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Scott Bremner
It’s absolutely dizzying watching the speed by which President Obama and leaders in Congress are working these days.
In fact, it’s a little hard to keep up.
“Today we’ll fashion a bill to shore up the ailing banking industry. Tomorrow we’ll put an end to questionable questioning techniques used on prisoners of war, right after we overhaul our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then we’ll implement a wide range of green technologies for business and extend the school year to compete globally.”
“Oh, and on Monday we’re reversing all of that stem cell ban nonsense.”
I suppose you really can’t blame the President.
He’s proven in his first fifty days to be a shrewd interpreter of the landscape and he knows that nothing is as short in Washington as a honeymoon.
Sixty-plus percent approval ratings don’t last forever, especially in an economy growing darker before the dawn.
I’m sure, too, that he is being spurred on by elements in his party even further out on the political tree branch than he is.
The fact is that those folks have waited a long time to have a real say in things.
You could argue that with the pragmatism and governing-from-the-middle leanings of the Clintons that it has been at least Jimmy Carter, and more likely Lyndon Johnson since the far left has had the perfect storm of political juice, leadership and world situation needed to allow for a free pass to push the country solidly in their direction.
And if it is to be a brief window, doesn’t it make sense to push hard?
Even Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is getting into the act, using the waning two years of his second administration to enact sweeping executive orders on everything from health insurance, mortgage assistance, home-heating assistance, and job-counseling programs.
Combined, the initiatives form a torrent from the left virtually unseen this side of a Sunshine Socialist.
Inevitably your support for what’s happening will come down to (A) whether your job is affected and (B) some basic beliefs on government’s ability to spend our way out of problems.
Or do you fear that the need now is so great that we are turning a blind eye on the bill being left for the kids?
It’s certainly far too early to judge whether the moves being made today will cause more good than harm down the road, a bench from which history will ultimately preside.
But if the idea is to make hay while the sun shines, there’s little doubt that right now, we’re getting a barn full.
You’ll have to pardon me if the waxing turns a little nostalgic.
It was 25 years ago today when I started my job as a cub reporter and camera operator for WSEE-TV.
Since I’ll be turning fifty later on this year, at least the math is easy.
I’ve literally spent half my life on this job.
The Bible talks about a church being the people and not the building.
I get that, and I’ve been thinking lately a lot about the people who have spent time in the cathedral of my broadcasting career; friends, co-workers, those who really wanted to be on TV and those who really, really didn’t.
But with downtown development looming the reality is we’ll probably be leaving our building this year and with that comes a sense of sadness too.
The church may be the people but you can get attached to the place, too.
I brought my bride and my two newborn children home to my first house, a tiny ranch in the southeast corner of the city.
My young family soon outgrew those confines so we, like so many others, moved to the suburbs to something with a little more elbow room.
Our current house is a little bit larger, a little bit nicer and a whole lot newer.
But it’s not my first house.
So too, it was this building where I ran back night after night covering the aftermath of the 1985 Albion tornado.
It was here where I ran in on deadline every afternoon to post the testimony in the 1988 David Copenhefer murder trial.
It was in the middle of this newsroom where I stood and watched, mouth agape, as airliners went flying into New York City skyscrapers in the fall of 2001.
There are thousands of other stories I could relate here; fires and ice storms, acts of malice and kindness, accidents and premeditations.
Woven together they present a tapestry of who we were and what happened to us over a quarter century of time.
And true to the biblical lesson, it is the real stories from regular people that have stuck with me far more than the major events.
Like the family of the fiancé of Tom Stone, the young Jamestown area soldier killed in the barracks bombing of Dhahran.
Like Lindsey Fuhrman, a young woman I first met as a teenage heart transplant patient whom I later watched as she walked down the aisle to get married accompanied by both her father and the father of her heart patient donor.
We all resent change, but the truth is that, like sharks, we too must move to survive.
Change really is our one constant.
It has been a privilege to be given access to some extraordinary lives and to be given a chance to chronicle the changes in their stories over the years.
In that regard the rewards have far outpaced the regrets, and the struggles dim in the glow of the victories.
