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PAGE 4A - THE COMMERCE (GA) NEWS. WEDNESDAY. MARCH 12. 2008 mion Editorial Views A Generous Donation From A Library Advocate It is interesting that the most generous donation toward the expansion of the Commerce Public Library is the result of a man's gratitude for a public library in India. But Dr. Narasimhulu Neelagaru, known universally and affectionately here as "Dr. Neel," humbly attri butes much of his education — and thus his success — to the countless books and other publications he read at the public library in Bellary, India, as a poor child growing up in a poor nation. Commerce residents and library patrons are grate ful for his gratitude. The Neelagaru family's $150,000 donation puts the library within $75,000 of raising the $583,000 it needs to leverage state funds for the long-awaited expansion. The $2 million project will add 5,000 square feet of space to the library. The examples he set merit observation. First, Dr. Neel recognized that the key to escaping poverty was to get an education, and he set about to acquire one, using his public library as a starting point. Secondly, he applied himself diligently toward achieving his goal, and thirdly, his gratitude is such that he wants to help the Commerce Public Library as it serves the public — just like the library in India served and motivated him. "The Neelagaru Family Children's Library" will serve area children for generations. Hopefully, those children will also learn about the man for whom it is named. His work ethic, humility and generosity are an inspiration. State Water Policy Defies Understanding As Georgia braces itself for the second round of the ongoing drought this spring, one thing is clear. Georgia's leadership is confused and contradictory. The General Assembly, governor and Environmental Protection Division continue to issue edicts and orders, each trying to manage local water issues from afar, and none of them — apparently — aware of what the other is doing. Meanwhile, local water boards, which at state insistence drafted drought contingency plans that were all approved by the EPD, find those plans useless because one or more of those entities issues countermanding orders. What's driving state water policy — aside from the clown convention we call state government — is the low water level in Lake Lanier and the prospect that Atlanta will not have sufficient water come May. Most other reservoirs have recovered, and some parts of the state have yet to feel the impact of the drought. What is needed in Atlanta is a far cry from what is warranted in Hartwell. Water providers have no clear concept of what the state water policy will be, because the EPD policies often don't jibe with what the governor says, and the legislature is apt at any moment to take matters into its hands. Lost somewhere is the idea that local governments just might have a better understanding of their water needs than the folks 65 or 265 miles away in Atlanta. There may be times when the state has to intervene in local government, but it should always happen on the smallest scale possible. If one drainage basin has a problem, address that basin. The state — EPD, governor or General Assembly — should never force "solutions" on cities and counties that don't have the problems for which the solutions were devised, and should not confuse the water providers and the public with multiple orders from different entities. Dealing with Georgia's fragmented approach to water management is far more challenging locally than providing adequate water during the drought. Editorials, unless otherwise noted, are written by Mark Beardsley. He can be reached by e-mail at mark@main- streetnews.com. The Commerce News ESTABLISHED IN 1875 USPS 125-320 1672 South Broad Street Commerce, Georgia 30529 MIKE BUFFINGTON Co-Publisher SCOTT BUFFINGTON Co-Publisher MARK BEARDSFEY Editor/General Manager BRANDON REED Sports Editor TERESA MARSHALL Office Manager MERRILL BAGWELL Cartoonist THE COMMERCE NEWS is the legal organ of the city of Commerce and is published every Wednesday by MainStreet Newspapers Inc. Periodical postage paid at Commerce, Georgia 30529. Subscription Rates Per Year: Jackson, Banks and Madison counties, $19.75; State of Georgia, $38.85; out-of-state, $44.50. Most rates dis counted $2 for senior citizens. POSTMASTER send address changes to THE COMMERCE NEWS, P.O. Box 908, Jefferson, GA 30549. Don't tell anyone, but I hand-watered my roses for 27 minutes yesterday Do you think the governor will have me arrested? The Stars And The Lonely Ocean The night sky in winter has always seemed spectacular to me, and never more so than here, where we don't (yet) have enough ambient light to make the stars fade. Orion stands out in such stark relief that he looks like a connect-the-dots figure, and Mars, this year, is particularly close and therefore particularly red. Whenever the weather fore cast says "clear and cold," I think about how beautiful the sky will be, and I never pull up in front of my house and get out of the car without looking upward immediately. So that's what I was doing the other night: looking upward. Usually I exclaim "Oh, wow!" or something, but this time it was late, and I was aware of a vast silence that I didn't want to break — a silence so deep that it seemed to be echoing itself. So I just stood there. And suddenly a line of poetry came to me: "The stars go over the lonely ocean." Joan Didion described a similar moment in her book "The White Album," which I read 30 years ago. A line from Ezra Pound's "Cantos" arrived in her head: "Petals on a wet, black bough." And it seemed so significant to her that she A Few Facts, A Lot Of Gossip 2 BY SUSAN HARPER wrote about it at some length, and about Pound, too. I feel that same way. I was introduced to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers more than 40 years ago — in the year that he died, in fact: 1962 — and I'm not sure I've read him since. Yet there he was, in some part of my head, waiting to give me the perfect words after all these years. That seemed as remark able to me as the stars over my head. Jeffers, born around the same time as my grand mother (the late 1800s), was a minister's son from north western Pennsylvania. His brother Hamilton became a well-known astronomer, but Robinson, a child prodigy, was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rebel. He entered medi cal school in California, fell in love with the wife of a promi nent Los Angeles attorney, and ended up in a scandal that hit the front page of the L.A. Times in 1912. By 1913 he had mar ried her and they had moved to Carmel, on the California coast, where they built a house out of rock, had twin sons, and lived a rugged life, much of it outdoors. Jeffers would never have been my cup of tea. He became preoccupied with mankind's "inhumanism," as he called it, and didn't see how we could build a decent, peaceful world as long as we were all so ego centric. (I don't think it ever occurred to him that he was the most egocentric of all!) He didn't accept the idea of meter in poetry (stressed and unstressed syllables), so he was at war with poets too. And he was dead set against America's entering World War II, so he ended up being at war with just about everybody. I think he must have been a real sour- puss. And yet... he loved the "astonishing beauty" of the natural world, and his stars did go over that cold, lonely ocean — and for me, always will. Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. A Better Appreciation Of Teens Just as I started to feel that American teenagers had been completely lost in the self- absorbed, technologically- driven and indifferent culture of our day, the challenge of a county-wide essay contest changed my mind. No more Britney Spears cus tody battle, no more American Idol predictions, no more text messaging, facebooking or even myspacing. The thought ful essays I read this past week end were generally composed by concerned and selfless high school students interested in how they can help make their community a better place. Topics such as global warming, animal control, public recre ation, health care, child abuse and neglect, historic preserva tion, business recruitment, education, drug abuse, litter control and public participa tion through volunteerism dominated discussion. Outside of the few contes tants who obviously regurgi tated the last thing they heard on the morning news, a major ity of the essays were thought- provoking and motivating. As Views In Rotation BY HASCO CRAVER one teenage author eloquently created a picture of an anxious young girl entering a home for abuse victims, another used illustrative details to examine the process of "paying it for ward" — a phrase popularized by a movie of the same name whereby good deeds are carried out in an exponentially grow ing fashion (someone helps a person in need, then the per son originally receiving help assists another, and so on and so on). The writing style exhibited by these teenagers was aston ishing and wildly entertaining. Their understanding of com plex issues coupled with their ability to convey those ideas in written word was delightful. After rereading some of my favorites over and over again, I forgot that I was reading essays written by the portion of our population that is normally seen as moody, insecure, argu mentative, angst-ridden, impul sive, impressionable, reckless and rebellious. The idea that teenagers are impossible to talk to, live with and relate to has become so commonplace that most adults start to believe and act as if it is so. The myth of the difficult teenage years is perpetuated over and over until everyone believes that all teenagers are difficult all the time. The teen ager is truly a unique creature. I am not a parent, so my pondering of contemporary parenthood usually occurs while reading a journal article or watching a television pro gram about the bleak outlook so many experts have for our community's future. While there are numerous reasons to be nervous, and even fright ened by the world around us, Please Turn To Page 5A It's Gospel According To Mark BY MARK BEARDSLEY Amazed By The Restoration In St, Louis We celebrate in Commerce when one of our historic buildings is reno vated, and we've had several oppor tunities to celebrate in the last year. More will come. Imagine my amazement then, to find 27 historic buildings undergoing renovation all at once — 17 of them in a two-block commercial district. I was in St. Louis, visiting my cousin Bruce and his wife, Jane, who is one of three employees of the tiny Old North St. Louis Restoration Group nonprofit. She arranged a tour of "The Mall," a 17-building swath of commercial buildings stretching two blocks on both sides of the road. Sometime next year there will be a grand opening, new businesses will be in the now-vacant storefronts and people will occupy the 80 apartments being rebuilt above the storefronts. Dozens of workers were scattered among the buildings that Friday afternoon, framing apartments, hanging wire, installing plumbing. There are private investors, people who've seen previous ONSLRG proj ects that worked and think they can make money on this one. There are some tax credits, 20 percent federal and 25 state, that help leverage the resources, but the largest asset is the optimism of the group, its backers and investors in the future of the neighborhood. What I neglected to mention was that the project is in an inner-city neighborhood. Burned out or other wise abandoned houses are adjacent to restored houses. Vacant lots and junk abound. The property crime rate is atrocious. White flight took place decades ago. Bruce and Jane live in an ONSLRG project, a new house built in the style of the historic old houses in the same neighborhood. Across the street, a friend has lovingly and art fully restored an original house. Next door is a long-abandoned house ripe for restoration. Neighbors are actu ally neighbors; people stop on the street to talk, and everyone knows everyone else — just like in a small town. Some of the buildings being restored lack a wall or a roof or both. Some are burned, completely gutted. Others were all but abandoned when business died out, and one or two are still occupied and being reno vated privately outside the auspices of ONSLRG. All over St. Louis, old buildings are being restored to their original con dition for new uses, both commer cial and residential. Some of them are huge. I couldn't tell you if resto ration outpaces decline — St. Louis has a world of problems — but clearly there is a strong belief that restoring the old is preferable to building new. If Wal-Mart, Bi-Lo and Ingles shared that belief, the square footage of blight in this little town would drop precipitously. It began with a church that decid ed to start a second church in the neighborhood as something of a mission. Members looked around, saw work to do and figured out how to improve a historic but run-down neighborhood. Two decades later it continues, still an act of faith. The church folded back into the original, but the mission it created is rebuild ing a neighborhood, one building here, 17 there. Truly amazing. Mark Beardsley is editor of The Commerce News. He can be reached at mark@mainstreetnews. com.