Owego Rotary Club Rotateller

The March board meeting was held in conjunction with the breakfast group meeting for the first time, since the breakfast group has decided to meet every Thursday.

February attendance information: 63 members; 73% attendance; 28 with 100% attendance.

Accepted proposal for membership: Joe Di Cosimo, sponsored by Mychael Willon. Joe is the principal at Apalachin Elementary School. Following the 7-day comment period, a formal induction will be held.

Decided to add a second booth at Strawberry Festival to allow space to provide information about Owego Rotary. The booth would be adjacent to the strawberry shortcake location.

Approved cost of a one-night stay in Syracuse for mandatory training for the president-elect.

Approved a $300 donation to the Seven Lakes Council of the Girl Scouts, for camperships for local girls.

Approved funding for five club members to attend the District 7170 conference at Villa Roma, May 6-8. Positions of president, president-elect, secretary and youth coordinator plus one club position were approved.

Pledged $1000 to assist in funding the cost of transporting hospital equipment to Ghana. The used equipment has been gathered by PDG Marie Lusins.

Approved basic nominations for the Paul Harris Foundation awards: one member of the community and one from within the club.

Because some members of the board will be traveling the third Thursday, the next board meeting will be held the fourth Thursday, April 28, 2005, at 7:30 a.m.

PRESIDENT-ELECT TRAINING:

It is apparent that this is much more organized than it was when a number of us served. It was also good to hear that our Club was used as an example for many of the protocols. Individual past Owego Rotarians were interviewed and contributed (Orv may not have been aware of this background).

ORIENTATION:

Richard commented on last week’s orientation which went well. He also commented that our Club has been significantly enriched by the addition of our new members.

BLOOD SCREENING:

RAILING BLITZ:

Will be held on May 21. We will try to leave some railing left for Barb to paint.

PAUL HARRIS DINNER:

FINES:

Gwen gave us a team-building quiz which was well-done. We also got to level the field in our large team by all contributing an equal share.

PROGRAM:

Jeanette introduced Tom Gerow from Wagner Lumber. Tom apologized for not being a public speaker and then proceeded to give one of the better programs that we have had. I would love to have a tour of their facility. They work on furniture grade hardwood lumber. 66% of NY is forested. 85% of that is privately owned. Les started the company in 1973 and it grew to 6 employees handling 150 truck loads of logs by 1986. In 2001, there were 60 employees handling >9,000 truck loads of logs. They have 9 foresters which is more than any company in NY (other than the DEC). They manage and harvest. They go from Buffalo to the Hudson Valley and from Watertown to Williamsport, PA except for the Adirondacks which has poor quality lumber due to the weather and the soil. They sell wood all over the world. There are 500,000 wood lots in NY >10 acres. They process 2000 logs a day. I am sorry that I did not get to stay until the end of the program.

I put these at the end so it is easy to get the Rotary news and skip the excerpts and reflections. The following long excerpt is from The Best and the Brightest. I just happened to be reading it on the day that it was reported that George Kennan died. That book plus two other experiences this week, made me reflect on process. We would assume that the process gets better as the importance goes up, i.e., state and national government vs. Owego Rotary, but that just isn’t necessarily true. Last Tuesday, I was in Albany to lobby. Most of this is done by paid lobbyists represent many different clients. They don’t really understand the issues (but they should, at least, understand the politics). They are speaking to elected officials or their staff who tend to be equally ignorant. I also got interviewed by the WSJ about vision and dyslexia. The woman was sincere and interested, but it was also apparent that the depth and breadth of her knowledge on this subject was about 24 hours and I was squeezing this into a schedule that didn’t allow adequate time. How confident can we be about what we read?

These men were all from the big investment and banking houses, or lawyers for them; they and their class had long harbored and abiding suspicion not so much of Russia as of Communism. Their tendency was to see the growing American-Soviet conflict in their terms and definitions, fulfilling their long suspicions. To them it was an ism, not just two new great powers struggling to find their balance. Thus the men who defined postwar American policy defined it in ideological, not national terms. Forrestal, who was particularly suspicious of Communist designs, was delighted to find a brilliant young diplomat-intellectual named George F. Kennan at the U. S. embassy in Moscow, and Kennan's warnings about Soviet intentions were immediately seized upon by Forrestal as intellectual and historical evidence of the great struggle ahead. Forrestal made the Kennan reports available to friends throughout Washington, and Kennan's career took off overnight. His reporting was eventually published both in Foreign Affairs (under by byline X) and as a book which became the primer of postwar American diplomacy and was read by almost every college student at every great university, on of the most influential books of an entire generation. Kennan became known as the author of the containment policy, but he had been talking more about Russia than about Communists. He would eventually find his ideas being exploited, as it were, by his superiors, used as a justification for an increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He eventually broke with the other foreign policy architects because he thought they were too ideological and too military-oriented in their policies. He felt that the Communist world was much more nationalist in its origins than it was monolithic, and that we were creating our own demonology. His opinions in the early fifties represented the first truly major dissent within a largely consensus view of a nonconsensus world.

The Kennan experience was not to be the last time that the national security principals would take the intelligence reporting of the own experts and exploit it out of context, de-emphasizing the issue of nationalism and exploiting the issue of Communism.

Rotary Club of Owego, NY
ROTATELLER

VISITORS AND GUESTS:

District Leadership Institute:

District Assembly:

Highlights: Owego Rotary board meeting 3/17/05

PRESIDENT-ELECT TRAINING:

ORIENTATION:

BLOOD SCREENING:

RAILING BLITZ:

PAUL HARRIS DINNER:

FINES:

PROGRAM:

	Rotary Club of Owego, NY ROTATELLER
Tuesday, March 22, 2005 Gary Williams, Editor

Rotary Club of Owego, NY ROTATELLER

VISITORS AND GUESTS:

District Leadership Institute:

District Assembly:

Highlights: Owego Rotary board meeting 3/17/05

PRESIDENT-ELECT TRAINING:

ORIENTATION:

BLOOD SCREENING:

RAILING BLITZ:

PAUL HARRIS DINNER:

FINES:

PROGRAM:

Rotary Club of Owego, NY
ROTATELLER