In Search of the Common Good

Rain was falling through the October afternoon as I drove along Route 146 and recalled a sunny morning, last month, when my neighbor’s son, Richie, had gone off to kindergarten. Richie had marched proudly onto the yellow bus with his Sponge Bob backpack. He took a seat, and I saw his face at the window, smiling, thrilled, and then the bus moved on under a shining canopy of leaves.

             The rain was heavier now, and I stopped at a red light. Off to the left was the high school, and I wondered what Richie would find there ten years on, and how much it would cost. Would our budget be $150 million or more? Would that be fair to those in our community who didn’t use the schools? Would it even be affordable for those who did?

             And what about the dedicated men and women employed by the district? Shouldn’t they be compensated fairly and, almost equally important, free from worry about their jobs? I’d read in these pages about the concerns of Mr. Michael Seinberg, and I was saddened that any citizen of our town should be so frightened about the future of his family’s medical care.

             Yet what will happen if the growth of the budget isn’t controlled? What kind of fear will all of us live with then?

             I haven’t been on the school board for long, but of one thing I’m certain: to work on a budget is not just a consideration of costs and programs. It is also a moral undertaking—a search for the common good, those “general conditions that are,” as the philosopher John Rawls observed, “equally to everyone’s advantage.”

             And what was that number, I wondered.

             Then the light turned green.

* * *

The rain let up as I headed through Altamont, past Orsini Park and the Home Front Café, and parked outside a Dutch Colonial on a leafy side street.

             “Glad you made it,” Newton Ronan said, opening his front door.

             He was a solidly built older man with neatly combed white hair, and he led me through a porch dense with framed photographs and rows of oxygen canisters. His wife, Jane, who was sitting in the living room, had been in and out of the hospital, and she still needed help with her breathing. She was a petite woman with lively eyes and a graceful smile.

             “We’ve lived here forty-six years,” said Mr. Ronan after I was seated. “We sent our three children to the schools. It’s not that I think we shouldn’t continue to support the district, but. . .”

             His voice trailed off. I heard a tick-tick-ticking sound and noticed that the house was filled with old clocks—wall clocks, desk clocks, grandfather clocks.

             “The ticking gets so it’s soothing,” said Mrs. Ronan.

             Mr. Ronan said, “I started fixing clocks after I retired twenty-five years ago. I don’t have much chance lately. I’ve been busy taking care of my wife.”

             Mrs. Ronan smiled at her husband, who returned her smile.

             I listened to the clocks. Finally, Mr. Ronan said: “I wrote that letter to the Enterprise because a lot of older folks—well, they won’t.”

             I said, “They’ve told me they’re scared to speak up.”

             “A lot of them are afraid to be seen as rocking the boat,” Mrs. Ronan said.

             “But I talk to my friends,” Mr. Ronan said. “And many of them feel like no one cares about us. My tax bill went up 38 percent. I’m lucky we have medical insurance, but the cost of prescriptions keeps going up. We have to be as careful as possible with our money. I want to feel confident the schools are doing the same.”

             I glanced at a painting of the Altamont train station above the stone hearth. Mrs. Ronan saw me looking at it and told me how, years ago, her mother used to take the train from downtown Albany to visit her daughter and son-in-law.

             “This was way out in the country back then,” she said.

             Mrs. Ronan began talking about her childhood in McKownville, which eventually led Mr. Ronan to the subject of the war. He had joined the Army Air Corps, but because his brother had already died in the Pacific, the government denied his request to enter combat.

             I love listening to stories, and the Ronans had some pretty good ones, but after a while I had to go and said goodbye and went out to my car.

             It was raining again, and I felt, more strongly than ever, that to relinquish the search for the common good is to relinquish our responsibility to the present and the future—to the older members of our community and to all of the children, like Richie, who will need the excellent education provided by our schools.

             I looked back at the house through the gray afternoon, thinking about that ticking symphony of passing time, and then I drove off in the rain.