Washington Park

Washington Park in Albany, New York is the city’s premier park and the site of many festivals and gatherings. As public property it dates back to the city charter in 1686, and has seen many uses including that of gunpowder storage, square/parade grounds, and cemetery. The park is often mistaken as being designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, but does incorporate many of the philosophical ideals used by Olmsted when he designed Central Park in Manhattan. The park is about 81 acres (33 ha) in size with the 5.2-acre (2.1 ha) Washington Park Lake, a roughly 1,600-foot-long (490 m) and 140-foot-wide (43 m) lake, in the southwestern corner.

Give Trump a Chance

I get annoyed by the constant attacks on President-elect Donald Trump on social media and in the mainstream media. Many are totally unnecessary and unfair to judge a man who has not even yet been formally sworn into office – and just suggests an unwillingness on the part of some liberals to change and try different ideas to solve our nation’s problems.

We had eight years of a fairly successful run by President Obama. He got a lot done, but there is a lot of unfinished businesses. We should give the President-elect a chance to address these concerns and put his stamp on the presidency. I don’t know if his ideas will work out – many of his positions differ from my own – but it’s worth a chance to see what he can accomplish. Many of the problems our nation faces aren’t going to be solved by purely a liberal or conservative solution, but will addressed by a variety of solutions creatively applied.

Change is a good thing. While I think my preferred candidate for the president, Jill Stein, would have been a better chief executive for our country, I’m open to see what President-elect Donald Trump can get done – and I’m not willing to reject his alternative ideas simply because he has different solutions to our nation’s problems then what my own political party, the Democrats, have  proposed.