I love to praise my friends and neighbors and laud the gorgeous place in which we live, but I’m sure that some readers sometimes think I’m blind to the hard things and hard times and simple but emphatic disagreements that happen here in Paradise.

I admit to trying to find the good in life, work, places, and the future, and know that I can sound Pollyannish. Maybe to right that, and maybe because Christmas and the New Year is a traditional time for celebration and hope, it is a good time too to acknowledge current rough patches in our Shangri-La: the 23 jobs lost when D&R Motors went gunnysack this fall; the closing of the OK Theatre; bare cupboards and growing demands at the local food bank; dissension in the city of Joseph over our governance; various illnesses and premature deaths that always grab the wrong people at the wrong time; a recent suicide that left its many victims.

These things are hard, and make small irritants more irritable. It would be nice to have a Will Rogers or Tommy Smothers around to help us laugh our way past some of them. My good old boss, Chuck Gavin, loved to tease a couple of Wallowa ranchers who could not stand Gwen Coffin’s editorial stands in the Chieftain. “Cancel your subscription, did you?” he’d coax. “Again. Heard you’re first one at Shell’s Store when the paper comes out Thursday morning.”

And there was the Wallowa School Board member who sent his kids to school in Enterprise over differences with school administrators and fellow board members. (Chuck loved to query him on that decision!) And the county commission chair-then called the “County Judge”-who had the county crew pave his driveway. He later said that he had meant to reimburse all along. That followed a fight on the County Court and a change of commissioners over where road department tires should be bought. And the county health nurse at the time claimed that she’d never seen a case of child abuse in all her years on the job-Dr. Sharff just scoffed and said that “we take care of things without involving her.”

Division, controversy, and hard times are not new here. But to bring us back to present, the most troubling local issue is certainly the loss of jobs and empty buildings on Main Street. I’d add an undertow of fear-fear of change and fear of keeping things as they are. These fears extend from the current issues on the Joseph City Council agenda-a new public works position and the “idea” of a city manager-to the unsettled future of the Wallowa Lake Dam and nagging underground “news” of Nez Perce attempts to “take back” local land.

They include fears of a Black man in the White House and persistent rumors that good Christians are turning the country over to Moslem terrorists. I know that these fears exist locally because they pop up on the school yard and in local email traffic.

So what do we do entering a new year in hard times with a new president who is preaching hope? We hope! Hope that local people will talk and listen to neighbors openly about their fears and dreams. That they will, when necessary, put shoulders to wheels together to make the local schools, hospital, towns, dams, irrigation districts, food banks, churches, arts groups, sports programs, granges, and economy work. That we will laugh together when we can.

On Sunday morning’s “Meet the Press” Tom Brokow began a long interview with President-elect Obama by suggesting that things are getting worse by the day as he waits to take office. And in maybe the best political news that I’ve heard in decades, the new man did NOT suggest that we shop our way out of the current mess. He acknowledged things, said that we wouldn’t dig our way out in a day, and suggested that we would make the long haul together, that states and governors have public infrastructure projects long overdue and ready on the shelf, and that he would find a way to fund them. That the energy crisis, environmental problems, and failed medical insurance programs, although fearsome in the short run, represent opportunities for real and sustained economic healing and growth.

Life isn’t fair. Bad guys win and good guys lose. All of us make bad choices and most of us get caught up in others’ wrong choices and in events just too big and remote in their origins for us to have much of a say in. But now, with a new President, wood stacked against the winter, two lovely and lively grandkids living with me and excited about snow and Christmas, I can and will hope to high heaven.