Archive: Opinions

One of the costs of making a newspaper is that when people don't agree with you -- or even just think they don't -- you become a person with no integrity who is misguided or evil at worst, and naïve at best.  By the same token people may feel that affordable housing is a good idea in the abstract, but not if it is next to their own house.  Or sewer could help the town theoretically, but not if we have to pay for it.  The Republicans are evil unless you are one, and the Democrats are irresponsible with our money, unless you are one.  And neither care about the country as much as they care about their own party winning at any cost.  Unless you are one.

People work hard for what they have, and I think we all naturally want to have some control over how it's spent, how it affects our immediate environment and our world view.  'Not In My Back Yard' (NIMBY) syndrome is alive and well in Lansing as it is everywhere in the world.  So why do we get along as well as we do as a community?

Well, one way is that when someone who believes something one of the parties espouses makes disrespectful, sarcastic, holier-than-thou remarks about someone or some philosophical tenet of a party I agree with on that topic, I seldom engage.  Not engaging is my way of getting along.  It's not that I don't enjoy talking about politics as much as anyone else.  It's just that I don't like being called names and grilled as if I had just murdered someone just because I don't think exactly the way the other person does.  I'm pretty sure thinking any way I want to is what America is supposed to be about, and I can't find the passage in the Constitution that says I have to be demeaned for believing one thing or another.  Unless it's that 'pursuit of happiness thing' applying to the name-calling maggot on the other side of the conversation!

OK, now that I've gotten that off my chest, the real reason I think the community works is shared values.  As Americans that works on a macro level, and in small towns it also works.  We all agree that living in America is good, or at least better than living elsewhere.  In theory we agree that diversity is good, and that people with different histories and cultural differences make America stronger together.  We tend to believe our values as a people are good ones that make the world better.  At least on that macro level we are instilled with these things from birth, and how we interpret them on a micro level may be very, very different, but we share them, at least, on the macro level.  Those values are reinforced in us by people in other countries, many of whom don't like us, but still want to be us culturally even if they hate us politically.

I have often mused that the joy and the sorrow of an online newspaper is that we know exactly what people are reading.  The Ithaca Journal, Tompkins Weekly, Ithaca Times -- the New York Times, for that matter -- make a judgment call and put what they think is the most important stuff in the front.  They have the luxury of thinking those things are really the things their readers care about, and can feel pretty good about a job well done when they write about those things.  But they have no real way of knowing what readers really are interested in.

They would probably be disappointed if they could know.  But despite the weeks when I work hard on a local municipal or political story that gets only a quarter of the hits of a piece on a local restaurant, I also like knowing that because it helps me understand the shared values of our readers.  And that helps me understand the glue that holds our community together.  (Check out the 'Popular This Week' box on our front page to see what your fellow readers are clicking on the most in this issue.)

By the way I'm not saying that all Lansing cares about is food.  When I looked at the hits on our top 100 stories of all time (all time being the five years we've been publishing) I certainly saw a lot of our pieces on restaurants, but also many hits on stories about local elections.  A really old article on the 50 mile yard sale continues to be popular, articles about The Shops at Ithaca Mall, and my piece on the opening of the Regal Stadium Cinema is one of our most popular articles.

So our community really loves its food, shopping, and entertainment. 

But that's not all.  The Town Supervisor campaign between Scott Pinney and Steve Farkas seems to have struck a chord with our readers that brings them back to those articles two years after the election.  That election represented two distinct points of view, and I think people were moved -- or threatened -- by it.  But I loved that our readers have that interest (because the political/municipal stuff is what I love to think is important).  Many of our election interviews are also in the top 100, which I also love, because I think the Star does a pretty good job with those.

Interestingly you don't see many sports articles in the top 100, though they start to seep into the culture in the second 100.  I'm not sure you can say that is because sports isn't as important in Lansing as shopping and eating out.  I think it's more because you have a game and then it's over.  Then you have another one.  So those articles don't have the sticking power that others do.

You get the point.  As a community we share so many values about things that are important to us that we get along just fine, for the most part, despite the overwhelming strength of NIMBY.

A time I remember that I was most offended, even more than having religious slurs screamed at me (in high school) or being called misguided or evil or naïve (much more recently and repeatedly since we started this newspaper) was when a friend declared loudly at a party that President Bush (the second one) wasn't HIS president.  On reflection I think I was that offended because it was a total rejection of our most basic shared value: that everyone gets a vote in America, and the person elected represents us all, because we have all pledged allegiance to this system of government and agreed that this is how we can best live together.  I know a lot of people didn't like President Bush, especially around here.  But if you believe in America, he was our president, every one of us.  For myself I was never thrilled with President Carter (and still am not) but I never questioned whether he was my president.  He was.  So was Bush.  Neither ruined the country.

(As I typed that last sentence I realized that it makes me misguided or evil at worst, and naïve at best).

That, too is because of shared values.  We may not be able to agree on what should be in our own back yards, and we may not be able to agree on who gets to spend our tax money, but we can always agree on shopping, going to the movies and eating out, and how we do it.

It's not perfect, but it seems to work.

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