SO WHAT DOES ONE DO?

     People come to CV for various reasons and with different motives. Personally, I never ever thought that I would be a year round resident here. In fact, until we bought I never thought we would ever have a place in Florida!
     Retirement rolled around and it was more financially feasible and sensible for us to live here, so we did just that. We travel to the kids or they come here and right now it is fine. We attend many theatrical and musical venues and love it. Just yesterday we attended a wonderful lecture/presentation at the Kravis about the history and language of music and the American Songbook and very much enjoyed it. And guess what? It was a resident of the Village who was the presenter!
     We have lots of shopping areas (too much sometimes!), great libraries, thrift shops for treasure hunting, nature preserves for walks and lots and lots of wonderful people. All this for a still reasonable monetary fee.
     So what is the problem? The problem is that when some people moved here, they lost sight of the fact that we all must take responsibility to keep our home, year round or part time, a good place to live. We must speak up, express our feelings and thoughts, and not cede anything to anyone. In other words, the principles of America the country were valid within our gates and no one has or had the right to take them away.
     So, what to do? One can turn a blind eye and hope that all will be well. One can say, I can only worry about the now, or myself and not the future or the people who are being priced out of their homes. One can engage in scare mongering tactics by saying terrible things that are not true - more robberies, bad people, and on and on. The truth is, and check with the Sheriff's department if you do not believe me, is that inside the Village it is quite safe and I must say that the people I meet, be it in the Clubhouse or the perimeter or the pool, do not seem bad. In fact, they are engaged in the same activities with the same end desires as myself.
     We do not need all this new interior Big Brother security. What we need is more exterior security and efficiency - check IDs, streamline the entry process so we do not STILL have lines into the streets of Okeechobee and Haverhill. What we need is more efficient spending of our funds such as improving the infrastructure of the buildings at the pools, maintaining the roads even as they continue to crumble to sand and pebbles, keep the facilities OPEN and not shut down for months, keep the AC on during Saturday nite shows especially, which are generally jammed, and open the Village venues to ALL, not just the favored few.
     What to do? Enjoy oneself and get involved. There is time for both and a necessity for both. We have earned the enjoyment after a lifetime of working hard, of two or even three jobs sometimes to support the families and get the kids through college and off to a good start in life. But we also need to insure that we can keep this lifestyle and for that - one must be active, proactive. That is the simple truth.
     Come join us in our attempt to keep the Village on an even keel, on a smooth road, with financial security and sanity, with decent and humane leaders who know the residents, who  lives amongst us, rather than keeps to himself. As the old ad said, "Try it. You might like it."