http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=euLTJbMUKvH&b=412 359&ct=2016415
Crazy about the Navy By SCOTT LEWIS Thursday, March 2, 2006 Full disclosure: My wife is an officer in the Navy. I have the Navy to thank for bringing me to a place where the weather's so nice the dead of winter only means that I might have to wear a sweatshirt. I have the Navy to thank for a group of charmingly weird friends I know I would have never met had she not chosen such a peculiar career. Best of all, I have the Navy to thank for cheap gasoline. But I also have the Navy to thank for extended periods of celibacy and bad diet. I have the Navy to thank for the stupid oddity of not knowing when, exactly, my wife will be back from an "underway." For whatever reason she isn't supposed to tell me when the ship is scheduled to come in. So I never know just how long, exactly, I can put off cleaning the house. I suppose I could just keep the house clean all the time while she's gone. But where's the sport in that? So in discussions about the Navy, I have to disclose that I don't come to the table with an open mind. I can only promise a bit of schizophrenic babbling about how the Navy's been good to us and I appreciate it but that I also hate it. .. ... ... .. ... ... I don't know if building an airport at Miramar or expanding the current airport out to North Island is the right thing to do. I really don't. I'm one of those who see Lindbergh Field as unbelievably convenient yet I acknowledge that it's really weird to have a major airport cramped in so close to a city's urban core. While the military was deciding which Navy and Marine bases around the country it was closing, the airport authority could have brought up all of the options it was exploring to put an airport on military land. Local leaders could have asked the Navy to cooperate the way they're asking now. After all, if the best path for the airport authority is to look at military bases as possible sites for a new airport, it would have been right for the agency to look at them last year and before. But instead, it let people like Duke Cunningham scare it into pretending that we -- as San Diegans -- were united in our desire to keep the military and its bases. It's never good to make decisions out of fear or weakness. Now when we approach military leaders about being cooperative and giving up some of their land for a new airport, they are justified in looking at us like we're schizophrenics. And maybe we are. But if so, we shouldn't have ever pretended otherwise. ---------------------
