Spring isn’t here yet. Spring is the season of rebirth and hope.
I was reminded of this fact by a combination of recent weather events.
First was the windstorm and its assorted and often serious consequences for individuals and the town of Weston itself.
It was disconcerting at last week’s Board of Selectmen meeting to listen to the first selectman sincerely describing what had transpired during the windstorm. He spoke of the failure of our public infrastructure. He noted that the people who were there to serve the public, such as police, fire and emergency medical services personnel, were able to star in their roles despite these failures.
What was the problem? I had noted to myself when I saw the list of closed streets in town that Norfield Road was included. I wondered if this meant that town hall had no power.
As it turned out, not only town hall but the town’s communication center were without power. How could this be? How could communications with Eversource even be a problem? The answer: a faulty generator. There is a lesson in this somewhere.
Next, as this column is being written, is an impending major snowstorm. Given the dire advance warnings, presumably we all prepared as well as possible. And so hopefully a blanket of heavy, white, wet stuff won’t have caused too much of a problem for most of us.
And speaking of preparation, what about preparations for Hartford’s political solutions to the state’s fiscal problems?
There are some who believe that if we stick to our proverbial guns, and be true to the natural environment, all will turn out just fine. I happen to find myself in this group more often than not. I am an optimist.
Any way you slice it, though, the fiscal pie is shrinking. That is the pie of society’s ability to afford things.
It is quite startling to hear expert after expert testify to various committees and commissions in Hartford that Connecticut’s ability to pay is mortgaged to the fiscal sins of the past. Many decades into the past.
A flip side to my optimism is social engineering, defined as psychological manipulation. Especially, in recent times, in the context of information technology.
We often seem to be wedded to the digitization of society. Digitization in the field of computer engineering refers to representing anything and everything as a series of numerical digits, each of which is either 1 or 0. But can questions be answered and complex issues resolved with simple “yes” or “no” decisions? Does the Internet have undue control of our thought processes? Certainly not for many of us, as individuals, and especially here in Weston. But it seems that as a society we have a ways to go.
NOTE: “About Town” is also a television program. It appears on Fridays at 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 10 p.m. on Cablevision Channel 88 (Public Access). Or see it at www.aboutweston.com.