GreatRidge Station

I believe that people have a responsibility to get involved in their communities and try to make it a better place to live. Peter Menzies pointed out a few months ago that we have a responsibility to participate in community life at the local level. I probably should be able and willing to contribute something of value to the place gracious enough to allow me to call it home.

And there’s the problem. We have a house, and we enjoy it and are grateful for it. As for the town I live in, I cannot, I do not, consider it home. Our relationships with our neighbors are cordial, but with the exception of the folks on either side of us, we do not know them.

The town itself has an unethical mayor who fancies herself a suburban version of an all-powerful Mayor Daly. She is insufferably flaky, and her speeches at civic events are an embarrassment.

Our city planners have turned a non-existent downtown into a traffic nightmare, in hopes of drawing more business and retail shops into the area. We now have unusable roads and acres of retail subdivisions which have sat undeveloped for at least six years. Winding, narrow roads with no sidewalks join major thoroughfares at uncontrolled intersections. At many controlled intersections, no pedestrian traffic is allowed. One can neither walk nor bicycle to the main business areas of our town.

Incidentally, when the Big Box Home Store came to town, our city leaders spent five hours (yes, five hours) discussing whether an accent color on the building should be painted on or completed in ceramic tile. My tax dollars at work.

When I have business to do, at the post office, grocery store, or otherwise, I go somewhere else. Two nearby suburbs seem to have grown wisely, and not at the expense of their people. Instead of a traffic maze, they have sensible roads flanked with bike and walking paths.

I love our home and our neighborhood, but I am absolutely ashamed of the city that I live in. I invest my time and effort in other communities around ours, and there are three or four towns that we have a stake in and in which we are more heavily involved. I have never felt like this was home. I’m not arguing that my attitude is good or right, I’m simply letting you know how much I despise the city in which I live.

My advice for anyone planning a move to a town: check it out before you move in. Read the local paper. Drive around on the city streets. You need to find out, before you move in, whether the city government is populated by sociopaths, and if there is any sense of the long-term vision.

Oh, how often I have heard people praise their towns, and speak fondly of their community. Sadly, you won’t find me among those people. I wish I could, but I cannot, in good faith, recommend my town to anyone.
Yes, I’ve said many times, the world is starved for leadership. In the absence of real leaders, self-serving, petty people step in and bleed a town dry. Welcome to my town.

While e-mailing myself something (it’s a long, convoluted story), I was running into problems. I simply wanted to save a file on an e-mail server as a backup: Technology is not always trustworthy.

In an odd twist of fate, Microsoft lists its own Visio files on its server blacklists. Ah, that’s comforting thought. Along the way, I also learned that Microsoft has listed Adobe PDF files as “unsafe.” Yes–unsafe for Microsoft. Adobe has been supporting this product for aeons–so long, in-fact, that it confounds some new-earth creationists . The truth is, I trust Adobe much more than I trust the folks in Redmond, Washington.

Just as a disclaimer, any trademarks listed here are the property of their respective owners. Blah, blah, blah.

I’m taking a few more days away from my blog so that I can work on data analysis for my dissertation. I hope to be back to GreatRidge Station around June 19.