Editorial

Recent revelations about past financial mistakes inside Healdsburg District Hospital should not be taken as any reason for patients, doctors and community partners to withhold support or question its medical excellence. A business turnaround looks to be in place and elected leaders of the North Sonoma County Healthcare District last week expressed their vote of confidence in a new management team, now completing its first full year on the job.

In December I went to a Regional Climate Protection Authority presentation at the Healdsburg city council chambers. The RCPA was created in 2009 to improve coordination on climate change issues and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as was mandated by the ten county government’s partnership with the Climate Protection Campaign in 2005. The goal is to reduce county GHG emissions to 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2015. It was the CPC that first championed Sonoma Clean Power in 2004.

My wife Bonnie and I recently went to the de Young Museum to see the Vermeer (1632 - 1675) exhibit on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Exhibit is called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” after what is perhaps Vermeer’s best known work. The girl turns to look at us over her left shoulder and as she turns our gaze is drawn to the single pearl on the lobe of her lovely ear. A text describes the painting as the Dutch “Mona Lisa.” The exhibit reveals a world of mostly prosperous looking men and women. Self assured, Protestant, one might even say secular. They are a class of people absent from earlier times, the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages. They are neither prelates (there is one painting of a preacher in the exhibit), nor princes, and they are certainly not peasants. They are burghers and their families, men of commerce, trade and industry; and they read and write. There is a charming, domestic scene of a woman, seated comfortably at a desk in her own home. She is writing, maybe a personal letter, maybe household accounts, but the point is she is writing, something that a few hundred years earlier few other than clergy were able to do.

Editor: Quite clearly the attempt by environmentalists to