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October 10, 2017

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Several years ago I got an email from Sullivan asking how to join CityWatch, an organization devoted to livability issues and the control of rampant and destructive types of development. I told him all he needed to do was send in a letter of application and a statement that he supported CityWatch's efforts and purposes. He then replied that he did support CityWatch's issues, which I already knew that he did not.

"Welfare Queen T.J. Sullivan" or "Welfare Queen of Salem" according to his own party's terminology. Always looking for a handout from the hard working taxpayers. Sad!

Hi Brian,

Honest questions: What concrete things have you done to make Salem better? How many people do you currently employ and how many have you employed over the past ten years? How much cumulative tax have you paid over the past ten years? Have you built anything?

I think it's great that people speak out on a blog and try to add value. However, if that is all that you do, you are just typing. You have no real world experience creating or building. If a small community in the middle of nowhere was just made of 50 people like you, it would whither and die in less than a generation.

By the way, Salem is not designed to support evening and weekend bus service. It is too scattered and too sprawled. The environmental cost would be too great. The actual cost would be incredible per person per ride. Running big polluting busses all over this sprawled city to maybe, possibly give one or two people a ride on Saturday morning or Tuesday evening would cost huge sums of money and a lot of useless pollution. A better approach would be to fight for more density and get people to not live on south commercial if their job is on north lancaster.

I’d love to see Brian put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with TJ Sullivan’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and blogging about your urinary tract problems and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours TJ Sullivan has given to this community.

Concerned Citizen and Ben, you not only got a response to your questions, you got a freaking 1600 word response. See:

http://hinessight.blogs.com/salempoliticalsnark/2017/10/challenged-to-say-what-ive-done-to-make-salem-better-im-pleased-to-reply.html

This is how I ended the post, a.k.a. rant.
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Anyway, I've responded at length to Concerned Citizen and Ben because (1) it bugs me when someone asserts that I haven't created or built anything because I'm not a businessperson, and (2) it bugs me even more that this assertion oozes over into denigrating the contributions of everybody in Salem who has taken a non-business path in life.

Concerned Citizen said that if everybody was like me, a community would wither and die. Well, the same is true if everybody was like anybody.

Salem would die if there were only businesspeople in it. And not just figuratively, literally, since there would be no doctors and no nurses. And if there weren't teachers, librarians, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and so on, Salem wouldn't be a town worth living in.

So let's bury the Chamber of Commerce notion that Business Rules way more than ten feet under. How about ten miles under. I and countless others are valuable members of the Salem community not in spite of us not being in business, but because we're not.

I’d love to see commenter Ben put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with Brian Hines’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and posting comments on a blog about a urinary tract problem and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours Brian Hines has given to this community.

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