Welcome to my new Blog along with my welcome to 2010!  Another year has gone by very fast and it seems to get faster the older I get.  It was a year of good news and a year of very bad news, especially at the end.  I guess that almost every year has some elements of both, but it is so easy to forget.  It seems like a pretty important year, but the long perspective is that it probably was not at top of the list.  As humans, we tend to make the year we just lived the most important of all time, forgetting hardships and triumphs of prior generations.  Life requires living and sometimes the old adage of the alligators up to you know what keeps all our concentration on now.

The whole year was occupied by the Recession, or Depression, the severity really depending on whether you still have a job or not.  The good news is that our area is about 90% employed in some fashion.  This is not really good news to the other 10% except that the employed can reach out to make life easier for the unemployed by being generous to the many charities in our community.  The 90% figure is deceiving as there is another 5-10% that are underemployed.  This means part-time, lower wage, fill-in jobs and so forth.  The bad news is that it will likely get worse in early 2010.  If you are fully employed, decide to help your community more in 2010 by giving of your finances and time.  Help make it a better, or at least tolerable year for those not so fortunate.  Then maybe they will have good news by 2011,

Transportation issues had ups and downs in 2009.  The good news is that traffic is slightly better.  The bad news is that it is because of unemployment.  If 10% fewer people are going to work, that is not cause for celebration.  I have worked hard over the last two years trying to learn more about our transportation issues and how to try and solve some of them.  I will be reporting on this on a regular basis in the future.  

More good news is that there are a lot of very smart people trying to figure out how to fix and improve traffic in the Puget Sound area.  The bad news is that there is not enough money in current funding sources.  It is not true that there is “plenty of money if government would just be more efficient”.  The “Free Lunch” ended some time ago!  The numbers are truly staggering and it is about time we stop passing the buck, known as “debt”, to our children and grandchildren!

I can only start with bad news when I think about the multiple tragedies affecting our law enforcement community.  Note that I said “our” not “the”.  We is them, so to speak.  As a community, these multiple tragedies affect all of us in one way or another.  As a former law enforcement officer from way back, I felt the pain just like I was still in uniform.  Inexperienced people say it is like war, as our soldiers face this every day in some parts of the world.  The fact is, it is not the same.  While police officers get extensive training, it is one thing to be carrying weapons at the ready, all the time expecting to be shot at, and another to be patrolling in your own community when it is at peace.  We are not supposed to die serving our community in peacetime.  The fact is, we do not want our police officers acting like they are at war.  It clashes with the idea that we are a “civilized” society. 

Good news is not easily found now, at this sorrowful time, in our law enforcement community.  I hope the good news will come in the next Legislative Session, which begins this month.  Already, several Legislators have proposed some changes to laws to fix what is broken.  Good for them!  Violent, career criminals need to be out of  “our community” and kept in “their community” (prison), away from our families.  Sometimes, you have to throw away the key.  The bad news is that this is going to cost money.  That means taxes, folks!  Are you willing to pay a few dollars more a year?  I hope so.  In 2009, thousands of career criminals were released back to “our community” because there was not enough money to keep them in “their community”.   More on this later!

Notice how good news and bad news are so often inexorably linked together?  Most of us prefer to focus on the good news.  There is another old saying along the lines of one person’s good luck is another person’s bad luck.  Well, this might well be true on the card table, but it does not have to be true in our community.  Spend a little time over the next few days asking yourself how you can help create some good news in our community in 2010.  Thanks for your time!