225BatonRouge.com

If 2008 were a clean slate and you could choose where the community goes next, where would you take us? It had better be a better place because Baton Rougeans are hungry for change.

We sent a delegation to Portland, and they returned brimming with fresh ideas.

LSU’s football team showed us we can be among the best in the land and gave us something to rally around.

We helped elect a young, upstart governor; we helped yank from office some powerful incumbents who’d overstayed their welcome. And we scrapped our arcane Sunday blue laws.

Now a new class of leaders promises new and better times for Louisiana and Baton Rouge.

But each of us must keep up our end of the deal. As parents, we must do a better job preparing our children for a quickening world, where jobs become more challenging, competition more intense, and the cost of living ever-higher. We should sit down and listen to our children every day, stay involved with their development, and only then can we demand that their teachers and schools provide a better education.

As employees we must become more nimble and sharp, and prepare ourselves to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge in order to build the kind of steady careers our parents enjoyed simply by showing up to work each day.

As taxpaying voters we must inform ourselves with the truth about the problems we expect our elected leaders to solve. We should read and keep up with the news, and turn out at public meetings to ask questions and demand that elected officials prove to us they are thinking through each problem and solving them in our best interests.

As residents of the Baton Rouge area we must accept our share of responsibility for keeping our environment clean and safe. We should clean up after ourselves, we should drive safely and with consideration for others, and we should look out for our neighbors’ safety as well as our own.

As fun-loving Louisianans we should engage our city’s entertainment choices with gusto. We should seek out local artists, musicians, writers, chefs and actors to nourish our bodies and souls, and to remain open to learning from them what we don’t yet know about ourselves. We should seek out locally owned businesses and support the entrepreneurs who have risked it all to pursue their dreams.

A healthy city is composed of healthy neighborhoods, which are made up of families who care not only about themselves, but those around them as well.

So in 2008, don’t ask where your new leaders will take you. Rather, ask yourself what are you prepared to do to make life better.