Category Archives: Editorial

The Columbia Paper Editorial

EDITORIAL: This we can do

by PARRY TEASDALE

CONSIDER A PROBLEM we could fix. It would cost less than doing nothing, and doing nothing would only make things worse. Fixing this problem could help kids and they’d like it too. Most of them, anyway. That would be a change, wouldn’t it?

Let your teenagers sleep later. That’s right. This doesn’t require washing your hands more frequently. You don’t have to choose a candidate, either. Just sleep.

Research published in ScienceAdvances, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, estimates that teenagers are sleeping an hour less than they were a century ago. That may not sound like much when you account for the glowing, blinking, buzzing red, green and yellow haze that now surrounds most of us every night. But kids need sleep to grow and learn, and what the science tells us is that the sleep patterns of teenagers are different from adults. Read more…

EDITORIAL: The bag story

by PARRY TEASDALE

HEY, BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A BAG? Not if it’s a single-use “carry-out” bag and you want it in New York. In case you haven’t yet gone shopping, we are switching to “bag-off” mode starting Sunday, March 1.

Bag-ageddon! Most of us will not—or at least shouldn’t–be able to obtain the thin plastic bags that shoppers have used for carry their food and household needs from the supermarket checkout to the parking lot for the last 40 years. Instead, we’ll all have to get used to bringing a re-usable bag that’s full of re-usable bags into the store so we can wrangle groceries or other purchases to the car. You could buy new, reusable bags at the stores every time you shop, but eventually you’ll have so many bags, there won’t be any room left for groceries.

The state law banning many types of plastic bags was signed by Governor Cuomo almost a year ago. (Seven other states around the country have similar laws.) Back in 2019 the law got some attention but, with implementation delayed by a year, other news stories captured our attention. The delay has given bag providers and bag users time to adjust. But if the state Department of Environmental Conservation was alerting the public to prepare for the bright bagless future, it didn’t register around here until last week. So who needed anything else to worry about? Read more…

EDITORIAL: Talking is teaching

by PARRY TEASDALE

HOW DID YOU LEARN to speak? How could you possibly recall the specifics? Infants hear and repeat and, for the lucky majority, the magic of growth does the rest.

A lot of factors govern that “magic” of early childhood development, things like nutrition and environment, human contact and, for most infants, sound. Not just crying, either. Hungry little kids have hungry minds too. Between birth and three years old most of what an infant does is eat and learn (yes, diapers, too, but thankfully that’s not the focus here).

Some parents have to spend a lot of their time doing their best just to provide safe homes and enough to eat for their families. Other tasks must be deferred—tasks like learning. It’s hard enough to cover the life-sustaining basics working two jobs or because the learning part was absent in the parents’ upbringing. Some parents may not have experienced how little it takes to engage in the learning process with a small child and how much a mastery of literacy can improve the lifelong prospects for almost every child. Read more…

EDITORIAL: Grrrrrrrrrrr

by PARYY TEASDALE

BIGGER ISSUES demand our attention, but they don’t have wet noses. Thousands of voices compete for our attention, but the ones from furry muzzles often are best at claiming our time.

Dogs do a pretty good job at public relations too, even allowing for the occasional very-bad-dog story. Right now there’s a dog tale in the Village of Chatham that has nothing to do with the thoughtless, lawbreaking humans who don’t clean up after their pets as village law requires. It revolves around a question of comfort and how much of it—if any at all—a government should provide.

The comfort in this case takes the form of a comfort dog. It’s hard to say for sure what the dog thinks about it, but evidence suggests that all sorts of people benefit from man (or woman or child)-meets-dog encounters with what are now called “comfort dogs.” Read more…

EDITORIAL: Are we transparent yet?

by PARRY TEASDALE

THE NEWS FROM IOWA this week sounded a lot like a re-staging of last November’s Columbia County early-voting melodrama. The Iowa cast was larger but both productions left the political theater audience wondering whodunit.

Who or what was eating our ballots? In both cases early reports indicated that all was going well with new technology that promised to make the process of voting more accessible and transparent. That word “transparent” has become a required part of the modern political vocabulary. It’s shorthand for: “We’re so honest, we show you everything we’re doing.” The Iowa Democratic caucus system relied on a new “smart-phone app,” which party officials described as quite transparent. But it wasn’t transparent at all. It just didn’t work right.

The situation here was different in what seemed like a simple problem with ballots that were incorrectly printed. That could have been easily remedied. It was only when unofficial results were not available on the day after Election Day and for some time thereafter that the scope of the disruption became clear… but not exactly transparent. Read more…