You are Invited...
November 28th, 2007
Dear Friends:
We are enclosing an invitation to New York Civic's annual fund raiser (click here), which will be held tomorrow night (Thursday, November 29, 2007, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m.). We appreciate the generosity of Georgette Mosbacher, who will be our host at the gathering. She lives at 1020 Fifth Avenue, and the entrance to the building is on East 83rd Street.
This is an opportunity for our wise readers to meet each other. We will enjoy meeting you in person. We hope that as many of you as possible will attend. As usual, there is a sliding scale of prices so you can select one, or any other sum you choose to give that is within the range that proceeds from Yorkie to Great Dane, or beyond, on the invitation.
We are proud to be the nonprofit with the lowest overhead in the city. I do not receive a salary, but I am a member of the New York City Employees' Retirement System, which keeps the wolf from the door. Other needed sevices are donated to New York Civic by generous friends.
Now five years old, we would like to expand our activities beyond the commentary you receive once or twice weekly. We would like to investigate the facts, if any, behind some newspaper stories, and report to you on their percentage of truth. We are particularly interested in press releases by public officials. Some are merely statements of opinion, while others are labeled as fact. It was said about 60 years ago that one of the newsmagazines (a new form of expression in those days) boasted that it separated fact from opinion, but its rival pointed out that they then printed the opinion. We would like to have the resources, which will of course be used sparingly, to look into the printed and televised words we read and see each day, and examine their shifting relationships with reality.
You can help us do this with your gift. We hope you enjoy the articles we write and send to you. We could do much more if we had the modest amount needed to recruit and provide a stipend to people interested in public affairs, perhaps students at a local graduate school. It would be a learning experience for both the students and us.
New York Civic has been in existence since February 2002. At first we called ourselves "New York's Youngest Civic Organization," but that is probably no longer the case. It would be presumptuous for us to style ourselves "New York's Most Literate Civic Organization", so we will leave it to you, our readers, to suggest a superlative, preferably understated, that might distinguish us from the other worthy causes that seek your kind assistance.
We love the City, and we are dedicated to its honest and efficient government. It is perhaps a greater challenge to do this from the outside than from the inside, but there are compensating benefits. One is more freedom to say and write what you believe, rather than reflecting the views of your master. A second is meeting interesting people on the subway and on the bus. This helps us to develop and reinforce a sense of activism, which one hopes more people will adopt with regard to our City.
But whether or not they do, there is enormous satisfaction in doing work in which you believe. We ask you to join in that effort, by contributing your time, your money, or some of each. Please be as helpful as you can.
All the best,
StarQuest
