Small talk on this and that,

for what it's worth ...

Terror alert In this

issue, we present some local reporting on sensible preparations being

taken by city and county agencies in view of the recent heightened terror

alert.

Yes, I did buy some duct tape,

but mainly because I was down to one roll of the irreplaceable stuff,

having used it for innumerable home, office and car repairs. As my colleague

Sallie Satterthwaite has counseled, no one should be without a can of

WD-40 and a roll of duct tape, no matter your station in life. And, I

might add, no matter the level of terror alerts.

The plastic sheeting I found

to be extraneous. Why not just omit the sheets over your windows and doors

and just duct-tape the crevices instead? You use about the same amount

of tape either way.

One big item we wanted to cover

was kids in schools. If something happens nearby during the school day,

the first instinct of most parents is to rush to pick up their children

from the schools. Probably not a good idea. As we have discovered, schools

are pretty safe places to be, and all have emergency plans in place.

We published in Friday's papers

some common-sense preparations any family should consider. We are reprinting

that full page, courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in

this issue.

Fayetteville's new annexation

You have to hand it to our Fayetteville Council members: If you like

bigger and bigger growth, these guys are the county champs. Yet another

annexation, yet more commercial and high-density residential acreage,

this time on the city's south side.

Leave these guys in office

and Fayetteville will swallow up much of what's left of unincorporated

Fayette County. I suspect the council would love to get their developing

hands on that big pasture just west of the hospital on Ga. Highway 54.

They probably think all that wasted open space could be put to much more

profitable use as big box parking lots.

Just about everything that

goes into these new chain-store developments is bad for locally owned

retail businesses. They suck out boxcar loads of local money, pay low

wages and send massive profits off to other states. Except for the taxes,

that is. They pay big taxes to Fayetteville, enabling the municipal empire

builders to expand their eat-the-whole-thing philosophy.

Strange, though, the new taxes

never seem to solve the traffic woes or deter the increased crime brought

on by the empire builders' grand plans.

Dredging Lake Peachtree

The Fayette County Commission seems bent on being penny-wise, at

the expense of a big source of our drinking water. With money already

set aside, the commission should pay for floating a barge on the lake

and dredging it while retaining use of the lake for supplying our faucets.

Instead, they may choose to

drain the lake, leaving it dry for many months, shutting down the use

of that lake and Lake Kedron for drinking water intake, at a time of prolonged

drought and uncertain events in the war on terror. All this for a "savings"

of a little less than $200,000.

Somebody needs to throw some

cold lake water in the commissioners' faces to wake them up to the public

safety needs of the county.

Changing our stripes?

We heard from some that this curmudgeonly editor is starting to shed his

conservative wolf's skin and is beginning to bare his true sheepish liberal

ways.

Ha!

I mean, we publish letters

brutally opposing the current mayor of Peachtree City, to whom (to some)

we are joined at the hip. So which is it? Are we fer, or a-gin'?

Well, both. Fer, when the official

is right (in our humble opinion). A-gin', when the official is behaving

stupidly.

But always, always, these pages

are open to opposition viewpoints. If you are on the inside, the outsiders

are going to pummel you on these pages. These same pages are open to the

insiders as well, but many rarely feel the need to communicate with their

subjects through this medium.

We print what we get. If an

official suffers the slings and arrows of outraged citizens in official

silence, nobody's to blame for that silence but the official.

American politics has often

been about the Ins and the Outs. The Ins have the power; the Outs have

these pages.

Witness our lead letter this

week. I enjoy reading Timothy Parker's missives, although I rarely agree

with either his premises or his conclusions. But his is Loyal Opposition,

and he argues his point with passion and intelligence.

This editor-publisher espouses

mostly conservative-libertarian-liberal-radical viewpoints, and at this

late stage, is unlikely to change his spotty skin now.

On our 10th anniversary

So, The Citizen survived the first decade. And we're still around.

Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ. And see us through the next 10. Amen.