Editorial: Omicron’s Paradox A COVID-weary public confronts the conundrum daily: Is this good news? Is it bad news? We have to admit that we’re a little bit confused. The Omicron caseload is frightening on its surface — ridiculously high numbers on a daily basis, top-of-the-fold newspaper coverage, lead-story status. We’re so attuned to scary numbers and frightening graphs that when we hear about record-shattering daily positive tests coming back, the first thing we want to do is retreat to our…
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Editorial: Timely guidance? New Yorkers learned late December 6 exactly which hospitals around the state would be subject to Governor Kathy Hochul’s Executive Order limiting certain elective surgeries and procedures beginning roughly 36 hours later, on December 9. The order initially exploded out of Albany seemingly moments after South Africa’s first report of Covid-19’s Omicron variant. We recognize and appreciate Governor Hochul’s proactive effort, but there’s a big disconnect at play reminiscent of just about every Covid-19-related Executive Order her…
Editorial: Omicron, is it? It sounds a lot like something out of Hollywood — one of those action/sci-fi movies that demand we suspend our disbelief more than usual and go along for the ride in a world where it can’t happen here. The problem, of course, is that it can. And it is. We had barely dried the Thanksgiving dinner dishes when word came out of the World Health Organization that it was meeting in emergency session over a newly…
Editorial Small business, every day We publish this week on “Black Friday,” the day in the calendar year when the nation’s retailers would sell so much merchandise to Christmas shoppers that their operations for the entire year would stop running in the red and move into the black. It really is not the busiest shopping day of the year — these days, that comes a couple of days before Christmas itself, when all of us wake up and realize that…
Editorial: How was it? A big success We salute the Cooperstown Central School’s varsity boys’ soccer team for a 2021 season that was a resounding success, a joy to witness, and a giant step forward on our slow walk ‘back to normal.’ We send that same salute to the Cherry Valley/ Springfield boys’ varsity soccer team, Cooperstown’s girls varsity swimmers, Oneonta’s boys’ varsity cross country runners, the Head of the Fish and Head of the Charles rowers, and every…
Editorial: The other side of Autumn Ah, the autumn colors. Beautiful to view, harbingers of cozy nights indoors, and, let’s face it, quite good for our local economy. And then they start to fall. We could debate all day long about whether it’s right to pick them up or let them be over the winter months, but let’s face it: come next spring, we’ll want our lawns to look good again for the summer to come. We also could debate…
Editorial An ‘off-year’ election? Not by a longshot All politics is local, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said in the 1980s. So it’s a mystery that we call it an “off-year” election when local races fill our ballot, and an even greater mystery that biennial apathy replaces voter interest. We are voting to fill the offices that affect the fundamentals of our county, towns, and villages, choosing the people to whom we’ll entrust our local tax dollars as…
Editorial Local owners/local news The Freeman’s Journal, our village’s venerable newspaper of 213 years — and one of the oldest continually published weeklies in the country — has a long and complicated history, both of news and of ownership. It has chronicled the workings of our town and the opinions of our residents through the country’s wars, holidays, prohibitions and depressions, as well as through the state’s droughts, blizzards, elections, floods, tragedies, surprises and celebrations. The Freeman’s Journal is our…
Editorial Hail to the Chief A legendary member of the Otsego Lake community has bid us farewell this week. Ownership of the Chief Uncas, the 55-foot electric launch that has continuously plied these ancient waters for just fewer than 110 years, has been transferred to the Susquehanna National Heritage Area, in Wrightsville, PA, a not-for-profit organization focused on the cultural and natural resources of the Susquehanna River and the communities along its shores. The Chief Uncas arrived on the lake…
Editorial Rural Hours This week, as we watch the forests magically change their colors, wave fond goodbyes to the squawking flocks and ponder the stillness of the lake in its reflective glory, Susan Fenimore Cooper comes to mind. And while we were planning to offer our own reflections on the beauty of the changing season, Cooper’s enchanting treatment of the subject would be hard to top, so we let her speak for herself. It was in 1850 that her book,…
