Luzerne County Courthouse
I hate to add to the gallons of ink that have been splashed on the subject of the Luzerne County courthouse crimes and high misdemeanors. Partly because I really don’t want to add to the public shame that is ours as a community anymore than I have to. And partly because, really, what is left to say?
But I got to thinking the other day, a dangerous thing in and of itself, and I started to wonder what it must be like, over there at 200 North River Street. What it must be like for the rest of the 360 or so employees left to hold down the fort?
The closest I can come in my own experience is when the radio station I was working for at the time was being sold. First started the rumors. The water cooler talk. You notice a few doors that were once always open, now always shut. Whispered conversations that stop when you enter a room. Then when it gets to the stage where a careful inventory was made of all the assets you knew something was in the wind and it wasn’t Chanel No.5.
Soon thereafter a group of men in suits were “visiting†and if you weren’t aware then that you had met the new bosses you were soon thereafter.
I have been through that ordeal a number of times in my career. The first instinct is to abandon the premises like rats do a sinking ship. In most cases that is the correct behavior. When someone new takes over things are different, jobs are lost and often the whole direction of the company can change, not always for the better.
And so inside the gold dome it must be sort of like that.
It must be miserable to work in a place that has such a group of thunderclouds hovering over it. That the investigation is far from over has been made abundantly clear by those who are doggedly pursuing the evil doers.
Picture this. You head into work on a sunny Monday and stop by your boss’s office only to see him being led out in handcuffs by dark suited agents of the FBI and the IRS.
A year or two ago it would have seemed like something out of a John Grisham novel. Now it’s a reality all too harsh in the glare of the day.
Don’t mistake this as sympathy for the ones who did wrong. This is just a hope that those honest workers by the Susquehanna and that’s probably most of the 360, can one day hold their heads up, and stop looking over their shoulders.
I would hate to be wrong about that.
Go back to today’s Blog post for 1/16/11
