So here's something on each of them.
The curfew will be discussed Sunday at the Colony Café in a conversations style meeting at noon, and again at the town board meeting Tuesday evening at the Community Center. While we believe business owners have a legitimate complaint when teens, or anyone for that matter, abuses their premises, a curfew is not going to substitute for better parenting, and neither is anything the town can do.
And while we also believe that we have a competent police force, and strongly support new chief Clayton Keefe, the fear is that with a curfew in place, police have the ability to stop anyone who appears young and demand their id - 'your papers, please...' - and that's not what an open society is about. And imagine a 16 year old who lives in town, hanging at home with a friend, hey, lets go get some ice cream at Cumberland Farms at 10:30 p.m. Did you ever go out at 10:30 p.m. when you were 16? C'mon...against the law? Suppose there was actually something to do in Woodstock that was fun for teens, like a bowling alley...would they not be able to come and go from that after 10 p.m.?
What we've done is to identify a problem and the quick, easy solution isn't going to work. Next?
Lots of people have somehow been cheering for the bank robber. Hey, he didn't hurt anyone, and after all, it was only Bank of America that he took off. But that's just succumbing to the TV-celebrity-pop cultural-pretend outlaw-sheltered loneliness of our isolated existence (or something like that.) But let's remember, we're talking armed robbery here, not street theater. There were real people in the bank who were threatened with a gun, there could have been a major barn fire in dry conditions that might have significantly harmed the town, and if it was your house or business that was robbed at gunpoint, it wouldn't be so cute.
And the heat? Well, it's been almost as hot as it is in Austin, Texas, everyday from May 1 to October 15. ++
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