Monday, October 29, 2007

The moon rides along with me, big and bright in the crisp fall sky, along winding roads in Wayne County. This is the feeling of gentle. It is space within which I can think and dream.

The dinner this evening was anything but quiet. Members of the Wayne County Bar Association and Judges from throughout the Judicial District and from the Appellate Division shared stories and jokes and talked up a storm. I have known many of those attending for the fifteen years of my legal career. Many attending have known each other far longer. The voices rose with camaraderie.

The historic bakery building, across the park from the restaurant stands, still in the moonlight. I brought it up several times during the dinner, finding out various proposals that had been made since 1995 for its use, none approved. How many nights it has stood in the moonlight. Longer than me. Longer than the attorney applauded tonight for 55 years in practice. Longer, even, than the men who have voted to have it torn down.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Tonight’s citizens meeting turns on the impact of trucks on quality of life issues in the Finger Lakes region. 18-wheel, 130,000-pound loaded trucks, barreling on lakeside roads and through neighborhood streets. Tipping fees that won’t compensate local municipalities for road repairs. Truck fumes, once blowing into houses less than 100’ from the roads, now meeting windows homeowners have closed.

Stories are told by Senators, Assemblymen, and their staff that it is difficult to get anything done in Albany. That these issues have been getting worse for ten to twenty years. That they can’t get bills out of committees. One goes so far as to blame Governor Spitzer for failing to act immediately.

These voices of the legislature? Incumbents who have been in office for those “ten to twenty years” that the issue has gotten worse. Incumbents who brought us massive garbage dumps spun as “economic development,” grown now, physically, into mountains, visible when standing in adjoining counties on the other sides of lakes. Truck after truck bringing us piles and pounds of garbage from New York City.

I am the one person in the room to dim the patting of backs by the politicians with the reminder that they have been patting themselves on their backs for years for bringing us the trucks they are now having to curtail.

Have the incumbents not heard, not felt, the beauty of this region, spoken of by our elders as formed by the imprint of the hand of God? These issues are so obvious it shouldn’t require citizen groups even to form because these issues shouldn’t be happening to begin with.

I see this region as blue. (Democratic, yes, by way of light humor.) Blue because of waters. Blue because of waterways. Blue because 25% of the Earth’s fresh water supply was entrusted to us in the Finger Lakes and Great Lakes region.

If we want to do honor to the waters and the lands that we will someday give to our children, we must pull together those in the know to create cutting edge industries such as garbage deconstruction. Turn black into green. Recycle. Reclaim. Create energy out of these man-made mountains. Think of garbage as a resource that we created and that we must use. Dream the dream that we can tear down these mountains that these incumbents have built.

I cannot help but ponder the life-cycle of garbage. Our trash bins are filled with the products from China creating our international trade imbalance, purchased from the box stores built on feeder roads that devastated the small businesses of our town centers. We can shift the paradigm, right here in the Finger Lakes region, and become a model on which our country can build.

Several people at the meeting spoke of missing the sounds of geese waking them up, their ears now filled with the trucks. Susan Sontag wrote: “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.” Sontag wrote these words from Silent Spring in 1962 – before I was born. The last generation had warning, had time, and let capitalism prevail over the public good – the planet good - for another forty years.

It’s time for change.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Work on an appeal consumes me in my job as a family law attorney. I am working on an appeal on behalf of a mother accused of neglecting her children, whose parental rights were terminated at trial. The case has been in the Family Court system for six years. The children are barely over 6 years of age. For near the whole of their lives, they have been suspended, neither with their mother, nor with adoptive parents.

The case reflects the core of problems with Family Court. Overload. Inadequate resources. Judges with so many cases to handle at once that they can only spend a few minutes on any one case. Even on days of trials, there are constant interruptions as judges fan their attention across multiple other cases.

The judicial branch is separate from the other two branches, legislative and executive. And, yet, as one judge points out to me, the judges are dependent upon the whim of the legislature to obtain the resources they need to do their job correctly.

Six years. The lifetimes of these young children. The legislature and executive, unresponsive to judicial needs for those six years and more. Do we really want judges to have to become politicians in order to be able to help those who seek justice?

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Twenty-two candidates line up on the stage in the auditorium of North Road Elementary School in Geneva for the League of Women Voters candidate forum. These are the candidates for mayor and ward representatives for the City of Geneva and for supervising judge of City Court.

Many questions are raised and answered. Some candidates sound the same. One or two stand out from the group. Only three voices are the soprano tones of female candidates.

Of the women running written audience questions to the front of the room, there is a young girl, perhaps 9 or 10 years old. A swirl of shy and anxious mixes with her seriousness of her task. And what will she become, a future leader among men? And how will these events influence her choices?

Sunday, October 21, 2007

My walking shoes have stayed warm, walking for breast cancer, walking for hunger.

Can we ever truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes? If I were to wear pink? If I were to go hungry? These would only be moments that would pass within the context of my own life.

But we can and we should strive to feel and be compassionate to the burdens of all, even to the Earth as she weeps toxic groundwater, even to the sky, warmed to 80 degrees in late October. It is not just the weight of gravity grounding our feet as we walk.