Our community is reeling from a horribly tragic accident over the weekend–the death of a 4-year-old boy while riding in a car with his mother and older sister.  The driver, a woman who works with my wife who I know slightly, reportedly drove her Jeep through a stop sign and was broadsided by a Ford F-150 that had to be traveling at a high rate of speed–judging from the mangled condition of the other vehicle.  The mom and sister were both hospitalized, but neither has life-threatening injuries.  The passengers of the other vehicle managed to walk away unhurt.

Reaction to the accident has run the gamut from stunned to outraged, with blame cast in every direction possible–the mom, the speed limit, visibility of the stop sign in question, lack of enforcement, blah, blah, blah.  I guarantee you that there is enough blame–and guilt–to go around.  I can’t even imagine how Charlene–the mom–is coping with the reality of what has happened.  The absolute crushing feeling of personal accountability for causing the death of your own child is one for which some can never recover.  What about the man whose truck caused the fatal blow?  Regardless of legal or other responsibility, that has got to be a sickening and tortuous memory.  Town officials are captured on camera in low voices and subdued postures.  No doubt they all feel some responsibility for an accident that was probably caused at least in part by a freeway-style speed limit on the cross street in a once-remote but increasingly more populated area.

I can’t begin to speculate on the outcome of this tragedy.  Hopefully, who ultimately must take responsibility for what happened won’t require a judge and jury, and I cannot imagine how criminal or even civil actions could provide more of a punishment for the two adults who will bear the weight for their involvement in what happened.  Then what outcome can we wish for or urge from this terrible occurence?

I believe there is a great deal of constructive benefit that can come from all of this tragedy.  First, state officials will have to take note of the role high speed played in this accident, and lower the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit on the cross street.  The increased traffic this roadway has seen due to the area’s population growth practically demands a more moderate limit.  The town’s highway department will undoubtedly take action to trim back growth and other obstacles at this and many other intersections to improve better visibility of traffic signs and other vehicles. 

And I would fervently pray that all drivers take far more seriously exactly what a stop sign means.  I’ve ranted on more than one occaison about the lack of respect drivers have for that red octogon-shaped advisory.  It’s possible that all Charlene did was slide past the sign into the intersection and caught the speeding F-150.  I do not want to speculate on what she could have done differently–that kind of hindsight serves no one.  It’s enough to say we all ought to try a lot harder to make sure we’ve done all we can to keep ourselves and other drivers out of harm’s way. 

I believe all of us need to ask ourselves one unnerving question–what if it had been me?  What if I had done something, no matter how benign, that took the life of my child?  What if I had to learn how to live after that?  Only after having the courage to honestly pose question can we hope to avoid more of this kind of wasted life. Drive safely…

The company that owns the station that I work at is pretty big, but it’s only really gotten that way in the last couple of years.  Email-wise, it’s been just recently that there have been wide distribution lists created for corporate broadcast of various items (some of you definitely know what I’m talking about).  The impact of that has recently been demonstrated on a large number of my co-workers here and nationwide.

Someone somewhere in our organization decided to share some promotional offer that really only applied to a subset of our stations to every on-air person in our company (several hundred people at least).  That in itself wouldn’t have been that irritating–if it hadn’t been for an enormously huge number of the recipients of the message using the "reply to all" button to either make a comment (wisecrack or otherwise), or some request to be "taken off the list"–apparently assuming they’d been added to somebody’s cutesy distribution list.

As you can just imagine, the mushrooming effect of something like this bordered on the ridiculous after a couple of hundred of these hits your inbox.  But after a while, it just got to be funnier and funnier.  I couldn’t tell whether my talented co-workers either didn’t realize they were continually sending their messages to everyone or didn’t care that they were or just wanted to irritate everyone else as much as they were.  Occasionally, some of them were pretty funny and a few were insightful enough to wonder if we could all find some forum where we could share some of what we know with one another.

But just like the volume of messages themselves, that notion just quietly faded away.  I doubt we could no more creatively collaborate any better than we handled the "reply to all" button.  But who knows?  Maybe another, better message will come along that we all will get that will actually be worth discussing, and something worthwhile may actually occur.  There’s a first time for everything…

Nothing much on my mind to rant or vent about–just the notion that referring to these daily updates by the same title day after day strikes me as a bit egotistical, like I assume a subject is of less importance to you than the mere fact that I have deigned to share my thoughts once again.  Sheesh!  What an a**hole. 

Henceforth, I shall give each one of these posts a proper heading befitting their individual subject matter.  It’s the least I can do for someone so insightful as to visit this spot on the web.  You’re welcome…

Another important decision awaits those who live in my community, as the board of supervisors in the town where I live is proposing to disband the police department and contract with the county for services.

To fully appreciate this situation, it’s important to understand New York’s somewhat complicated (at least to me) governmental organization.  Coming from the Northwest, it was pretty simple,  Within a county, you either had incorporated areas (cities) or unincorporated areas.  Those not incorporated were served either by the county or by various voter-generated districts (fire, water, school, etc.)  In New York, you have a veritable menu of possibilities.  Within a given county, you can have cities, towns, villages, and hamlets–each with their own distinct and separate governments.  For example, a city resides within a county, but is independent otherwise.  Towns function similarly, but can also contain villages, which have seperate government structures and often provide residents all the typical city services, but may permit the town to do so.  Towns also comprise hamlets, which are as you might expect pretty tiny, with some elected officials but services usually provided by the town or county. If your head is spinning, it’s no surprise.  I live here, and it spins mine still.

The decision to abandon the police department is one other governments in the area have tried with degrees of success, and is largely one of economics.  The county-provided service will save the town a million dollars a year–a not insignificant sum for a community of 60,000 people.  The present department is small and it seems the consensus is they are pretty worthless at anything except writing citations.  I’m inclined to agree with that, since they are hardly visible and seem hopelessly unable to handle important tasks like maintaining residential speed limits.   That is something that village police forces–where they exist–are incredibly efficient at doing.  In my neighborhood, cars drive entirely too fast for the numbers of children who walk and play along residential roadways–and I could probably count on both hands the number of times I have seen patrol cars on even the well-traveled arterial streets there.

But the county contract provides for only 2 patrol cars to cover what is the county’s largest town by area.  That may not be far from what our present reality is in terms of actual coverage, but strikes me as a far cry from what is needed.  I’m also concerned at losing local control over public safety–not that it’s really had much of an impact up to this point.  I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better to worry less about saving the million bucks(this is a heavily Republican area constantly trying to find new and better ways to spend less money) and turn the whole $2.4 million department budget over to the county in exchange for pehaps double the number of patrols. 

Then again, I’m not sure what we would be buying in improved service, since the entire force will be able to transistion into similar positions in the sheriff’s department–and would initially be assigned to patrol Clay.  They may get the opportunity for better training and supervision, but who knows?  We all may end up no better and possibly worse for the experiment.  It is likely the story with a nearby village, who decided to let the nearby city of Syracuse provide its police service–only to revert back to their own force a couple of years later.

The town will put this up to a vote of residents in June, which gives me a little bit of time to ponder this.  It reminds me of the old adage:  "There’s never a cop around when you need one".  It certainly seems to be the case here–even when you don’t necessarily need one…

My apologies for not posting anaything here on Friday, as my Monday/Wednesday/Friday cardiac rehab routine is creating some new challenges to my creative process.  The results will be worth it, so I will continue to work to make time to fit in all the important parts of my life.

The weekend was nicely punctuated with a visit to the auto shop, as both our cars were due for New York’s annual inspection–a somewhat tedious but I believe necessary task.  My wife had been concerned about her brakes, and wanted them checked and repaired if need be–which we both expected to cost us a pretty penny, since we assumed from the symptoms that there were damaged calipers and rotors (big money!). 

As it turned out, it was the suspension that was suspect, as both front springs were broken.  Not only is this obviously undesirable, but it won’t permit the car to pass inspection.  Needless to say, the work was done.  Throw in an alignment and replacement of associated front end parts, and the tab was at least what we expected for the brakes–which turned out to be mostly OK.  The rotors were warped, which accounted for the strange pulsing they were making.  Turns out it was less a safety issue as it was a comfort one, as the pulsing will just get progressively worse until you decide you don’t want to deal with it anymore.  The pads had normal wear, and were pronounced likely usable for another 8000 miles.  At the rate my wife uses her car–work to home round trip is maybe 5 miles–and her ability to tolerate the warped rotors, the brake repair could be postponed for months.  That was good news to me, because I’m not fond of turning over the cost of a decent-sized HDTV to a mechanic for some springs…