Letter: Save Prospect can teach a priceless lesson

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To the Editor,

In a world where instant gratification is the norm and where participation trophies are given out for just being there, Save Prospect is now in the unique position of being able to pass on a valuable lesson.

When Save Prospect Corporation began their fight to stop BNE from building wind turbines in the south end of town, its members did not take into consideration that win or lose someone would have to pay the bill. Someone would have to take responsibility for every action of the committee and that someone might be the committee members.

I do have sympathy for their current plight. I am sure that these hard working, tax paying Prospect residents don’t have the disposable resources to comfortably pay the debt that they as unapproved representatives of the town have now amassed.

But here is where the ability to teach a valuable lesson to adults and especially children, our future leaders, comes into play.

Save Prospect Corp. members can now show other adults and especially their children that responsibility for our actions is important. Everyday in the news we see celebrities going off course and elected officials behaving badly without taking personal responsibility for their actions. We see trials where the defendant begins to blame everyone from the past to the present to try to justify what was done. We see Congress and the state spending money that they don’t have and we complain constantly that since we have to live within our budgets, then so should they.

And, in the case of Save Prospect Corp., we see honest hard working citizens who wanted to make a difference but forgot that even in good deeds there is responsibility for our actions. The piper will eventually come ’round for his fee.

I am encouraged to see that Save Prospect has rescinded its request for the town of Prospect to pay the Save Prospect bills as if Save Prospect was entitled to payment just because they took it upon themselves to represent taxpayers, many of whom did not even know the committee existed until it had already begun to spend money it didn’t have. Save Prospect may feel that, as a committee, they represented the taxpayers of Prospect, but many of those taxpayers don’t feel that way and didn’t right from the beginning.

If we can begin, in our small town, to show that personal responsibility for any and all of our actions is important, then we can give our children a good start in dealing with the bumps and milestones on the road of life.

To quote Jagger and Richards from 1969:

“No, you can’t always get what you want.
You can’t always get what you want.

You can’t always get what you want.

And if you try sometime, you find

You get what you need.”

The need here is the ultimate lesson that there is always responsibility and consequences for our actions.

Patricia Smith Zappone

Prospect