The woes of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, as reported in two recent issues of Newsday, should remind us all of our potential as well as our squandered opportunities. Unlike poverty-stricken inner-cities or backwoods communities in the rural South, suburban Long Island has some of America's finest parks, museums, beaches, historic sites, wildlife sanctuaries, libraries, and art galleries. Yet, all-too-many weekends on Long Island are characterized by empty museums and crowded shopping malls. All-too-many Long Islanders spend evenings on the sofa watching the idiot box and the latest purile "reality show."

Life can be rich and rewarding on Long Island in spite of stratospheric taxes, traffic congestion, bureaucracy, ethnic tensions, and the high cost of living. The history and natural diversity that inspired Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Sidney Mount, William Cullen Bryant, Edwin Way Teale, and others are still the muses that inspire local writers and artists today. Sadly, this extraordinary legacy is greatly undervalued.

Consider a handful of the local museums of which I am affiliated and/or am a frequent patron:

The Museum of the Levittown Historical Society - with its documents, maps, vintage photographs, books, toys, furniture, home furnishings, appliances, clothes from the '40s and '50s, artifacts from original Levitt homes, World War II collectibles, and popular culture memorabilia - documents the beginnings of a suburban lifestyle that's now enjoyed by tens of millions of people throughout the industrialized world.

Old Bethpage Village Restoration is as close as one can get to the experience of life in mid-19th Century Long Island without the aid of a time machine. Its houses, shops, church, school, and farm are all from that period and from Long Island.

The Cradle of Aviation Museum is literally built in the heart of the early 20th century airfields where the age of global air travel was born.

The Hicksville Gregory Museum, housed in one of this nation's few surviving rural courthouses, boasts Long Island's largest rock and mineral collection as well as a fine collection of butterflies and some rare fossils and dinosaur specimens not available to the public even in larger institutions.

Takapausha Museum and Preserve has acres of swampy woodland,

live creatures that inhabit that ecosystem, and a worthy collection of taxidermic specimens - birds and mammals native to Long Island.

Garvies Point Museum and Preserve documents the geology of our area as well as its early Indian inhabitants who, as archeological evidence illustrates, were living right there more than 2,000 years ago.

Finally, Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay is a treasure trove of the world's botanical wonders surrounded by a Gold Coast mansion and estate grounds that make one feel like one is on an English estate of the Tudor era.

My point is, these local jewels, in addition to offering cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge to the general public on a more personalized and manageable scale, are not simply generic collections. They represent unique artifacts and the uniqueness of Long Island's rich heritage. They also, in their struggles just to stay in business, represent one of the great paradoxes of contemporary America: the more prosperous and better our quality of life we come to enjoy, the less we come to appreciate those values and institutions that make that prosperity and quality of life possible in the future.