Columns

In my last column, I wrote of my intent to resist the reign of Trump “tooth and claw” and the primary response I received was: “OK, sounds good. How?”

We all make a difference

Christmas Day only hours away; year’s end in its last gasp – a mixture of joy and pain which is life, is it not? When we look around us, lucky us, we see the faces of family and friends, relatively safe, hopefully well fed and well loved. We’ve got to feel gratitude. So many others in the world are neither safe nor fed and if the world loves them, it certainly isn’t obvious. We thoughtful and caring folk, from the safety of our warm homes and full cupboards may give monthly to Doctors Without Borders, providing a bandage here and there to a victim who has just been blown apart. It’s on the nightly news, nagging at our conscience and disturbing an otherwise comfortable evening by the fire.

“We are the newspaper that listens,” was the title and message of our first editorial written in 1996 under our current ownership of Sonoma West Publishers. That message and mission has not changed, but just about everything else in the newspaper business has.

Winter chill and Christmas bells, plump sparrows and red berries. ‘Tis the season. Thank you for sending items to “Idlewood 3…” in 2016. “Hedda Healdsburg wants to know all!”