Just shake hands (Editorial, Aug. 10)

“It is proverbial that old men plant trees as an act of faith, precisely because they know they won’t themselves live to sit under the shade. In this spirit, we believe the time has come to put aside political differences and plant seeds of justice and reconciliation.”
— Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Dec. 21.1998.
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Let the healing begin.
The ravages of the Battle of Ruthsburg have left a county divided among itself.
Farmers — former friends — do not speak to one another. Citizens, who serve their community in organizations or on administrative boards or even in church councils, avoid contact had they held opposing views on the plan to establish an anti-terrorist training center for federal diplomats on Queen Anne’s County farmland.
We have heard terrible tales of venom directed from one side of the debate to the other, of insults hurled and, yes, even death threats,
This is the rubble, the debris, the detritus, which the federal government has left behind in what it now admits, from the highest level of authority, was a mistake.
The General Services Administration and the Department of State sang a siren’s song about a never-never land, forever prosperous, blessed with the generosity of the stimulus fund, its unemployed put to work, its rural economy provided with enormous muscle.
Would it have been so? We shall never know. Because from the very beginning, it was apparent, even to those in the nation’s capital charged with clearing the path to construction, those 2,000 acres in dot-on-the-map Ruthsburg, were not the place to put the facility.
Facts, troublesome facts but quickly apparent facts, got in the way. Under those farmland acres, the federal officials quickly learned, lay the remnants of an ancient Indian civilization. On the borders of the site scampered the Delmarva fox squirrel. Near or through the property ran streams whose waters flowed through a state park on their way to the Chesapeake Bay.
These elements of the project defied mitigation, and the feds knew it. So, in the end, they pulled out, leaving behind a critically wounded county, divided unto itself, those who had favored the installation wondering what might have been and, those who had opposed, relieved that they didn’t have to find out.

Let us now bind up the county’s wounds and get on with the business at hand. Those five letters, FASTC, are now written in the history of Queen Anne’s County, and all of that other county business and all of those other community considerations, which  succumbed to the FASTC storm for so many months, need attention.Let the folks across the county, no matter their persuasion, shake hands.

Let the healing begin.