Healthy challenge
Guest commentary by Shirley LaBarre

When my husband and I moved to Ojai from our West Los Angeles home of 47 years, it required quite an adjustment. There were new services to locate and various shops to discover: hairdressers, hardware and grocery stores. There were even new idioms: the "Y," East End and the Upper Ojai, variances in speed limits between north and south, east and west streets, hard-to-pronounce park names, doctors. You know the routine.
We also learned about the delightful (mostly) axiom, "Ojai is a city where no proposal is too insignificant not to elicit controversy!" The main arguments were found in the Letters to the Editor page in the Ojai Valley News.
Every day was full of fun and discovery. Everybody smiled and said hello. Neighbors offered to help with advice about microclimates and the incredible calcium water deposits. And they were courteous. My first experience parking at Vons was a two-car duet approach for a parking space. Imagine my surprise to have the driver of the other car wave me in instead of making a rude finger expletive or worse, pulling a gun!
And there were innumerable opportunities to serve the community as a volunteer and we both chose carefully - and generously.
However, just six months after arriving in Ojai, I became an emergency patient with a recurring serious heart condition. Now I panicked. Ojai with less than 8,000 citizens and one little hospital - what did they know about "big city medicine"? Lots.
The doctors were knowledgeable, understanding and assertive. The nursing staff consistently treated me with compassionate concern expected only in a loving family care person. It made up enormously for some of the less than state-of-the-art equipment and the décor that was badly in need of plaster and paint. But when you are really sick and hurting, who cares about ambience?
Later I learned that the lack of repairs and upgrading was directly related to the profit status demanded of the absentee owners - some huge HMO in Tennessee. There had been several purchasers over the years, but though promises were made, none were kept. The profit never seemed great enough. Facilities and morale were becoming serious.
A Hospital Foundation was established under the leadership of Chief of Staff Scott Davis, M.D., and the hospital's board of directors. The consensus was to make an offer to the owners with the goal of making The Ojai Valley Community Hospital a locally owned, nonprofit hospital. The foundation, led by Alan Rains, found suitable financing to make an offer to the owners. The offer was accepted. Immediately a program of fund raising began.
There was an all-city yard sale, a 1-5K walk, jog or ride, and a video film was made for wide distribution.
This year two activities will again be offered for citizen involvement.
The yard sale will be on Sept. 7 and the 1-5 K runs on Oct. 5. In addition, there is a push for membership in the hospital by offering membership with various perks in each category for payments of $100, $250 and $500. Citizens are being urged to consider legacies in their wills or trusts.
Let's face it. This is one project that should not elicit any controversy.
The very real likelihood is that each of you will spend some time in the hospital. This is the time to think about it and do something. Already the effects of a nonprofit status are visible in the hospital facilities. Rooms have been painted and new state-of-the-art equipment is in the program.
Edmund Burke said a long time ago, "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." Challenge yourselves. Whatever you can do - do it!

Shirley LaBarre is an eight-year resident of Ojai and a director and former president of the Ojai Valley Garden Club.

Cranks and crackpots
Bret Bradigan, OVN publisher

Cranks and crackpots, schemers and dreamers, are an integral, if seldom appreciated, piece of the American puzzle.
The Ojai Valley certainly has its share. You'll occasionally bear witness to that in the letters to the editor, or at a public meeting, or overhearing someone's loud denouncement of all things governmental at the coffee shop. We turn away with barely disguised contempt, satisfied in our essential rightness and thankful that we are not so far out on the fringes.
The borderlands and the frontier attract such types; those who do not meet the expectations of polite society and so seek the faraway places where they can indulge their eccentricities in peace. And this region, with its colorful past and bright future, is a beacon to the misbegotten and the malcontents, the hopeful visionaries of our future and the pessimists of our present.
Those of us who like to think of ourselves as normal and well-adjusted often have little patience with these types. They are disruptive and vaguely threatening. Sometimes their eccentricities verge on the dangerous. It is possible that the next mad bomber Ted Kacynski-type lives among us. Or perhaps there is a Tim McVeigh out there, festering with imagined slights, hoping to pull the trigger that sets off the big showdown between Gog and Magog.
This is the price we pay for our splendid isolation, for living in the hothouse that is Ojai.
We must also realize that the next Henry David Thoreau may be living among us, scribbling down a more perfect union between man and nature. Or perhaps another Abraham Lincoln is being raised in our midst, someone whose frontier-bred strengths can stitch together an unraveling society.
Most of us contain elements of all these types in varying proportions. We exist along a continuum, and are reminded of that by those at the radical fringes. Most of us go about our daily lives amid people who think and feel almost exactly like we do, and so come to believe that our thoughts and beliefs must, as a consequence of their being commonly held, be right. After all, the majority can't be wrong, can it? It is my belief that this, and not the occasional crackpot spouting off, is the biggest obstacle to our progress.
Conventional wisdom is an oxymoron because there is nothing conventional about wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge with the critical addition of perspective. And perspective can only be gained by considering all points of view.
Cranks and crackpots challenge our assumptions. By forcing ourselves to explain our positions, we often find that our beliefs rest on shifting sands. That is the source of our discomfort; sometimes we'd rather be comfortably numb than painfully aware.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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