Preserve our Heritage and Diverse Family Friendly Small Town
Memorial Day Parade, Gettysburg, 2006
Gettysburg is a Diverse Family Friendly Small Town. In our annual Memorial Day Parade Children still carry flowers to the graves of soldiers buried in the National Cemetary.
What doYou love most about Gettysburg, PA? What do you want to still be here for your great grandchildren? What would you miss the most if it were gone?
Change efforts are always more effective if folks have a positive vision to go for, not just a negative picture to run from. At our second public meeting, 5/10/05, we asked about 60 residents to pair up and tell one another what they loved about Gettysburg and Adams County.
The conversations were lively, and then people shouted out answers to
What We Value the Most
Our Land:
We love our Rural Lands, Open Space and Natural Beauty
Our History:
We love our Historical Uniqueness and Importance,
Our International Reputation,
Our Strong Sense of Place
Our Hallowed Ground, The turning point of the Civil War
We are Stewards of a National Treasure
Our Small Town
We are Family Safe
We have Intimacy here, a Sense of Belonging.
We are Friendly
Our Local Control:
We are Progressive in Our Inherent Conservatism
We have Active Civic Groups and easy access to our representatives
Our Morality:
We have Integrity and Civility
A Fundamental Morality
We are Religious with Lots of Ecumenical Cooperation
We are a Family Friendly, Low Crime Small Town
Our Visitors:
History Tourists are Nice People
They Come to Learn
They Respect the Town
They Feel Safe Bringing their Families
Learning and Our Cultural Life:
We are a learning community with a rich cultural life. We love our Colleges: Gettysburg College/ HACC/ Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg and nearby-Wilson, Penn State, Mt Alto, Mount St. Mary’s
and the cultural events they offer.
We are Artistic and have great First Friday celebrations.
What We Value the Mostis Who we are, our unique community identity.
The Next question was: Does a Casino fit into this picture?The answer was a resounding NO!It just doesn’t fit, and all the things that come with a casino just don’t fit. A casino would threaten all of the above list. It would change our IDENTITY from being a "NATIONAL TREASURE" to being "just another casino town." We worked to keep what we value the most.
Grown-Up Ethics:
Do the Ends Justify the Means?
For something to be truly ethical there must be congruence between principles, process, purpose and product. We don't know the investors well enough to understand the principles they follow in life. However, publicly the investors say their purpose is to help Adams County preserve its history and community by bringing jobs to the region. Their process for doing that is through a gambling casino--ie, through exploitation of people for profit. The product they produce will be enormous profit, and literally thousands of broken lives through gambling addiction, the destruction of our current tourist base through crass exploitation, and the destruction of our family safety.
They are working hard to "buy" Adams County with outrageous promises. Do you remember the scene in It's a Wonderful Life when Mr. Potter offered George Bailey(Jimmy Stewart) a great job and plenty of money and entertainment, if George would only give up fighting for his community?
George turned him down, and Adams County is turning down the 5000 slots of Crossraods Gaming Resort and Spa.
For grown-ups--the ends DO NOT justify the means.
“America...made a stand, not for herself only, but for the world, and looked beyond the advantages she herself could receive.”Thomas Paine, Statesman
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” President Thomas Jefferson
"Government should not be in the business of making losers of its citizens." Warren Buffett, economist
No Casino Gettysburg, an all volunteer grass roots movement, began as an explosion of anger as soon as the casino proposal was announced, and would have occurred without me. Volunteers. of every age, income level, race, religion and political and social viewpoint came together with passion to preserve the liberty and union that 170,000 Americans fought over right here. We believe we have a say in the quality of life in our own community, and together, taking a stand on values, we have strengthened our local democracy, we have bettered the state’s own process, we have even improved Crossroads proposal.
The first thing we encountered was the phrase, “It’s a done deal”, which is just a belief that money is the only power that the state will hear. That’s an anti-democratic idea that weakens the individual and cheats the community of the individual’s mind and talent.One thing we’ve learned is that democracy is a relationship we all have with ourselves and with one another, and like any relationship, it takes self-awareness, time and courageous effort.
We have to claim our own power in the service of the values we hold most dear; we have to speak our truth to powerful people. The huge personal and economic sacrifice our volunteers have devoted to this cause grew out of our recognition of that essential relationship.If this union is to persevere we must put our highest values to work with and for one another.
This battle against materialism over meaning, glitter over good, pie in the sky over sustainable economic development, is a call we had to answer and a conversation this County and this Country needs to have.
We’ve re-affirmed that no matter how sold-out the politicians and the power elite are, ordinary people still should have power in this Democracy. If money and muscle win this time around, local participation in Democracy may go into cold storage for awhile, but it can never be killed, because it is a universal good. So whatever the outcome, for many of us, this is the most important thing we’ve ever done in our life.
