It has been a long rough year, but as it comes to a close I look forward to a just as crazy New Year, but with hope. It seems that people are coming back to their senses, and leaning back towards being the loving, understanding intelligent community we grew up loving.
Please join with us in 2017, as we work harder than ever to bring people together while respecting our differences. Everyone is entitled to an opinion,but having the facts help.
Our editor Margaret Brinich wrote a beautiful piece for the last edition of the paper in 2016, and I am going to run it here, please read, it should speak for all Observers.
A Year Of Unknowns Lies Ahead For 2017 As Tumultuous 2016 Comes To A Close
by Margaret Brinich
For the first time in the decade-plus history of The Lakewood Observer, we are hitting the streets with a new publication in late December with our first ever Issue 26. Every fall our Publisher, Jim O’Bryan, makes the suggestion that we come out with a 26th issue and every year (until now) we, somewhat selfishly (who really wants to be working on a paper just a few days before Christmas?), have politely declined. But something about 2016 was different. This time when Jim proposed a second December issue, we all agreed.
Two-thousand sixteen has been a complicated, messy year both for Lakewood as well as for our great nation, and with so many unknowns still to come in 2017, something about taking our customary “holiday break” just didn’t feel right. We pride ourselves on our ability to provide our entire community a voice and I suspect that 2017 will solidfy the importance of protecting this kind of civic dialogue. As a non-traditional media outlet, The LO is set up to provide the necessary infrastructure to maintain an open public discourse, but then relies entirely on the residents to engage and empower each other to better our community. Admittedly, it’s not always pretty (as we saw in 2016), everyone doesn’t always agree on how to address the problems up for discussion, and it’s a lot of hard work. But ultimately, with the help of the motivated, engaged citizenry of Lakewood, The LO can continue to evolve and bring residents together to learn everything they can about each other and the community in which we live, well into 2017 and beyond.
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