What is acceptable?

What is acceptable?

The Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary defines acceptable in the following ways.

acceptable ac·cept·a·ble[ ak séptəb'l ]

ADJECTIVE 

1. 

adequate: considered to be satisfactory

2. 

approved of: likely to gain somebody's approval

3. 

welcome: likely to please the person who receives it

When you drive around the Village of Justice do you see two and a half foot high overgrown weeds that make it almost impossible to see our Village entrance signs?  Eighteen foot bushes that were once three foot high finely groomed hedges?  Ditches that haven’t been maintained in almost thirty years and can no longer carry water away from your homes?  Ditch culvert pipes that are either crushed in on both ends or rusted away so badly that when you walk down your driveway you can see holes where the asphalt is falling into the pipe?  Garbage on the side of the streets that has been sitting there for months?  And last but not least roads that were built in the late 1960s that have deteriorated to the point that all that is left is about a ten foot wide path of cold patch where a two lane road that once allowed a brand new 1969 Mustang to wind its way through our sleepy little town?  

I drive the streets of the Village every day and it makes me wonder, how did our Village infrastructure crumble right before our very eyes? I have a few theories.

To start our former political leaders were not wise business leaders and did not plan for the future.  They just wanted to act in the moment and spend every penny that was in the Village bank account.  They did not save for the future.  They did not save for a time when our infrastructure would need repair.

Second the residents of our Village are so busy living their lives, raising their family and making a living that they overlook the appearance of the Village as they drive their car through an eight inch deep pot hole in front of their house.  At the end of the day the residents just want to go home, eat dinner with their family and not worry about what's happening in the Village.

My last theory is that all of us have fallen into the trap of acceptability.  It's funny how what is acceptable today may not be acceptable tomorrow and vice versa. When the owner of that new 1969 Mustang came diving through our town when the roads were new he hadn’t a care in the world when it came to pot holes. A few years later a couple of pot holes appeared and they were fixed.  Twenty years later we are still patching and fixing those same pot holes plus dozens more.  There has been so much patching done over the years that the patches are being patched.   Do all of us just find this acceptable? 

I drive through our neighboring towns and their streets are newer, cleaner and look more acceptable than ours.  I am jealous of our neighbors.  The Village of Justice is celebrating 100 years of existence this year and we have some of the worst infrastructure this side of the I&M Canal.  I am tired of the same old excuses from the politicians, “We have no money, we were promised money from the state that didn’t come through and we’re doing what we can to patch what we have. Go and call your State Representatives on our behalf."   I feel this is NOT ACCEPTABLE!  We need to take action and let the elected officials of this Village know that we no longer find the condition of this Village acceptable.

It is time for us to come together and start paying attention to what is happening in our Village, how our money is being spent and what plans our elected officials have for making this Village better.  Most importantly we cannot stay home on election day because if we do than what is acceptable will deteriorate even further and turn into a sad reality.  Change is hard but waiting makes it even harder to achieve. 

25 year resident

Village of Justice