Phil-osophically Speaking: May 21, 2010

Remembering the Unsung Heroes of Vietnam

You’re a 19-year-old kid. You’re critically wounded and dying in the jungle. Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 hundred yards away, that your own infantry commander has ordered the Medi-Vac helicopters to stop coming in.

You’re lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you’re not getting out. Your family is halfway around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you’ll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Around the Town: May 21, 2010

I would like to take this opportunity to inform residents of Hempstead Town’s SWIFT911 emergency notification service. The system provides a mechanism for the town to phone, e-mail or text message residents and businesses under its jurisdiction in the event of an emergency such as a severe storm evacuation. Such situations may include water main breaks, flooding, weather emergencies or natural disasters. Non-emergency contact may also be made in the event of town water department pipe flushing, which may affect water quality.

Phil-osophically Speaking - May 14, 2010

The Great Struggle Against the Third Track

Supervisor Kate Murray recently held a press conference regarding the MTA’s announcement that it would not include the Third Track in its 2010-2014 capital budgets. The Third Track had engrossed the interest and energies of our community as no other issue in the recent past. So it was fitting that the supervisor held the conference at the Floral Park Train Station.

Letter: Get Out and Vote on May 18

Tuesday, May 18, is the vote for the proposed 2010-2011 Floral Park-Bellerose Elementary School District Budget.  

The NYS PTA recognizes that every child deserves excellence in education and in quality of life, and the purpose of the PTA is to be advocates for and to promote the welfare of children and youth in the home, school and community.   The FPBS–PTA believes that the board of education has prepared a fiscally prudent budget designed to achieve the goal of providing a continued quality educational experience for all of our children. 

Letter: Third Track Task Force Chairman Thanks Local Communities

Since April 2005, I have served as chairman of the Third Track Task Force.  Therefore, the announcement that the proposed 2010-2015 MTA Capital Planning Budget specifically excludes funding for either the construction or future planning for the Third Track Expansion Project is heartening. This validates the efforts of thousands of citizens, hundreds of organizations and dozens of communities who joined as one voice in complete and total opposition to the seismic change this project would have had on our lives. Our opposition was relentless, chronicled by thousands of letters, petitions, e-mails, media releases and attendance at public scoping sessions where hundreds more provided testimony. We the people let our elected representatives know, at every level of government, of our reasoned opposition not only to this project, but ironically, to funding the diminution of our homes’ value and the destruction of our quality of life. Perhaps the MTA, a public authority, underestimated the strength of organized opposition based upon our fundamental sense of fairness. This was a modern day David vs. Goliath. 

Letter: Go Out and Vote on Tuesday, May 18

At the John Lewis Childs School Parent Teacher Association (JLCS PTA) meeting held on Tuesday, April 13, a motion was unanimously approved to support the 2010–2011 Floral Park-Bellerose Elementary School District Budget as educationally sound. The JLCS PTA urges all residents to go out to vote on Tuesday, May 18.

Phil-osophically Speaking - April 30, 2010

Forty Years After the Kent State Shootings

It didn’t seem like the kind of place where the war would hit home. Farms and barns dotted a peaceful landscape and nothing seemed more American than the open plowed fields around Akron, OH. But a war in Southeast Asia had reached over here, across 9,000 miles, to touch forever a college campus with sweeping green slopes, groves of oaks and maples and a spray of dogwoods sprouting white blossoms to welcome spring.

Letter: Now Is the Time To Stand Up for Your Libraries

One of the most important services any community enjoys is its public library. You wouldn’t think so judging by the actions Governor Paterson and the New York State Assembly have taken on funding libraries and library systems in the state’s 2010-11 budget plans. The governor has recommended that state aid to library systems and their member libraries be reduced by $4.2 million. The Senate has rejected this recommendation, but the Assembly is still debating it.

Around the Town - April 23, 2010

Earth Day

Protecting our environment is a top priority for Hempstead Town. Residents currently enjoy excellent water quality, and with the continued help of everyone living on Long Island, our waterways and groundwater will remain healthy, clean and plentiful. This year, Earth Day was April 22, and I would like to take this opportunity to remind residents of what we can all do to help save our planet.

Phil-osophically Speaking - April 23, 2010

The Jeffersonian Legacy

If you ever by chance or design get down to Old Virginia, by Charlottesville, be sure to pass the stone-arch bridge to the base of the road that leads up to Monticello. There, through the gates of a graveyard, you will see a granite obelisk bearing these words:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the father of the University of Virginia.