Changing the image of image changing can help

Lou Marzeles
Editor and Publisher

     This is an agricultural area, noted for crops and quadrupeds of countless varieties. Yet even here, the saying remains true: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
     To apply this metaphor to the topic at hand, it means we've had the issue of this area's image put before us many times, but no one can make us care.
     To be fair, how a place appears is not likely to seem a top priority when you're faced with rounding up cattle, or keeping crops healthy, or, more fundamentally, ensuring that you still have a roof over your head. Survival and common sense are clearly paramount, and aesthetics can seem just so much irrelevant frou-frou. You can't argue with essential life priorities.
     But you can readily make a case for those priorities including appearance. Here's an example of how the aesthetics of an environment can dramatically impact the basics of life: several places in the U.S. and Canada have put up loudspeakers in high-crime areas and played non-stop classical music through them, while they also took steps to make the areas prettier. Result: in some cases up to 37 percent reduction in crime. Criminals, it seems, don't do their best work in classy conditions.      There are other studies that suggest untended areas tend to go more untended and, like magnets, draw increasingly undesirable and counterproductive situations.
     We wholly support efforts to beautify this area and improve its image—which is to say, to improve its prospects. We will continue to make the case for the sheer practicality of such efforts, and we will get behind every move to make our house a home, one in which everyone can feel provided for and welcome.