Adapting to myths vs confronting them

Every Tuesday, the Glens Falls (NY) daily Post-Star runs a feature called P.S. In it, journalists publish brief (1-3 sentence) observations, quips and stories from their rounds.

Today's edition mentioned an anecdote from Glens Falls PR maestro and General Electric mouthpiece Mark Behan. In doing research for his work, he came across excerpts from a 1950 mayoral campaign speech. The candidate in question noted downtown parking as the top issue he'd tackle if elected; he was. Yet, alleged lack of parking remains a perceived problem downtown.

As many of you know, transportation is one of my major concerns. Since I choose not to own a car or to drive, I face a very difficult task navigating city streets where non-cars are a peripheral concern at best. I was reminded of these issues today by the appearence at the Rock Hill Bakehouse Cafe by writer and critic of suburbia James Howard Kunstler. (I'll have more on him and his speech in a future entry)

For decades, people have argued that Glens Falls would die if it didn't cater exclusively to the automobile. Some power brokers are even pushing the abominable plan for building a hideous parking garage.

Much of the opposition to the long-overdue Crandall Library expansion was based on the myth that there's not enough parking (even though Library officials can't control parking). In reality, there's plenty of parking about 100 yards from the building in a bank parking lot.

The fundamental problem in Glens Falls is not a lack of parking downtown. The fundamental problem is the refusal or inability of citizens to walk more than 10 feet to a shop -- unless they're at a suburban mall where they have no problem walking 100 yards to the entrance and then walking around the inside of the mall for hours on end. But given the question of pedestrian safety in downtown Glens Falls, perhaps I can't blame them!

Some say that this is the unchangeable reality, that we need to accept the myth and adapt to it. Some say we ought to subsidize this civic self-destructiveness with millions of our tax dollars to build a parking garage. Some say that pedestrians are a quaint relic from a bygone era; the law says we can't run them over but that's about the only concession some would make.

Yet this boondoggle will not revive downtown for one simple reason: the instant you leave your car, you become that quaint relic from a bygone era. The instant you leave your car, you become a pedestrian.

We shouldn't adapt to myths, especially self-destructive ones. We shouldn't spend huge sums of money catering to people's false perceptions; we ought to work to change the false perceptions.

The bottom line is that it's difficult, sometimes insanely so, for pedestrians to cross the street in downtown Glens Falls. This is true whether you initially arrived via auto, foot, bicycle or bus. Once you leave your car, bike or the bus, you face the same challenges as the person who walked downtown. Wasting millions of dollars on a parking garage will not change this fundamental dynamic. It's simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (while adding huge weight to the Titanic's deck in the name of municipal debt bonds).

The city of Glens Falls has many wonderful civic and cultural institutions. The Hyde Collection. The Civic Center. Crandall Library. The Chapman Museum. But in order to get from any one to any other, you have to cross the street. Wasting millions of dollars on a parking garage will not change this fundamental dynamic.

Replacing the stoplights at the five-way intersection with a roundabout will only make crossing the street on foot even more suicidal. I have to time my run perfectly and sprint across the way, and I'm a 30 year old man in decent shape. I can't imagine how hard it is for senior citizens to do it. No sane parent would let their kids try it alone.

City leaders are so concerned about people being able to get THROUGH Glens Falls quickly and smoothly. Shouldn't they want people to STOP in Glens Falls, walk around, experience our wonderful town and spend money? The city can't properly be enjoyed from a car window.

What can be done?

We can start by not making things worse. Don't build a pedestrian-hostile roundabout. Don't waste millions of dollars on a parking garage that can't hope to make any significant contribution.

Take some of the money saved and install crosswalk signals that actually work. This also requires all stoplights at an intersection to be red for a brief period of time.

How about a civic campaign to encourage people to walk or bike when they go downtown? Surely downtown businesses could be involved.

How about taking some of the savings from not building a parking garage and investing in a few bike racks? Crandall Library has the only real bike rack in downtown Glens Falls (there is a tiny, insignificant one hidden near the bus stop). Neither City Hall nor the Civic Center, two of our most significant downtown institutions, has a bike rack.

I don't propose banning cars from downtown. I don't propose eliminating all parking either. I don't even ask that non-automobile transportation be put on an equal footing with cars, which would be a behemoth change.

The increasing pandering to automobile traffic (along with the general industrial decline of the northeast) has coincided with the economic decline of downtown Glens Falls. We've changed our cities to cater almost exclusively to cars. It hasn't worked. So let's try something else.

All I ask is that bikers, walkers and those who use the modest public transportation system be given minimal consideration. Bikers, walkers and those who use public transportation are taxpayers too. And what's more: they're consumers as well.



Shameless pitch: Esmond Lyons is the only current mayoral candidate who has shown the slightest inclination not only to address these issues, but even acknowledge that these issues exist. I'd encourage you to check out his campaign's website at: EsmondLyonsForMayor.org for more information on his ideas.

Gambling with the Adirondack Park's future

One of the big regional stories was the report that the head of New York state's Adirondack Park Agency has been suspended after being accused of downloading and emailing porn on agency computers. The APA is the agency that regulates activities in New York's six million acre Adirondack State Park.

Obviously APA head Dan Fitts should be fired if found guilty of this. I think most people can agree on this. But North Country Public Radio's report on the story contained a fact that astonished me: According to NCPR, the APA is the smallest state agency.

The APA has an enormous task. The Adirondack Park is reportedly the largest state or national park in the lower 48 states. The Park is to remain 'forever wild,' according to Article XIV of the state constitution. The APA created by the state legislature in 1971 to help enforce this part of the constitution.

Yet in the last few years, the APA has been inundated by building permits. Big developers have seen the Park as the ideal place to build huge housing complexes and McMansions to lure those New York city and Long Island residents spooked by 9/11. The Adirondack Park is great precisely because of its natural beauty. Yet much like California in the 50s and 60s and Colorado in the 70s and 80s, a huge population influx may threaten what makes the Park so desirable in the first place.

In addition to the obvious concerns of environmentalists who want the state constitution respected, this is also of some concern to business owners. The Park's economy is heavily dependent on tourism, tourism which is based on people want to experience the region's fantastic natural wonders. People come to the Adirondack Park to hunt and fish and hike and breathe fresh air. They don't come to the Park to get stuck in traffic in front of a Wal-Mart; they come to the Park to get AWAY from that.

The administration of Gov. George Pataki has been praised by some for authorizing the state to purchase a lot of land in the Park. Yet with the deluge of development projects, it seems that Pataki is protecting some land in the Park as a cover for letting the rest go to pot. He giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other... and then some.

The APA has this enormous job but with only 60 staff, it's the smallest state agency and, by all accounts, can barely keep up with the flood of development permit applications. Given the importance of its job, doesn't the APA deserve more well-staffed agencies like the state lottery or horse racing association? Or perhaps the lame duck governor is content gambling with the future of one of the few parts of the state that hasn't been paved over.

Shared burdens of war

In case you believed President Bush's rhetoric that the Iraq aggression was a truly multinational effort with a widely shared burden, this Associated Press piece reminds you otherwise.

There have been 2021 coalition soldiers killed in Iraq; 1828, about 90.5%, of them American (and that's assuming that the Pentagon is correctly recording casualties from the Iraq theater, something that has been called into question). The British military has lost 93 soldiers, the Italians 26 and every other coalition member 18 or fewer.

In other words, the US military has lost nine times more soldiers than the rest of the coalition combined. Some shared burden.

Bush-appointed civil liberties panel has never met

Now here's something that shocked (SHOCKED!) me.

According to an article from Reuters:

A civil-liberties board ordered by the U.S. Congress last year has never met to discuss its job of protecting rights in the fight against terrorism, and critics say it is a toothless, underfunded shell with inadequate support from President Bush.

Troublingly...

The inactivity comes at a time when Congress is nearing reauthorization of several provisions of the Patriot Act, a controversial law that gave the government new powers to go after suspected terrorists.

According to a high-ranking GOP Congressman:

Asked why it was taking so long to set the board up, Connecticut Republican Rep. Christopher Shays charged, "It's not a priority for the administration."

The administration is uninterested in civil liberties?

NEWSFLASH!

'Joy and gladness' at Hiroshima

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. There will be much debate about whether or not the dropping of an atomic bomb on a large urban center was justified. This essay is not about addressing that question.

What's interesting is this. Some people say that Japanese foreign policy provoked the Hiroshima bombs. I've seen the odd bumper sticker that reads, "If there hadn't been Pearl Harbor, there wouldn't have been Hiroshima."

Fair enough.

Yet if you say, "If the US hadn't meddled in other country's affairs, there wouldn't have been 9/11," those same people will go apoplectic with rage. They will accuse you of being an apologist for terrorists. This even though there is an obvious difference between explaining the cause of something and justifying it.

Either actions have consequences or they don't. People need to make up their mind.

But on one board I frequent, a man argued:

The Japanese got exactly what they deserved. They started wars, treated people with a brutality only rivaled by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, they treated life as if it was expendable for over a decade. These people want to claim to be victims of nuclear attacks? I don't think so. We should be proud of these attacks on Japan. They saved millions of lives, ended a brutal war and in fact helped protect Japan from total destruction. We might not like nuclear war but in this case it was completely and totally justified. Let's remember this anniversary with joy and gladness [emphasis mine] and let's pray that we never see such a brutal war again.

As I said, I am not going to argue whether the atomic bombs should have been dropped. That's another debate. And the Japanese regime was brutal by any standard.

It's one thing to argue that dropping the two atomic bombs were necessary. It's one thing to argue that they saved American lives and ended the war sooner. But at least have the decency to say it was "unfortunately necessary."

To be "proud" of the deaths of millions of innocent civilians, to remember their deaths "with joy and gladness," this is profane and despicable by the standards of any civilized human being.

Gitmo tribunals rigged, say participating US soldiers

The parody of justice known as military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay are allegedly rigged in favor of the government. This is not according to a terrorist... er, accused terrorist.... er, suspected terrorist who says this. This is not according to Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader or some other 'blame America first' loonie leftist. This is according to two US soldiers who worked on the prosecution team at Gitmo on those very same military tribunals.

The soldiers involved asked to be reassigned rather than participate in the kangaroo court. [T]hey accused fellow prosecutors of ignoring torture allegations, failing to protect evidence that could help defendants establish a defense and withholding information from superiors, reports The Washington Post. One of the soldiers asserted that the chief prosecutor had told subordinates that the members of the military commission that would try the first four defendants would be "handpicked" to ensure that all would be convicted.


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How to help anti-hunger efforts

This essay is part of a weekly feature on my blog that presents interesting stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, Israel and Iraq.


Last week, I encouraged readers to make a donation to the World Food Program or some other organization to help them with the famine in Niger and potential famine in Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

After a drought and an invasion of locusts, the UN and other agencies warned LAST YEAR that the Sahel countries would face food shortages and appealed for money. Yet the UN's emegency relief coordinator noted last week that the international community has put more money into the Niger relief effort over the past 10 days than it had during the previous 10 months.

In the wake of these food emegencies, international organizations are re-visiting their whole approach to fighting hunger. Some are calling for organizations to build up a surplus of money, a savings account if you will, that it can tap into when these food emergencies start to happen. By building up an emergency fund, organizations could react to situations before they became crises.

The conventional wisdom, until now, is that famines don't occur in democracies. I believe someone even won a Nobel Prize in economics a few years ago based on that theory. The infamous famine in Ethiopia was precipitated in no small part by the disastrous policies of the dictatorial Derg regime. The food emergency in Zimbabwe, formerly the bread basket of southern Africa, is not unrelated to strongman Robert Mugabe's program of stealing land from white farmers to give to his cronies; it's being compounded by the regime's alleged manipulation of international food aid for political purposes.

However, Niger is a democracy. A young democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. They have free elections. They have protests. They have a free press. The latter has been critical about what is seen as the government's slow response to the food crisis (the government counters that it's been making international appeals since last year). So is Mali. So are the southern African countries of Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique, where there is also a drought-provoked food crisis.

Developing an emergency fund is a good idea. The trick is getting enough money to build that emergency fund in the first place. Ordinary people tend to be fairly generous AFTER they see pictures of starving children broadcast into their living room, but usually not until that point.

Props to Ethan over at ...My Heart's in Accra blog. I encouraged people to make a one-time donation. But Ethan pointed a way that those so inclined can make a regular monthly donation to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) to help build up that fund so they can respond to emergencies in a timely manner. MSF has a program called Field Partners where they make an automatic deduction from your checking account or credit card as a donation. They have options from $60 a month ($2 a day) even down to $7.50 a month (25 cents a day). Click here for more info. Please consider it.

The end of the war on terror

The war on terror is no more.

At least according to The White House.

Administration officials are increasingly referring to their efforts as 'a global struggle against the enemies of freedom.'

It could be a tacit acknowledgement that their centerpiece of the so-called 'war on terror,' the Iraq aggression, had absolutely nothing to do with fighting international terrorism. It might be as close to an 'oops' as you'll get from the Bush administration.

This linguistic game should be unsurpising in light of efforts by the administration to block moves by several Republican senators to ban torture, which is a form of terrorism.

Of course, American troops don't practice torture, at least according to patriotic correctness. So it begs the question: why the objection to a ban on torture?