February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The location is not far from Our Lady of the Gulf Church, by now familiar to readers as a symbol of hope and renewal following one of the worst natural disasters to ever strike our nation.
New years are new days multiplied. And as with every new day we step into the coming year with hope, anticipation, a little trepidation and a few resolutions that not infrequently fall by the wayside.
We never expect perfection, even with the new.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t expect things to be better.
Each new year is a clean slate and with it we are all presented with an opportunity to improve our lives and our world.
We at this paper obviously have our hopes and ambitions too. We want to improve our product and attract more readers of course. That’s a given.
But we have wider dreams. We want, for example, to see Northern Ireland advance farther down the path to reconciliation and, ultimately, towards the rebirth of the single island society that existed before an unfortunate turn in history tore it apart.
We want to see Ireland, all of it, flourish economically, politically, socially and spiritually.
We want nothing less for a United States that has faced bravely into the assaults of both man and nature in recent times.
We would like to see the kind of imaginative immigration reform that acknowledges the contribution to this nation of so many from Ireland and other nations, both in the past and in the present.
The wish list goes on.
It will not all come to pass, but hopefully enough of it will.
2006, indeed, will not be perfect.
But we all believe it can indeed be an advance over the year about to pass.