is expensive; worse, it pollutes our atmosphere; climate change with forest fires, heat waves and droughts is upon us. Distant commutes for county services as well as worker commutes become expensive and polluting.
Even the well touted tax revenue may be too little as tax sharing contracts will be made with other related tax sharing entities.
The future calls for growth within the city where there is already plenty of space like infill and where commercial and residential zoning already exists. The future beckons to building worker housing, and jobs to repair roads, insulate buildings, manufacture alternate energy sources and install solar panels.
With so much at stake we must not let the supervisors drag us backwards. We must push them forward. Our future calls for us to again shout out by signing another ballot petition only when the pandemic wanes and it becomes safe for us signature gatherers to circulate.
Mary Zanger
Hollister
Surrender to Covid-19
This is a famous quote C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948 upon the entrance into the atomic age, modified by Rick Green, who replaced all the atomic references with Covid. It is an awesome look at how people have lost sight of the reality of a biblical worldview, and when we lose that view how the world can “fall apart” around us: “In one way we think a great deal too much about Covid. “How are we to live in an age of Covid?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
“In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before Covid was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.”
“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by Covid, let that virus when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about Covid. THEY MAY BREAK OUR BODIES BUT THEY NEED NOT DOMINATE OUR SOULS.”
Randy Logue
Hollister
