Heartfelt praise for city garden project

The News Virginian
Published: May 29, 2008

A thumbs-up, thumbs-down assessment of newsmakers here and beyond:
A genial fellow who flashes smiles with ease, Raymond Reed represents many things good, principally the Serenity Garden. Adorned with flowers and shrubs and featuring a brick walkway and patio, the sanctuary set on a one-acre knoll in Ridgeview Park is intended to be a place of respite and reflection for cancer fighters and their families and friends. It will be formally dedicated Sunday afternoon. The effort to create the garden adjacent to the South River has been driven by Reed, chairman of the project, which generated $60,000 in private money for construction costs. Nurseries have donated small trees and perennials, the latter particularly apropos considering the steady, quiet courage of people such as Reed, who is himself battling prostate cancer. Especially impressive, Reed and his band of volunteers were stirred by a community vision and moved with vigor to turn it into reality, performing the unheralded task of soliciting money from private donors by sharing the inspiration rather than relying on coerced generosity in the form of significant tax contributions. Those who gave to this worthwhile cause as well as Reed and others who pushed to make it happen deserve heartfelt thanks and admiration. We salute all who had a part in the project.
Subway marketeers are eating fresh these days, but the fare is substantially less enticing than such favorites as the meatball marinara. The popular sandwich chain is sponsoring a contest offering students’ parents $5,000 in athletic equipment for their schools for penning prose on such topics as “random acts of fitness,” including, presumably, consumption of low-calorie subs as an alternative to fast-food obesity builders, exercising and living healthy. Devils, as is their wont, surfaced amid the details. The competition excludes parents of homeschoolers. This was sufficient to stir the ire of a group more than 2 million strong, but Subway, which knows few bounds in transforming submarine sandwiches into a cult of eating personality similarly discovered few limits in its capacity to offend. The chain’s online advertisements promoting the contest include two spelling errors — the United States is referred to as the Untied States and the grand prize includes “a Scholastic Gift Bastket (sic) for your home.” This provoked an inevitable response among blogger mothers suggesting that perhaps homeschool students, frequent National Spelling Bee winners among them, should have been called upon to proof the copy. Scholastic Parent & Child, a sponsor of the contest, is racing to recover, apologizing for the slight, offering complimentary books to appease the angered homeschool masses and vowing to ensure the offense is not repeated. Meanwhile, Quiznos acquires by default a healthy slice of the emerging homeschool demographic.
On the subject of inspiring offense as well as taking it, Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama is abundantly familiar. He is less acquainted with facts. His most recent in a lengthening string of gaffes is especially entertaining. In a Memorial Day speech in which an attempt at eloquence included a reference to seeing “fallen heroes” among an audience principally composed of living people, Obama declared that his uncle was among American troops who liberated Auschwitz. This would have been an especially impressive feat. Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945 by the Soviet Red Army. American troops, in fact, did not set foot in Poland. Obama staffers clarified, saying that the Illinois senator intended to say Buchenwald, which was liberated by U.S. forces in April 1945. Obama backers dismissed the error as the innocent product of campaign fatigue. Such an assertion seems to have merit, considering that the campaign feels as though it began shortly after the Normandy invasion. But right-wingers similarly have a point in wondering if a Republican candidate could escape unscathed references to having visited America’s 57 states, Kansas tornadoes killing 10,000 people rather than the actual 12 and other, more complex gems in Obama’s growing trove of misspoken treasures. Obama might do better to adhere to his ordinary schtick of skipping specifics in favor of hollow but safe platitudes about change, hope and the audacity of it all.