Year End Review: Ah So-no-ma

So, another year: older, grayer, slower and just as uncertain as ever. Everything gets more repetitious, but there are still surprises. You think at 60+ that you know yourself and others close to you pretty well, but you may be in for a shock; or if not a shock, a jolt. Things go along routinely and we fall into a groove with it, and then out of nowhere we get shoved off track, and wondering what the hell hit us. It could be a death in the family, getting fired from a long held job, an unexpected turn in a long-term relationship or anything that sets us off course.

We’re humans. We set courses and try to follow them. We try to make order out of things that don’t always want to stay orderly. When we’re young, routine sounds like the worst thing imaginable. No one says, “I want to have a lot of routine and sameness in my life,” when they’re young. Change, excitement, new adventures – that’s what sparks us.

And then we get older. And older. And there you are at 60+, in the flower of geezerhood, and you like routine; you like sameness and orderliness, and the last thing you want is some change in all that. And it’s inevitable; change, that is.
Change comes, and it comes to everyone no matter how hard they have tried to build their lives resistant to change and new circumstances.

Of course we like breaking away from routine once in awhile: trying new things, traveling, opening up to new experiences. That’s also part of the human package. But after a certain age in life, even when you’re off getting stoked on something new and different, there’s still that tremendous pull to come back to the familiar and the known, the routine and orderly everydayness of life as you’ve constructed it.

So with that paradox in mind let’s review some of the high and low lights as they flickered across Sonoma skies.

*****

A little song entitled: “I Got the Lowdown, Hometown, Downtown Hospital Blues”

Things were looking pretty bad for the Sonoma Hospital Show, it was losing points and its audience in the ratings due to chronic indecision, but it’s out of the ICU and stabilizing. The hospital honchos have made an incisive decision, and the In-Town site has been chosen for a replacement.

Now it is up to the hospital board and CEO to present a strong case to the voters why they have made the best decision, and why we the public must act intelligently and wisely (there’s a challenge), and spend the money and build a hospital. Let me offer this prescription. Impress upon the voters that ultimately it’s their own butts that are on the line. Something congenial like: “Hey folks, think heart attack; think blood pouring from a severed something or other; think stroke, where every second counts. Now think drag-assing to Santa Rosa or Napa at rush hour, reviewing your life as they say you do, while you slide into the big sleep.” Something encouraging and friendly like that. Fear is always a good motivator. Ask the Bush administration.

It’s almost beyond ironic that the final hospital plan – using some of the existing buildings, and buying the adjacent Caranalli property – is basically the same as the original one proposed by Marilyn Goode and Lou Benson two years ago, for which they gathered over 1000 signers on a petition to keep a new hospital in town. They and their supporters were ignored and denigrated by the then hospital board and CEO and their bevy of experts. Goode and Benson were bad-mouthed as know nothing, obstructionist, “little old ladies in tennis shoes.” And so it turns out they were right all along, and all the expert powers that were, with their grandiose plans of a 20+ acres medical complex, had their collective heads up their you-know-where.

*****


Crèche-mania and Other Tales of Woeful Countenance

Up there and vying with the hospital hi-jinks was Sonoma’s mini crusade…

THE RETURN OF THE CRECHE: The Second Coming
Just to recap, ">Episode One, introduced 17 years ago, ended with Joseph, Mary, Baby J, farm animals and wise men (must have gotten crowded in that barn) being driven from the Plaza by the godless hoards of the Secular Humanists. Now in…


Episode Two: CHRISTIAN MARTYRS STRIKE BACK

Temporarily set back in Episode One by turncoat clergy under the influence of liberal pagans, Defenders of the Crèche and their stalwart Knights of Columbus sought to restore the holy crèche to its rightful place in the Plaza del Sonoma.

STARRING

(Newcomer) August Sebastiani, whose outstanding performance has made its mark on Sonoma. And a cast of outstanding other characters who got to have their 3-minutes of say.
Alas, Episode II ends with a defeat for the forces of Everything Good and Holy. But all is not lost. Take heart, council-watchers, there will be an Episode III. The august August gave it away when he said, “You’ve not heard the last of this…” before someone cut off his mic.

*****

Exercising their most democratic and political right, one-third of those voting on a school bond measure judged it unwise to support our children’s educational needs, like library availability, because…that’s how connected these people are to their community. Basically for them it comes down to: “I’ve got mine, and I’m keeping mine, and you can go shove off.” Not too many of these folks will say that, but that’s how I read it, regardless of the fancy rationalizing you’ll hear to defend their penurious stance.

Granted maybe there are some folks who voted against supporting local education because they can’t afford the 28-cents a day it comes out to, – the bond measure asked for $91 a year – but I’ll bet that’s not the vast majority of naysayers. The majority of this one-third minority are people who do not feel connected to their community or its common welfare. They live in a place, but never become of it. They cannot see beyond their tightwadidness to appreciate the simple fact that educating our populace makes for a safer, saner and more aware and intelligent society. These miserly-addicted fail to see it’s in our own self-interest to support education.

Everyone knows that proper support for education in California has been drastically reduced as a consequence of Prop. 13. So it’s up to us, we the good ol’ people, to pony up the $91 /year the measure asked for. I confess I’ve not sent in my check as yet, but I hereby promise to.

*****

So there you have it, gentle blogaddicts, the year in Shonbrun time. Here’s to a good new year, and good riddance to the worst President and administration in U.S. history.
And so it goes…