It’s all about our choices

Fran Ostendorf, EditorLife is about making choices. Anybody who knows me has certainly heard me say that often. My kids would tell you they hear it all too often.

But with each choice we grow a little bit. It helps us become the person we are today. And it doesn’t matter whether you are a toddler on the playground, an adult in the office or the editor of this paper.

Every two weeks I have to make a choice. What am I going to write about in this column? Sometimes, it’s a tough choice. I’m naturally a rather private person, so finding something that is both personal to me and important to the community can be tough. Often, I wonder if anybody will care. Because of that, in the last issue I made a choice to end this column with a reminder that we always like to hear from our readers.

Wow. That was a good choice.

As you can see from looking at the next page (but wait a minute, finish the column first!), you chose to respond with more letters than I’ve seen since I started this job in April.

Every letter is civil; each one is interesting; and we’ve run everything we received by our deadline for this issue. You’ve made me one happy editor. And, more important, we have a valuable dialogue going in our community. And I’m glad The Voice can facilitate that. It’s one of the multitude of choices we’ve made here…to be many voices as a community newspaper.

Now here’s something else that’s pretty important. And it’s also about choice. Nov. 4 is Election Day. I’ve already used this column as a platform to remind you to vote, and I’m going to do it again because it’s one of the most significant choices you are going to make all year. The Community Relations Council of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and The Jewish Voice got together to ask the candidates who want to represent Rhode Island statewide and in Washington a simple but critical question we felt needed an answer: As a leader, how will you use your leadership skills to improve our state and our country? On Oct. 10, we ran the responses from those running for Congress. Today we have the rest of the candidates’ answers. We also included responses from the Providence mayoral candidates because those impact a large portion of our readership. We hope you find this information useful.

And we hope you will exercise your right and obligation to choose who runs our government by voting. The choice you make is a personal one. But start by making the choice to vote in the first place.