Newtown’s Multiple Personalities

To the Editor:

Very often when I read The Bee, Newtown is portrayed as a nice, friendly, old-fashioned town with a sense of community that shows up during the Labor Day Parade, the Christmas Tree Lighting on the Ram Pasture, the library’s annual book sale, and in the service and sacrifices of our volunteer firefighters and others. There are pictures of livestock and adorable children. Where else can you find The Horse and Dog News? Then, you look at the real estate section where it appears that Newtown is a private club for rich people. Does Newtown have a multiple personality disorder?

I read the statistics about property values and average income and find myself lacking compared to the “average.” Despite soaring energy and oil prices, cars and homes around here just get bigger and bigger. Budgets get voted down by the only people who have time to vote –– retired people — and who can blame them? The rest of us are scrambling to pay for our costly lifestyle or car pooling our precious kids all over town to this lesson or that team. On the other hand, we have very little crime. We all pretty much agree on what constitutes civility and good taste. Even if you are below average in the eyes of others, Newtown is not a bad place to live.

You hear quite a bit about young people involved in community service. It may be a prerequisite for something they really want to do or a punishment for something they shouldn’t have done. The best community service my kid ever did was to volunteer in a soup kitchen in Danbury as part of a school assignment. He got a glimpse of how much of the rest of the world lives. Kids around here think they are impoverished if they don’t have the latest PlayStation or the most expensive clothes or car. It’s the disadvantage of living in such a generally overprivileged town.

This brings me to the high school students protesting the $40 fee for many extracurricular activities. Do they really think retired persons should be forced to sell their homes due to high property taxes so that they can be in a play or on the debating team? Have they thought about this issue in depth? One parent said that being in a play really was beneficial for her child. Compare $40 with the cost of psychotherapy or the human misery inflicted by unsupervised kids in less fortunate communities (inner cities, etc). I would pay the $40 even though I am not among Newtown’s affluent elite. $40 will pay for about 2½ weeks worth of gas in my car. Many high school students have cars of their own — how do they manage to pay for that? The sense of entitlement these kids have is probably due to their lack of experience in the real world. What’s odd is may adults seem to have the problem.

Nancy Cullen

10 Orchard Hill Road                                                 October 18, 2003