Opinion

High school graduations in Plumas County culminate this Friday with commencement exercises at our four public high schools. First and foremost, we need to celebrate our young people for their accomplishments: At this moment, you are beautiful, talented, invincible and immortal.

We also need to recognize the efforts of all school personnel — from the bus drivers to the librarians, the maintenance workers to the administrators — who, each year, do more with less.

The larger community, which is always so generous with scholarships and other forms of support, deserves credit for helping to shepherd our young people through the tumultuous waters of adolescence and into adulthood.

Recently, Plumas County and neighboring Lassen County have been plagued with multiple structure fires, the latest causing extensive smoke damage. Young Sing restaurant was only saved because citizens saw smoke coming from the building and firefighters were able to get to the scene before the building was engulfed in flames.

One thing is sure in the life of this reporter: directors of our local special districts will violate the Brown Act, we’ve seen it time and again.

Grand jury investigations have backed this up on more than one occasion, and many of you read our editorial last week about the legal battle over the Tulare County supervisors’ lunch meetings.

It was reported on one major news network that chatter about unusual activity in Abbottabad, Pakistan, began via Twitter long before the White House made the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed. A tweet went out from someone in the neighborhood about helicopters at the compound.

Texting, tweeting, smartphones and handheld computers are changing the way we gather information about the world in which we live. In the past, living in a small mountain town like Westwood would make it more difficult to stay up to date with current events. That is no longer true. Whether in the rural mountains or downtown New York, you can stay connected.