Sunday, May 8, 2011

To Pray or Not To Pray? That Is The Question??

Ok Gulls, here is the issue that has got the people of Delmarva all worked up: whether or not the City Council will replace their traditional Lord's Prayer with a Moment of Silence at the beginning of each Council Meeting.

Now, because The Other Salisbury News is a student-run blog (and is therefore staffed by....you know, young people), we tend to be a little less religious and a little more... "bipartisan" when it comes to matters of church and state. That said, we support the Council's initiative to replace the Lord's Prayer with a Moment of Silence. We realize that this position may get us in hot water with some of the locals (many of whom are vehemently against the switch-up) but our logic is that while Salisbury definitely needs prayer (from every denomination), the City Government Building is not the best place to conduct it. We refer all dissenters (on our personal opinion...) to the First Amendment for the further clarification on the matter.

Ok, so. Heres the part that rubs our fur backwards. Salisbury is in an economic crisis. Our historic downtown is dying, crime is out of control, the river is a cesspool of mutated bacteria, and irresponsible urban-sprawl (because nobody in their right mind wants to live in the city) is routinely degrading the infrastructure and resources we all depend on to coexist efficiently. Yet with the mile-high list of problems the city has on it's plate, nobody on the Council had the common-sense to say "Hey, lets set the Lord's Prayer debate aside until we fix (insert any one of the issues above here)."

We ask you Gulls- where are the priorities? Can't Salisbury find anything more important to spend its energy on besides this crap? Yes Delmarva, we think its crap. It's trivial and distracting and divisive. People wonder why our city is struggling to stay afloat yet they willingly spend their time arguing about how to dedicate 30 seconds of each Council Meeting to religion or the lack of it. You want our honest opinion Salisbury? We would rather the Council scratch the entire process all together and spend that 30 seconds talking about the Waste Water Treatment Plant or the Neighborhood Legislative Package (and the $10,000 of taxpayer dollars that went into it) or why we don't have businesses downtown or why Route 13 is a deathtrap or why the University has a horrible retention rate and the prison has a ridiculously high re-incarceration rate.

These are the issues worth discussing because they are the hurtles that are holding our city back- not Shanie's Christianity or Terry's Judaism. It's just like Ruby Thewes said in Cold Mountain: "Every piece of this is man's bullshit. They call this war a cloud over the land, but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, 'Shit! It's rainin'!"

Well Gulls, Salisbury's bullshit has created a leak in the ceiling of the City Government Building and Council is putting all of their energy into fixing it. Now, we get that that leak seems awful important, but Council, if you stick your head out the window and take a look around you will notice that the whole damn town is flooded. So we ask you- readjust your priorities please.

In the meantime, we will be blogging from a little red Lincoln canoe.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Little red canoe, isnt that a Prince song.