I’ve written before about the power of optimism, not only as a force for good in lives, but also as a necessary element for any success in economic development as a community.
The bottom line is that we will only ever be as good as we believe we are.
So it is with some reluctance that I look back at 2006 as the Year of Lost Expectations, a time not so much where bad things happened to us as a time when we realized how bad the things that were happening to us really were.
On the local level Erie City taxpayers will see that in the form of a tax bill 12 percent higher and offering fewer services for the money, including as many as 16 fewer firefighters.
We started the year with hope, however faint, that a new administration would find new ways to staunch that flow and begin a new cooperative era after the bickering and acrimony that marked Mayor Rick Filippi’s four years.
But incoming Mayor Joe Sinnott found early on that a new mayor would not suddenly end decades of entrenched politics. News that the city owes about a million unanticipated dollars to the state for that controversial reverse DROP retirement program didn’t help. Neither did city unions willing to go to court to fight consolidation and literally not give a nickel on insurance co-pays, all of which left taxpayers wondering just how bad things will get before or if they ever get any better.
In Harrisburg we saw judges, among the most powerful and best paid among us, give us a real eye opener by reinstating a late night and much detested pay raise for members of the judiciary. That’s even though taxpayer anger drove lawmakers into repealing the same raise they had voted for themselves.
The judges argued that the Constitution prevents lawmakers from voting judges a pay cut. But if the raise was never legal in the first place, how could giving it back not be?
It was a real wake up call for those of us naively clinging to the notion that the country was still ultimately run by We the People.
And then, there is Iraq.
You may remember that I reluctantly supported the war in Iraq when it began.
Surely there must be evidence of weapons of mass destruction, I thought, along with signs of Saddam Hussein’s support for the kinds of people that would plan September 11th hijackings.
Certainly our leaders would remember the lessons of Vietnam and wouldn’t throw American lives in harm’s way without a clear war plan that included a precise exit strategy.
Yeah.
Fast forward to the day after the November elections, a time when voters threw as many Republicans as they could out of power, including PA Senator Rick Santorum.
It was the day when President Bush also threw his buddy Donald Rumsfeld under the bus by asking the Secretary of Defense, the face of American policy in Iraq, to leave. That’s probably the closest we’ll ever get to the President, the greatest of the stay-the-course cheerleaders, admitting that the policy in Iraq had failed.
The President is now “weighing his options” in Iraq, but there are few of us left who believe that any answer will come easily, cheaply, or anytime soon.
All of that said, let’s also remember that with a New Year and new faces comes a new chance.
The Bremner family ends 2006 in fairly good health and in good spirits, and we wish the best for you and yours as well.
With health and hope, there is always the opportunity to overcome that which seeks to overwhelm.
We’ll look ahead to some of those opportunities next week.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
HEY! I hope you’re not disappointed but our comments section is still down. To post your feelings about the year just gone, keep your chin up and email me at scott.bremner@35wsee.com. Write “Comments” in the subject line so I don’t disappoint. And please don’t feel bad if it takes a day or two to post, since I’m feeling good about the fact that I’m on vacation.