Making La Conner's future great again

Mayor Ramon Hayes is hoping for more festivals in La Conner. This month his dream is fulfilled: we end this week with a second annual guitar festival and the next week with the 10th biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival.

Maybe Mayor Hayes wishes for two festivals every off-season month. That is one good, solid view of the future.

Tim Bruce’s vision of poetry in the schools and a festival for all of us has been realized. Nothing is more primal to humans than music. Our first songs came from poetry. More art in all of our lives more of the time is a hopeful vision.

A new library in La Conner builds our future. That hope must be funded by us to be built. The Library Foundation’s Susan Macek is sharing her view of the future for this issue in a new, occasional column by that name.

As much hard work as it takes to get libraries, music and poetry into our future, believe this: those are the easy lifts. Getting to a 2050 that is sensible and sustainable requires libraries and art and much more. Merchants and the mayor have named a summer shuttle as a need. Summer shuttles might be electric or horse or human powered. Any of those will set an example, moving La Conner a tiny bit closer to a fossil fuel free future.

There have been reports in this paper on cohousing and reducing plastic and other wastes. Council discussed a plastic bag ban for the second meeting in a row Tuesday evening. And, more than once, you have read about students walking out of school this spring. If they decide to walk into responsible adulthood right away, a new generation of activists for survival will add a quality of ideas, a quantity of bodies and the energy of youth. They are much needed to move the rest of us along.

The future is theirs, after all. Best we help get them to one that is full of music and poetry and free of plastics and fossil fuels and has many fewer guns and less use of them everywhere.