Message from the Mayor: Thanksgiving
Posted on: November 22, 2017 - 4:35pm
Fellow Residents,
The year has felt as if we are buffeted by a deluge of news that bring scandals daily, a seemingly endless wave of harassment claims and hate crimes, hurricanes and forest fire storms, empty rhetoric and discord. We forget that only a couple of months ago, Puerto Rico was devastated and a month before that, Houston and large swaths of Texas and Louisiana. It is easy to become numb and cynical. It’s enough to make one despair.
And yet.
Last night, the Community Center was alive with girl scouts packing the makings for Thanksgiving dinners for the less fortunate among us. The festively decorated High School gym was packed for the 28th annual Project Share Thanksgiving dinner, with 800 homeless human beings all served a full Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings by hundreds of students from our school and elsewhere, cooked by volunteers over the last few days, serenaded by live music performed by locals.
Other groups are kicking off toy drives, gathering gifts so that many more children enjoy something special for the holidays. The monthly brownie drive at the school collects dessert to add to the monthly meal that the erstwhile volunteers at Grace Church have been making for a shelter in Yonkers for decades now.
Aside from the holiday-themed activities, the volunteers of the Ambulance Corps go off for 550+ ambulance trips a year, and across the street and elsewhere in town over a hundred of your neighbors who crew the fire engines that roar off on average once every day.
Sports teams are coached by volunteers: the Little League board spent years crafting a renovation to the Uniontown ball field now underway that many hundreds of kids will enjoy next year. The various volunteer boards of the Village judge zoning variances and new project proposals, conservation initiatives and senior programs. Volunteers maintain the stellar Historical Society exhibits, and volunteers organize the top-flight art exhibits at the Municipal Building or elsewhere. They plant flowers and pull down invasive vines. They run local political campaigns and fight for causes they believe in. They volunteer at the schools and serve on the School Board. They serve in their houses of worship and in so many other ways, everywhere.
It is, in the end, a symphony of hope and an antidote to cynicism. It is the motor that makes our community run and the succor that helps others. We give time for a variety of reasons, but in the end, we give. And for this Thanksgiving season, I count myself luck to be among so many able and willing to do so. We are all blessed for it.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Peter Swiderski
P.S. – If you want to donate to or volunteer for any of the causes or organizations mentioned here, please reach out to me and I will put you in touch with the appropriate groups or individuals.