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I’m watching the Donald Trump phenomena happen with fear. I’ve given Donald my own rapper name, D. Tea Rump, because from a tiny rump of the very angry and very right wing Tea Party faction within the Republican Party, he’s leveraged bully tactics, angry right wing rhetoric, impossible policy and his high profile persona to close in on victory.

Tea Rump now threatens to become the nominee for all Republicans, and Tea Rump might actually become President of the most powerful country in the world. World leaders and average citizen are shaking their heads. What started as a joke website, started by a DJ on local radio, inviting refugees from Trump to move to Cape Breton Island has over 800,000 hits and has hit CNN. Crazy stuff is a happening just over the border because the majority is too silent.

Democracy today addresses the needs of only passionately committed and unafraid citizens. Modern political structures, major media outlets and even social media groups isolate all sides of any issues into opposing groups of like minded people. The middle of the road citizens, often called the silent majority, just want peace and good government until the next election and because of their silence aren’t important to politics any more.

What small percentage of people will allow lawn signs to show their colours during an election? Getting visibly involved or speaking publicly on any issue carries the risk of judgement, especially by circles of friends you travel in.  I saw brilliant advice on a sign in the parking lot at a golf course in Alberta: “Please leave your cell phones and politics in the trunk of your car”.

Governments today spend all of their time and energy battling and answering to those who oppose; the other side is always wrong and all the noise generated is negative. There’s little time left for socializing with and understanding the needs of the silent majority and the opposition. In that environment, silence feels peaceful and safe, until the agenda gets pulled too far to one side.

Social media, including Blogs and FaceBook pages are not the answer as they divide and attract comments and dialogue from only the like minded, committed, self-interested, strongly opinionated and those who lack any fear of judgement. Social media sites are hard work to control, clearly they’re public places and subject to all available legal recourse should they slander, defame or promote hatred.

I don’t remember the author, but I once read a fearsome analysis and prediction that US democracy could only last 200 years. The US was formed in 1776, so the best before date expired in 1976. Political power is in the hands of the money, the money is more and more concentrated and the average voice just can’t be heard. Doesn’t that sound like a Bernie Sanders speech? Bernie’s got great ideas, but he’s always been an oppositional politician and I don’t think the US would elect him if he actually gets nominated.

Since the McCarthy era, the vast majority of Americans don’t really even understand the differences between social democracy, socialism and communism. The money is happy having everyone pay their own way, because they themselves can. Democracy should involve a collective willingness to charity towards the disadvantaged and good democracy helps without judging the cause of that disadvantage. Money runs both sides of every democratic political structure, and money often sets policy that barely tolerates the average citizen.

I’ve spent years casually pondering the challenges of modern democracy, and for a time I thought the internet and social media might give a better voice to the silent majority. Instead I think the deafening noise of mass media and social media have driven the silent majority further from view and being heard. I’m convinced the revolution we need is involvement replacing silence.

How can an average citizen actually contribute to the public discussion without being visible?  Start small and do something is my best advice. I’m not exactly known as silent, but once was, so I know the process to begin to be heard.

Not every day for me is political, it’s more like a hobby where I try to make some time each week. Lunch at my desk is often a productive time for my personal interests; yesterday I spent probably 30-45 minutes on the following:

I quietly sent two emails to our Member of Parliament on issues that I’m passionate about and that I don’t care to discuss on social media or this blog. I sent a couple of calm constructive emails to our Mayor and Town Council with suggestions that I  won’t discuss publicly, so that they may have a chance to quietly consider my points and act if they see benefit. If they don’t act, I won’t take it personally because I can’t understand the totality of the community needs and resources as they can.

I also interacted, out of public sight, with number of people that I know to be committed to our town and who are on several sides of several issues I’m interested in. Mutual respect is a key element to those relationships and often hard to build.

For mental sport, I participate in a very small and very passionate political discussion group, not with like minded people, but a group with mutual respect and a full spectrum of political stripes. We get angry with each other’s points out of public sight and slowly we come towards a common vision closer to the center on many points.

I hope more people choose to get involved at every level of democracy; the silent majority must start speaking in a calm constructive voice. Just do something, please.

It’s re-run season for a few days, and I’m not commenting on current events but instead re-running a past column or two that I think were of merit and had some constructive ideas as we look forward again.

Yes, I know that I risk some blame for the Eco Trolley idea, but the much joked about concept of Eco Trolley is an exceptional one that implies that Hudson of the future has multiple points of interest to engage visitors and be busy with enough visitors to require local transport. Worthy goals, some of which I hope we can reach one day soon.

Weekly Itch #61 Published Hudson Gazette July 2, 2008

If Hudson is seeking a big box resistant retail core, we should consider openly attracting and really supporting artists and galleries. Those who come seeking art will come to browse from far and wide and must eat along the way. We’ve got some great eats in town for them and room for more. Some of our restaurants are already galleries for local artist’s works, so the core idea is already here in a small way.

The annual Hudson Studio Tour’s success convinces me that we have a fine base of artists that can draw a crowd within our reach. We need to create the environment for more top-notch artists to come to Hudson and settle down. We’ve got the ideal eclectically friendly community of people. We’ve got a picturesque semi-waterfront village locale, and tons of local character and characters for added interest.

Ideally, we could eventually attract those who teach art and run schools for artists. Example: week long course in fine woodworking brings midweek customers year round for bed and breakfast and after class theater, libation and eats.

We’re missing some of what we need to really make a go of it but I’ll jump to an end vision of a town and walk you quickly through it. Leaving the car behind we ride the free Hudson shuttle. The shuttle runs continuously and picked us up at from the early train at the Vaudreuil-Dorion train station that it services several times a day on weekends.

On Cameron, in the working artist friendly redevelopment of the Daoust dirt and equipment yard, you’d see an open post and beam building erected by local craftsmen. It has a common open gallery with flexible rental artist studios attached on two levels. Painters, weavers, jewelers, quilters, and the quieter smaller arts would fit well here.

The gallery would be staffed on retail hours and present the works of artists who rent the studios and keep a percentage of sales to support staffing and overhead. When the artists are in studio working, they could choose to open doors from the gallery to their studio to visitors, creating a direct link between artist working and customer and a beehive of interesting activity. The old Medicentre might be developed into a similar concept if space demand and structure permitted.

Walking towards Main road we find options for eats or sweets along the way.  We’re drawn downtown to interesting old buildings like Legg’s and Habib’s, their ground floors now commercial galleries full of non-local artist’s work.

The community center is buzzing with activity as one of our artists has booked it for a one-day course teaching the fine points of his form of art. Courses and showings are promoted on the HudsonArtists.com community website and through town funded promotions to attract both Montreal area residents and tourists.

The early weekend Hudson Arts and Theater train is pulling into the station. The Village Theater now offers courses and seminars and hosts a busy sold out weekend schedule year round. Theater people eat and buy art, so before or after the show they browse the community or hop the Hudson Shuttle to Finnegan’s for an hour or two in the summer. Some of the train riders, walk or shuttle to the Yacht Club to enjoy learn to sail days that brings additional day revenue and potential future residents and members into the Club for a summer day each month.

Meandering down Main Road, we notice the new Hudson Fire Hall Complex, which looks old enough to be part of town but is new and finally big enough to actually fit all the equipment and work safely. Upstairs it contains a commercial Hudson fitness center run by and used by the firefighters. Also a few rent subsidized apartments rented to active volunteer firefighters above the equipment bays.

Behind the Fire Hall complex, after the artists started coming, the Public Works yards and administration were moved away from the retail center to somewhere more function appropriate hidden on the edge of town. Heavier larger art is done here in a series of rental lofts for sculptors, potters, wood carvers, and glass blowers. Artists here include anything bulky and not requiring noisy equipment that would disturb close village neighbors. Long established Hudson artists still occupy the rental buildings across Main Road and because of growing customer traffic more wait for space to open up.

Hopping the next shuttle towards Finnegan’s, we get off at the Thomson Park artist’s community surrounding the parking lot across from the park. Few close neighbors to disturb with machinery, the lofts here include fine woodworkers and cabinetmakers and a small woodworking school where a local real estate agent is currently teaching a small group building Windsor chairs. The Thompson Park Café offers sandwiches and the Park is a great place to sit and enjoy the sunshine and lake views before we hop the next passing shuttle to Finnegan’s and spend a couple of relaxing hours browsing.

It’s getting late and we notice a booth at the flea market that makes reservations in all the Hudson restaurants. We quickly get a confirmed table and time at our choice of restaurants and hop the next shuttle back to Hudson for dinner before we head home to the city on the late train.

Could it happen? What would it take? Examples do exist of similar communities that are artist and restaurant centric. I’ve been to a few interesting ones on our travels. Over time they become successful destinations for locals day-trippers from the city and tourists from afar. It wouldn’t happen overnight. We’d have to have vision, cooperation, creative re-zoning and strong purposeful leadership to attract investment over time. Define the end product and manage the path to get there.

I’d rather live surrounded by creative artists, great art and fine food than surrounded by empty shops, modern strip malls and fast food.

I gave my wife Diane a wonderful little counter-top hydroponic edible herb garden for Christmas with the latest LED grow light. You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: Fill it with water, plug it in, add some nutrients and seed pods, and then wait while nothing happens for what seems like the longest time.

Everything germinates at different times; we were sure two of the six pods were duds and would never germinate. Suddenly, a single tiny shoot on one pod appears and then another, then they start reaching for the artificial sun. With time, all six pods sprouted and with more time the plants stretch and mature to compete with each other. After a few months, we’re overwhelmed with a variety of herbs and have more Dill, Thai basil, Cilantro, Mint, Italian Basil, and Parsley than two of us can use.

I’m moving away from commenting on Hudson as a topic, as the world has many interesting and important topics and problems. I’m planning to eventually seek a wider audience on a wider variety of subjects and try to step on fewer toes locally. I will change my Hudson role to back being a single voice citizen attending council meetings and discussing issues on all sides privately where I feel there is merit.

I’ve explored some of Hudson’s many divides, via discussions and dialogues on this blog and private conversations. Hudson has groups and individuals standing on different sides of many issues, not always respecting each other. In the middle ground between all sides is scorched but very fertile earth. Weeds are the first thing that grows in this place and weeds are overrunning our garden: the weeds of anger, distrust, hurt feelings and disrespect are encroaching from all sides including council, town employees and citizens at large. Our community has not enough hope and is starved for progress and good news.

There is a massive disinterest from the silent majority of constructive community gardeners who wisely won’t choose or speak on any side of most arguments. I understand and respect that decision to silence because disrespect and anger are just not the way of the vast majority of the good people of Hudson.

I’ve seen similar and significant attitude problems from all sides, and I have tried to plant some seeds by suggesting exactly the same solutions to both sides, both with my public blog comments and by emails and discussions which will remain private and confidential.

I’ve weathered distrust and anger from both sides of several issues as I’ve tried to lay foundations for some bridges that I personally think need to be to be built, lest we waste the balance of this council’s mandate and install another completely new group that can never satisfy us without our collective cooperation and mutual respect. Hudson chews up and spits out council after council, reducing the effectiveness of the next one.

I’m prepared to have none of my ideas come to fruition, and would be excited if even one took root, but I will never take credit for any that do because I have only provided a few small seeds to a starving community in a place that I know is capable of growing small ideas into great things by cooperating. My no risk offer: The first side to make a public move on one of my ideas that succeeds can take all the credit if it works, and if it fails please blame it on me for ever suggesting it in the first place.

Now is the time for each side of every divide among us to not just plant some of their own quality seeds on our scorched earth, but to nurture the many good ones that survived scorching and the new ones that may sprout as a community of friends works together. We have an underutilized wealth of knowledge, energy with time and willingness to volunteer, but we’re perpetually fighting among ourselves instead of pulling weeds and tending our community garden. We are indeed growing some hate among us, time to stamp that out.

I’m not a gardener good at nurturing; I’m a planter of ideas and hopes and certainly a facilitator of forcing discussions we wish to avoid. I’m not a patient enough man to wait the time it will naturally take for ideas to take root and grow, so I’m forever disturbing tender soil to the detriment of not yet established roots. Plus, I’m only one person and deserve only one voice while our leaders have seven voices and the mandate and validity of election to understand and speak for the majority of Hudson.

Hopefully, one or more of the seeds I’ve tossed onto this scorched earth will germinate and grow.  I know that if I am to have any positive effect, I must step back, move on to other more global or spiritual ideas in my blog posts and we’ll see if there is indeed any good idea planted and any fertile ground in this scorched earth we inhabit together if something sustainable germinates.

I will continue to moderate and engage in constructive respectful forward looking discussion on my past blog posts about Hudson, and hopefully on lots of future ones on other subjects. I will attend council meetings whenever I can and I am always available for one on one or small group forward thinking discussion that doesn’t involve anger.

Never underestimate the very real possibility that honesty will cause both sides to react badly for exactly the same reason: Truth hurts.

Anyone who knows me, or has read me  will know that I’m seriously flawed by my unwavering honesty at calling things exactly like I see them. Further flawed, I poke the issues we sometimes don’t want to talk about so that we might discuss them.

So, when I step into the middle of a Hudson Hornet’s Nest, I know that I’m near the center of the silent majority when the extreme sides both dislike what I’m saying enough to start talking dirty about me. Sometimes I feel like one of those Middle East peace talk guys, trying to understand unwavering and often irrational discord and sometimes hatred among people who share the same land.

The underlying problem is that there’s silence among the majority and I quietly get words of support that let me believe that what I’m saying resonates with a majority of people. As long as the majority stays silent, we can’t remove power from the extremes and we can’t ever find progress for the consensus of the majority.

I’ve got three options:

Option One: This requires everyone to trust me just a bit in an unscientific but confidential poll. I will delete your email addresses once I’ve tallied the results. I’ll do my best to remove duplicates and will never share any names unless your email asks me specifically to forward a comment to Hudson’s Council in which case I will forward only your comment and not your identity. Please be fair and only reply once if you’re from Hudson and of voting age. If you’re undecided or on the fence then send one and only one email to each side and I’ll only flush duplicates by side and your votes will cancel and represent a 50% support. Please share the link on this blog post as you wish.

The Question: Yes or NO  

I support  Mayor Prevost and his Hudson Council of our fellow citizens and would like them to know that.

I’ve set up two email addresses on my company server.   Yes@rptmotion.com and No@rptmotion.com

Option Two: Tug of War

I thought with the coming storm that a snowball fight on Sandy Beach might work, but that risks injury. So, I’m suggesting a town wide tug of war organized by our Recreation Department and assisted by our Fire Department and judged by me the guy stuck in the middle.

Prevost Council supporters on one side and Detractors on the other.

Proof of Hudson residency and voting age required bring the kids and friends to watch.

Option Three:

Phone or email your Town Councillor and tell them what you really think. Many voices are not being heard, and trust me, I understand why some might be reticent to speak for or against issues.

Like the Middle east, I’d like to see some bridges being built instead of destruction and anger.

So please choose Options One and Three and then we can do Option Two just for fun. And keep lobbing those grenades my way, it motivates the hell out of me to speak my mind more.

My post yesterday titled “Our own worst enemy” set some quick records for visitors and views on this blog. I don’t smell hot tar this morning so I’ll presume it was what many needed to hear and it was also my first post that was shared by a significant number of people on Facebook, including my most beautiful, smartest and toughest critic, my lovely wife Diane.

I have personally emailed the link to Mayor Prevost and our Councillors because unlike some of the angry mobs, my comments aren`t legally actionable and I believe our leaders have a right to know exactly what I`m saying about them without searching or hearing it second hand.

Once we have elected a government, it is now the only government to work with for all sides of every issue until the end of term. We citizens become like passengers on a ship, our elected leaders must set course and trim the sails based on the laws of the land and of course the feedback that they receive from the citizens that elected them. We citizen passengers hope for a pleasant cruise to a sunny destination, but our leaders also must work within the confines of the condition of the ship they took command of, the prevailing weather and seas, and so the ideal destination isn’t always possible in a short time frame.

It is not the responsibility of our captain or his officers to allow any person or group of people to take the wheel or controls of this ship. What is important in any democracy is that we collectively lift the anchor and start moving in a direction as soon as possible to a destination or at least a direction that most of us agree on.

What about the good ship Hudson?  Once a very proud little ship in a small ocean, Hudson seemed a stable luxurious place at the peak of desirability and independence, and so most of our passengers have booked the lifetime cruise. We’ve enjoyed the best of times and recently we’ve suffered horrid times.

A series of past captains had thought the crew competent enough to have let them mostly run it themselves. Then our long serving first officer turned out to be a real nasty pirate. One of our passengers, a retired captain of industry Ed Prevost, offered to command for us and then was elected, by most of us who voted, to run our ship.

Not enough money had been spent on maintenance, so we started springing leaks, cracks have appeared everywhere and our paint is peeling. Because we were controlled by a pirate, we’ve been ignoring many of the rules for navigation of our ship and our leaders and employees must learn and adapt to many new rules and regulations.

Make no mistake; this has not been a glory assignment for Captain Prevost. Prevost has had to change much of the crew, several first and second officers have jumped ship or some were forced to walk the plank and some even seem to have chosen to stand on the plank and ask to be pushed. All the while, good citizens everywhere on the ship are paddling, bailing, painting and slowly trying to improve Hudson. Some days it seems that there’s hope and we’re seeing some light and a new dawn after the storms.

Captain Prevost and his team of elected officers have a strategic plan for the future. It’s ambitious and will possibly stretch the capabilities of our crew and passengers, but above all else this is a team that actually has a plan for our future. They’re not perfect, their plan is not perfect, but I believe that most of us want to help them guide us from these treacherous waters and into sunny days and calm seas again.

I’m all for community action and community guidance, but I believe it must be constructive and fact based not simply driven by emotion or the loser’s perpetual belief that the winning side is always wrong or always cheating. I admittedly set some pretty high minimum standards because: I hold both democracy and the town where we live in very high esteem.

We have wonderful resources and energy in town. We have credentialed experts on many fields with knowledge and experience that naturally exceeds that of many of our hired town employees. We have in our midst the solutions to many of our problems, if we could just build bridges instead of walls and communicate what we know openly and equally.

Many fear the anger of a mob, but please ignore those bullies who meet in the dark corners of our ship shouting and recommending or plotting mutiny. Frankly, if you’re going to become part of any positive community action group, the Mayor, council and relevant town directors should get minutes of your meetings including the number of members in attendance. Invite them to attend your meetings, where your group has the agenda and control of the floor, because they should want to hear from you.

If the group can’t accept those standards, then they have no right to demand openness and transparency from our government and you might reconsider joining it. Better yet, groups with good ideas should open a website or a blog and please do publish your minutes of meetings and your documents because if you’re really doing trying to do good for the good ship Hudson why wouldn’t you want everyone to know? If your ideas really have potential for consensus support of a majority then we all need to hear them, and we also all need to be able to understand and publicly question them to the point we believe in them as a community. Then progress is simple because it’s driven by education and critical mass.

I know there’s no easy way to like or comment on this blog or even like this post without registering. If you have feedback please email me at: peter@rptmotion.com

 

 

I’ve lived in Hudson for 34 years, just sixteen more years until I’m considered a local. I have enjoyed the best of Hudson life and seen the worst at times.

I’ve watched and at various times participated in municipal government, our children lived and one died here in service of our town, they were both educated to brilliance here by great teachers many who live among us, my wife  was an elected school commissioner for ten tumultuous and angry years in education, our family was at the center of a tragedy that reached the national news and uncovered structural weaknesses in our local government and management of departments, I’ve spoken in over 200 often controversial columns in our best local paper of the time.

We are a wonderful community at our heart. Hudson is full of amazing people engaged in a wide variety of activities and interest. We attract some of the best and brightest people in many fields to live here. We have so many people who contribute to Hudson that I’d have to write a book and I’d still miss many of them because they quietly shape Hudson into their vision of a caring compassionate responsible and sustainable community. We support each other’s charities and causes like Nova, le Pont Bridging, the Palliative Care Center, Greenwood, le Nichoir, being the first community in Canada to ban pesticides. And yes, we spent public legal dollars defending our right to insist that we all must live equally with dandelions.

I could sum the true spirit of Hudson up in one annual event: Hudson Yacht Club’s Work Bee. A volunteer group of members spend the day organized into groups to prepare the yacht club for the coming season. They share hard work, lunch, drinks, friendship, citizenship, community and by all pulling together for a day accomplish not just the repair of an old club, but they bond into a cohesive group with better understanding of each other and the needs of the club.

There has been, for most of the years I’ve been here, an impossibility to ever truly govern Hudson. From apathy we acclaim far too many of our leaders and those who get elected are elected usually by a minority of citizens who come out to vote.

Around half way through almost every government, there are angry mobs quietly forming in Hudson that are determined to bring down the government. No public consensus required, gather a group who will listen, light the fires to heat the tar, get the feathers and they’re ready to rumble.

Because they have a responsibility to govern for the balance of their term, most Town councils under siege react by circling the wagons, plugging the leaks and forming an impenetrable bunker around their group. The angry mobs isolate them from the silent majority of citizens.

Modern social media brings new challenges for communication, including the potential for legal challenges due to slander and libel that previously only the press needed to worry about.  It is not a citizen’s absolute right to express any opinion or promote anger publicly. One cannot be sued for calmly stating verifiable facts and details, publishing legal documents in the public domain, and even carefully coming to a logical conclusion or rational request for action based on those facts. However, if you are hateful or of the opinion that there has been something illegal happening and even imply that an official or a town employee is involved, you are breaking the law and should be held accountable.

Angry mobs are not the answer; calling to bring down the government in absence of any criminal charges is not the answer because there are no recall tools available.

There’s a giant boulder in our way. Years of ineffective and illegal management of Hudson, questionably effective past mayors and councils, rising debt, and new rules and technical challenges including the MRC, the PMAD, the CMM other regional obligations that we under participate in.

The government of a few elected citizens, friends among us, is in charge of managing the moving of that boulder. But we have angry mobs forming on every side of that boulder each yelling and pushing in different directions, so because we’re not as a majority pushing in any one direction the boulder never moves.

We have the best possible government in Hudson this time; we actually elected all of them from the best choices among us who chose to run for the thankless role of leadership. And they chose to run for office at a time when they knew Hudson was in an intractable mess and that they’d inherit a swamp full of problems they couldn’t even see until they started draining the swamp. They’re not perfect, but they are the best we could have and deserve respect.

We have choices to make, we can choose to get behind or at least move out of the way of our government or we can destroy their ability to make any progress and pick them apart one piece at a time. Or perhaps we could somehow get a consensus formed to help to start pushing this boulder out of the way as a community. The problem with that  consensus is that it is buried in silence with the majority of citizens afraid to speak up and possibly be judged by the angry mobs.

I needed time off from council meetings, and I work hard long days running my own business. I’m going to begin attending council meetings again, not on any side or allied with any cause. I’m going to witness government and bear witness to the responsibilities of both sides of democracy at work. If I see abuses or disrespect on either side I will comment.

I’m going to attend because I don’t want a local government who must close up and bunker themselves in protective silence and inaction and I don’t want to live in a town full of angry narrow focus mobs setting the direction.

In the end I will always try to take the side of and speak for the most responsible side that I believe speaks logically, respectfully and best supports the needs of the majority of Hudson. That is my responsibility as a citizen, as it is your responsibility.

Thank you for the suggested topic Chloe. I believe that undefined or unprotected heritage is almost always endangered. This subject is far too complex to cover effectively in one simple blog post.

Heritage is under discussion everywhere these days and this question is currently very Hudson appropriate. With PMAD coming into effect towns have an opportunity to define and then try to protect valuable heritage, but only if we do something. If we do nothing then our heritage will be at greater risk. Let’s just barely skim the surface with ideas that are admittedly biased by my personal opinions and hopefully a discussion dialogue can follow with your comments.

My bias: I really like eclectic old villages with varied buildings representing an advancing visual history of the past life of that village. I think my preference is because that format gives me a sense that a village grew, prospered or floundered at various times, still has a living anchor to its past and the village has been valued, maintained and probably has changed purposes several times by its citizens over some long period of time. In an old village perhaps you feel like you’re joining history with like minded people rather than waiting for it with strangers in a new development.

Since 1982, we have owned a 1929 Hudson village home. We significantly expanded in 1985, totally changing the look of our home, but keeping it within the village spirit and look. In fact many people who have arrived after our renovation mistake our home for an original heritage home. In the end, we would be financially, efficiency and living space wise far better to have simply torn town and rebuilt new. That’s the labour of love part of heritage and we have paid the price because I feel the responsibility of not wishing to change an old village for the worse or push it out of the character it has found for itself before I came to it.

Clearly each person in any community might define and value heritage differently, plus a community’s collective need for space and development changes with time, so it is important to regularly facilitate public discussion to identify a common vision of exactly what heritage a community feels is important to protect. Universally, each component of what we will call heritage must have some enduring value and special interest to the collective community, because without those we first lose the attachment, then we stop maintaining it, and then we will surely lose that part of our heritage before long.

It’s a rarity and stroke of great luck that we are blessed in Hudson to have the outstanding heritage example of the Greenwood Center for Living History. Greenwood was bequeathed by Phoebe Nobbs Hyde to the Canadian Heritage of Quebec not for profit organization, thereby protecting it from future sale. Study Phoebe Hyde and you’ll realize how rare a gift this is, usually a family will sell such property as part of the estate, but Phoebe had no children and she wished Greenwood protected so it might endure for the good of Hudson.

Greenwood is a wonderful and irreplaceable centuries old piece of our history sitting on what would be immensely valuable waterfront property for any high end builder. Greenwood is run by dedicated local volunteers who ensure that they raise money and secure grants for adequate funding for operating and maintenance costs, and a minimally paid executive director, and some minimal hired summer staff to help operate tours and events. If you haven’t yet, please visit Greenwood this Spring when it re-opens and better yet join it, contribute to it, or volunteer with them.

Greenwood brings life to our community with many events, including Storyfest each year. Storyfest is an entertaining and enriching part of Hudson as a great series of quite famous Canadian authors have been brought to Hudson each fall for a number of years. I hear they’ve got an outstanding line-up planned for Storyfest 2016. In Greenwood’s case our history truly not just educates but also enriches our present day live proving that protecting our heritage well can bring great benefits to a community.

Heritage buildings will be much more expensive to maintain and operate than a similar sized modern building. If we let an old building deteriorate too far, it can become far more expensive to renovate than to replace which adds further incentive to destruction. On a purely financial analysis heritage almost never makes sense and since the payback on replacing with modern can be quite quick, heritage will be perpetually at risk. We will face difficult choices with Hudson’s old Town Hall soon.

Unless there are clearly defined heritage protections or incentives, with future densification pressure always looming in metropolitan Montreal and our MRC, eventually teardown and replace becomes economically interesting for developers and villages needing to increase density.  Especially true in the case of a village that is becoming run down or is no longer commercially viable or not attracting enough daily visitors to support local businesses. Empty rental buildings have less value and are easier for developers to buy for teardown. If a village has zoning laws that allow enough density then there’s money to be made building condos or rental housing where old buildings weren’t viable.

The delicate balance of the heritage coin is that virtually no one can afford to protect what is no longer marketable, and it’s very difficult to force and enforce standards of maintenance. By limiting demolition permits, or artificially limiting permits to build on vacant lots or stalling redevelopment on existing ones, you can quickly create your own ghetto or ghost town. Villages must market themselves and the businesses therein to maintain what I see as a critical mass of interest, those things that attract visitors to come on a regular basis.

Vacant buildings, empty lots, and empty rental spaces are signs of significant problems and potential for future decline. In a world of big box and strip mall outlets a village needs to find a purpose and direction or it will become a ghost town or one day be all condos close to a train station.

Heritage protection is a very complex topic with many facets. It is in the community best interest to come together and fully discuss and define what critical parts we are unwilling to lose, which other parts we’re willing to pay to protect and what are the best ways to reach that goal.

Warning, none of this really matters, reading this might waste your time. Enough about Hudson, it’s time to discuss something far less important.

French linguists are in a bother about the impending death of the circumflex by a consensus of an obscure and uptight committee of whoever actually manages such things. That funny little hat of an accent was originally introduced to signify that a word had lost a letter there next to the vowel it capped somewhere along the way and to make French spelling even harder.

Growing up we feared bad spelling and grammar. I’m of an age and generation where proper spelling and grammar might even have been beaten or at least browbeaten into some of us. We were told that poor spelling and grammar would limit our career options, our choice of university and be a dead giveaway that we might be lower class than we were and so clearly it meant the possible difference between a mansion and a double wide and who we might marry. Bad choice of motivation for young men when Ellie May Clampett and Daisy Duke were so damned hot.

Language is indeed a dynamic beast. Long ago those less rigid or perhaps less educated stewards of American, a colloquial offshoot of English Proper, played with stiff English minds by dropping the ‘”u” from many words like honour and colour. Not stopping there, they changed the “ough” to “u” in words like “through”. I’m sure many British purists still cringe when we use those rough edged lower class American compactions, and many are surely glad that the Americans had fought their way out of colonialism lest that poor English become contagious. Obama’s dropped ending “g” is probably causin’ clenched British sphincters whenever he speaks, I have to remind myself that he may have attended Harvard, but he grew up in Chicago.

I grew up, and therefore any attempt to educate me happened, in the US. I attended an exceptional municipal public school system and in High School was blessed to follow the AP (Advanced Placement) English and science stream.  We were taught AP English by a wonderful gentle PhD, surely my first exposure to a gay man as a teacher, but we never ever talked about that and he was wonderful as a man and as a teacher. His first name was “Mister” always and while his ruler never struck flesh, it often flashed loudly out of nowhere onto your desk for all manner of spelling and grammar transgressions causing immediate shock and terror because your stupidity was about to be projected, analyzed and humiliated for the benefit of the entire class. And some call those the “good ole days”?

Growing up Canadian in the US and coming back to Canada in my mid-twenties, I’m caught betwixt and between. Generally, I have adopted the British versions because it saves people from asking: “You are American, eh?”

Modern English is in a precipitous slide and that slide is being accelerated by advancing technology. On social media are so many people who clearly don’t understand the use of the lowly apostrophe. Purists might argue that we never should have allowed the lazy writers to devolve English with a simple contraction tool. Your (preceding purposeful apostrophe abuse) maybe going to hate me for saying it, but apostrophe confusion is so pervasive I say we follow the French Accent Assassins lead and just kill the poor misused and usually abused apostrophe.

Texting and Smartphones are making the changes happen faster. Why bother with “your”, “you’re”, and “you are” when a simple “UR”  or “ur” will do? Everyone knows what you mean and only the old and cranky like me grumble about the younger generation and cringe while reading it, plus we take ten times longer to text because we don’t know texting English and we have to kill those stupid and sometimes embarrassing autocorrect changes that we did not want done for us.

All to say that, so long as we can understand each other, and if we could learn to not judge each other by versions of our language, then the stiffness and structural constraints of any language don’t really matter much.

So, WTF, go have a wonderful day and please don’t forget to smile and LOL a lot and just try to accept that our language is a changin’ faster than ever.

My shorts are in an ever tightening knot about Pine Lake. Sure, Pine Lake is not an essential part of Hudson, despite once being the now removed iconic picture on our Town’s website. But what does Pine Lake say about us, and are we listening?

I’ll write a few brief paragraphs each on one point of why I’m bothered. I could go on for pages and pages, but this is my quick top of the head morning coffee list. I’ll write them in no particular order of importance so that those who wish to comment can refer to a point they wish to discuss. Feel free to add your points of bother to the discussion, or just rank them from your personal highest to lowest importance.

#1) Pine Lake is a depressing eyesore that a significant part of Hudson drives by each day. Many of us start and end our day passing this reminder that Hudson is somehow so broken that we can’t fix Pine Lake.

#2) Pine Lake had value to far more than the few property owners around it. In the past, I have made early morning panic stops to move dinner plate sized turtles across the road so they wouldn’t get hit, I smiled when the beautiful herons were there on my way home from work and we took our grandchildren there on village walks to see and feed the ducks. Many people fished Pine Lake, many stopped and sat and Pine Lake was a great first impression of Hudson year round. Now it’s an eyesore.

#3) Hudson acquired Pine Lake from private owners and committed in writing to maintain it for the town use. We have failed to honour that legal document in a timely fashion and have no current plan to end this situation. What is exactly is the word of Hudson worth when residents and friends are driven to legal action against their own town trying to force us to honour our own past commitments?

#4) I believe that we have somehow made the restoration of Pine Lake a much bigger, more complex and more expensive deal than it really is. I know the government can get complex, but repairing a damn dam that’s been there for 50+ years should not be such a big deal.  We need a will to find a simple good solution. If we manage to complicate every problem like we seem to have complicated Pine Lake then it’s no wonder we don’t get anything fixed.

#5) Pine Lake and the discussions surround the required repairs divide Hudson into smaller groups exactly where we should be coming together. I’ve seen comments that support the repair if we can do it for $25K, which is totally unrealistic, others that practically demand that we repave every road in town before we get to repairing Pine Lake. Has it become a case that I won’t support your top project until my top project is funded? We have a town, but sadly we just don’t seem to have the community we once had.

#6) Pine Lake is just the visible tip of the horrible infrastructure deficit iceberg we’ve allowed and Hudson is the Titanic bearing down with a broken rudder and out of fuel. We know that there’s much to be done, yet year after year we see not enough getting done. So the lingering image of a mud flat mess instead of a pretty lake is confirmation that we are really too broke to fix things that matter, especially things that we said we’d maintain.

So, if you want to know what’s really wrong with Hudson, stop and stare for a while at the muck that was Pine Lake. Hudson is really just stuck in the muck.

Did anyone miss me?

It’s early days of this Duff blog adventure, and like many of you, I do miss the paper once known as the Hudson Gazette and its several subsequent aliases. I thought I’d start by discussing what I already know about the differences between weekly paper and blogging and offer to answer any questions you decide to throw my way in discussion below.

Jim Duff is away on vacation, but as Jim is a guy who never stops thinking and I have knowledge of the general part of the planet he’s visiting, so I know he’s secretly in another part of the world peeking into Hudson’s future by visiting and researching small towns without ability to borrow more money.

Since someone must herd the potential for disaster or good here, I’ve been entrusted with the keys to this online blog, a potential castle of knowledge and wisdom. You will behave or I will be ruthless in deleting your posts.

We’re competitive, so I also hope to help generate enough new traffic to not only embarrass Jim’s efforts to date but also to add value and help make some sense of the time and energy that Jim has invested in starting this blog and perhaps even help define a future direction.

I’ve been attempting to be quite active in posting and commenting in support of Jim’s endeavour here, and to drive some discussion. Why? Because on most days he’s my best friend and I know Jim to be deeply interested and caring about Hudson and also the world around him. This bloggy place should become a very good place for Hudson, so I’m willing to donate a bit of my busy days to help this great little town many of us live in think about itself a few minutes at a time.

There is a commonality to editing or writing for a small town paper and to posting on a blog, but also many differences, so let me wander through that and hope you see why you should visit this place.

There is certainly a lot of room in both formats room for judgement and criticism, which neither Jim nor I fear, so long as it is respectful, reasoned and reasonable. I do know Jim to be fearless, only a fearless man would have published without edits literally every word of every column of the over 200+ columns that I wrote for him. Jim and I are generally like minded, but we often disagree and argue passionately both principles and details. There are issues we’ll never completely agree on, but over the past 10 years we are indeed best of friends. I have learned much from him and perhaps have been able to teach him a little. I know that what he says is always worth listening to, even if you chose to disagree.

This blog of Duff’s, in a few short weeks, has created opportunities for dialogue and learning that never rose from all those columns I wrote over ten years. In a few short weeks there have been, by way of dialogue on this blog, in near real time, changed views and new mutual respect between people who seemed unlikely to ever come to consensus or agreement. There have been new understandings of past history and also entrenched positions and future challenges.

There have been new connections between both like minded and different minded people, and I know that some small forms of community activism will spring from the depths of knowledge and connections available herein. That all this has happened so quickly should be very positive in Hudson if we can continue to generate enough interest and traffic,

We like your participation, but silence is also golden so long as you come and read with an open mind. Trust me, I understand that many people will read what’s here and not wish to comment or get involved in having a public voice. Passive activity is a great and constructive part of blogging, so please bring your friends along. The more sides of every issue we discuss, and the more people who follow and absorb, the smarter and stronger we become as a community.

You each have, should you choose, that wonderful gift that Jim Duff came to me with one day: Say whatever is on your mind and it will be heard by some. And tell me what we should talk about, what’s on your mind and why. If you don’t want to post publicly feel free to email me: peter@rptmotion.com

Today is a gift, so have a great day, have some fun, hug someone, share something positive with a friend, make a new friend or call an old one.