Our newspaper reflects what is important to our community — both in the stories we cover and the letters we receive.

We’ve been struck in recent weeks by how much of what we’ve covered over the years, programs important to our community, is being chipped away by the federal government.

As far back as 1991, we wrote about the Head Start program that helped build good futures for Hilltown families. 

“Head Start is there all the way for you,” said Kay McIntyre at the time. The mother of eight children, she said, “I have a speech problem. I have no teeth. How can you teach your child if you can’t do it yourself?”

Through Head Start, she was able to enroll her son in a program that helped his speech. But Head Start did more than prepare her child for kindergarten. “Head Start helps where we have a mouth to use it,” she said, citing the help she got in applying for a free lunch program at school.

The parents whose kids were in the program also spoke of the sense of community Head Start engendered. “A lot of mothers don’t have cars here,” said Kay Quinto, the Head Start teacher at the time. “The peer group creates a group of friends. A real camaraderie comes out as we work on problems and projects and parties.”

She also said of the families she worked with, “They’ve just had some rough times; that’s all. They’re an exceptional group of parents … Families in the Hilltowns are very strong and resourceful, and they’re a warm, welcoming group of people.”

The Trump administration is now asking Congress to eliminate funding for Head Start.

As early as 2014, we covered Guilderland’s medical director for emergency services demonstrating how to administer a dose of naloxone with an atomizer. Since then, we’ve written about people who had suffered opioid overdoses but were saved with Narcan.

In 2023, we wrote about the Guilderland Public Library housing a dispenser in its lobby with free Narcan kits, supplied by the county; other places followed suit.

We wrote on this page how, as a nation and locally, we have progressed since the era of “Just Say No.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, that catchphrase embodied a simplistic approach to stopping drug addiction. It, perhaps inadvertently, created a divide between “them” and “us,” promoting the notion that, since it was easy to say “no,” those who became addicted were somehow lesser, weaker, not deserving of our empathy.

We, at The Enterprise, have watched a sea change unfold locally over the past few decades just as it has unfolded nationally.

We wrote, for example, in 2014 about a white, middle-class kid from a loving home in Guilderland who had ruptured his spleen in a snowboard accident, and then became hooked on the prescribed pain meds. When requirements tightened for oxycodone, he turned to heroin.

As a young adult, he couldn’t hold a job and eventually lost his apartment. He’d used up his days for treatment and was living in the city mission. He stole to support his habit, was arrested, put in county lock-up, asphyxiated himself in his jail cell — and died in a hospital emergency room

This was not a problem of others; this was our own.

The Trump budget draft would end a $56 million annual grant program that distributes naloxone and trains emergency responders to administer the drug in the case of opioid overdoses — annually saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

For decades, we have written about the endangered Karner blue butterfly and local efforts by the Pine Bush Preserve Commission, by Save the Pine Bush, by now-retired Farnsworth Middle School teacher Alan Fiero and others to preserve the globally rare pine barrens and the butterfly that has come to stand for its salvation.

When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species in 1859, our Earth had fewer than a billion people. Darwin wrote of species that were interconnected with each other in ways we still don’t fully understand.

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank,” he wrote, “clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

People now number over 8 billion, and countless species have gone extinct.

We wrote on this page, during Trump’s first administration, of our concerns over the weakening of the Endangered Species Act. For half a century, that act helped protect the plants and birds, the fish and insects and animals that are most vulnerable.

As the United Nations report warned in 2019, we human beings are altering the natural world and speeding extinction at a rate that is “unprecedented.” Up to a million plants and animals around the globe are now threatened with extinction, the report said, which in turn threatens the ecosystems humans depend on to survive. Global warming, the report found, is a major force in pushing species to extinction.

It is hard to read such a report, we wrote when it was released, knowing that at the same time our nation is recklessly undermining the very law that relied on science to protect endangered species, allowing instead economic assessments to determine whether a species is to be protected. Because the effects of climate change may not be immediate, those, too, are downplayed now.

For short-term profits from logging or drilling or mining, ecosystems that would sustain humans in the long run will be undermined, we wrote, asking: What recourse do we have in the face of such hubris? How can we avert the catastrophe that will surely follow?

Now, the current Trump administration seeks to rescind the definition of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act. The proposed rule would narrow the meaning of “harm” to apply just to activities like hunting or trapping that cause intentional injury as opposed to the broader interpretation of habitat destruction.

As is clear in the local example of the endangered Karner blue butterfly, habitat destruction — in this case, development of the pine bush — is the major threat to survival.

What do these three examples of federal cuts affecting local programs  — and our regular readers will be aware of many more, from food pantry to library and museum cuts —  have in common?

Our readers are reacting.

Last week, we published a letter from Karen Covert-Jones of Guilderland who wrote that the elimination of Head Start would have “a devastating effect on our most at-risk children.”

She wrote, “In rural and underserved areas, it’s really the only support system that families have … Head Start isn’t just compassionate — it’s smart. Children in the program are more likely to graduate, avoid poverty, and contribute positively to society. And every $1 invested yields up to $9 in return through long-term economic and social benefits.”

We also published last week a letter from Kurt Larson of Altamont on the proposal to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

Larson correctly wrote, “This guts the very mechanism that has protected species like the black rhino, California condor, various whales, grizzly bears, and countless others from oblivion.”

We second his call to action: “So, are we simply helpless and is this a fait accompli? Hell no! The following link is your way to respond during the public-comment period: bit.ly/4jzKyHw. Your comments matter and can help provide support for potential lawsuits if this rule goes forward.

“We owe it to our children and future generations to help protect our water, air, and animals from further degradation and harm!”

We’ve heard, too, from readers concerned about the proposed cut to funding for naloxone. Assemblyman Phil Steck, who chairs the Committee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, advised a crowd at Guilderland’s Tyler Station concerned about federal cuts, “It’s more important to be involved in your state.”

The question becomes: How do we coalesce to restore a government — a federal government each of us supports with our tax dollars — that serves our needs?

Our governor, Kathy Hochul, put out a statement on May 2, the day Trump unveiled his budget, saying, “While I’m doing everything in my power to protect New Yorkers from these devastating blows, no state in the nation can backfill the cuts that the President is proposing.”

That’s true. No state can pay for what is lost in federal cuts nor can any local government. Further, some programs need to be federal in order to be effective. 

As we’ve written on this page before, while the courts have provided some protection against the executive branch of our government overstepping its bounds, the third branch of government, Congress, has not. 

If the Republican members of Congress cannot or will not see the harm being done to their constituents and act to restore both needed programs and essential rights, we the People need to work toward that restoration.

We were heartened on May Day by what we heard as we covered a symposium held by the Center for Women In Government and Civil Society at the University at Albany.

Dialogue centered on reviving our collective power.

Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan said, “The abolitionist movement started in people’s living rooms” and urged listeners to invite people into their living rooms now to develop strategies to fight for rights.

“It’s not just people who work in government,” said Sheehan of who should be active. “It’s all of us in civil society.”

Marion Porterfield, Schenectady’s council president, a Black woman, said the Civil Rights movement provides a road map. She spoke of the rights her grandparents and great-grandparents had fought for.

“Somewhere along the line, we almost forgot,” she said. “And this is reminding us that we fought the fight, but we have to continue …. You fight for what’s right and you just don’t fight for yourself,” Porterfield went on. “You fight for the other person as well because someday you could be the other person.”

“Amen!” came a chorus from the crowd.

No one mentioned the suffragist movement but that, too, provides a road map. Some of the women who organized the first Woman’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls in 1848, did not live to see suffrage granted nationwide in 1920. The movement progressed in fits and starts, often one state at a time, but it succeeded in the end because of its diversity, with an extremely broad class base.

We urge our readers to think of our opinion pages as your living room — a place where you can share your thoughts and gather momentum as we work with our neighbors to create a government that is a force for good — helping those in need while also protecting our health and environment for future generations.

Pick up your pen; it’s mightier than the sword.