Community
Wherever two live community should develop.
How can we be comfortable and satisfied with ourselves if we do not
extend a part of ourselves to others? One way we do this is through
involvement in community.
Belonging to a community is different from belonging to a church, or a club, or group that goes mountain biking on Sundays. These later are virtual organizations; we make them up. Community is real. It is based in the physical space around us and the content of that space, including ourselves and our neighbors.
We may try to not participate in community, but we will still be part of it because on the simplest level we occupy space in a community. We can settle for this dreary status or we may reach out, touch the community, even embrace it.
I live on Bradley Street. It looks like this:
Other streets in the neighborhood look like this:
Bradley Street is in Trumansburg, New York in the US
Trumansburg is a village, it looks like this:
The Village of Trumansburg is in the Town of Ulysses.
Ulysses is a rural town, or township.
There is great beauty, yet sometimes it looks like this:
I serve on the Ulysses Town Board - have been doing that for one year. There is much that needs to be changed in the Town and there is much to be preserved. The world around it has changed substantially in the last decades, but like most of Upstate New York, the lack of money has slowed most change.
Ulysses is in Tompkins County.
Cayuga Lake is the main feature of Tompkins County.
Cayuga Lake is forty-three miles long, one-and-one-half miles wide and 435 feet deep.
This view is northeast from a Sanatorium built in the 1920s.
None of the trees would have blocked the lake view then. Farmers
removed all the trees during the nineteenth century. Trees have
regained sixty percent of Tompkins County since the 1930s.
Forests continue to regain New York State at the rate of one million acres per decade.
It is a very strange fact that I have never heard an "environmentalist" address this FACT in any way. Remarkably, it is proportionately true not of just Ulysses, but also all of New York State and most of New England. This is becoming one of the world's great forests, but environmentalists are uninterested. Are they going to be blind-sided by a reversal in the very utopian trend they advocate?
Open your eyes! It's a great forest growing around us. What is the necessary political response?
At Sheldrake, looking north, Cayuga Lake looks as large as anywhere.
Tompkins County is part of New York State.
New York State's government corruption has come to dominant my whole State gestalt. The corruption is so ugly that I am not going to show you the beautiful state.
This is not a partisan statement. Changing administrations from Democrat to Republican or from Republican to Democrat only enlarges the cancer. We need a Constitutional Convention - one that excludes the currently elected representatives - a whole new governance structure.
Don Ellis
Trumansburg, New York, US
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Last update November 16, 2005