It is Easter; but I must admit my thoughts are heavy. When I consider the likely fate for this place, all of the possibilities seem very grim. Will our population be devastated by an avian flu pandemic? Will we be wiped out by an al Qaeda attack, undertaken to show Americans that comparatively small places are not immune to terrorism?
Or will we destroy ourselves, consumed by greed and bigotry?
So far this last possibility seems the most likely.
I am one of those who believes that, since the state is willy-nilly going over to gaming, Bethlehem needs to have one of the casinos. As things stand, we have few jobs and no way of protecting irreplaceable aspects of our heritage--a heritage that may well be the most valuable thing we have, even as an economic asset.
But if we get the casino, it WILL bring disruptions, some personal and some communal. There is no doubt of that. Some of these disruptions are on the way even if we don't get a casino. The fact is that New York City is in an expansive mode, and we are as much in the way as if we were standing in the middle of Route 22. (Speaking of which, "improvements" are once again planned for this giant road, and it is believed these "improvements" will take 50 years.)
It takes an enormous amount of hubris to believe these "improvements" will be needed, wanted, or even possible over the long run. Hubris--and greed.
And not the only examples of such to be found in the current situation. A friend of mine last week attended a meeting in Lower Saucon, just east of the South Side of Bethlehem. He told me talk of "development" was wild. People spoke of driving low-income tenants out of their apartments and doubling, and even further increasing, the rent. They spoke of getting control of vast tracts of land, even land with houses on it whose owners don't want to sell. The plan is that, when the trap snaps, when the homeowners discover they've been caught up in a plot they knew nothing of, and the big hotels are ready to move in and build, they--the homeowners-- will be offered so much money they'll be more than happy to sell.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, "O brave new world, that has such evil in it."
I do not know how this will come out, but I fear it may take a terrible tragedy to avert a terrible tragedy. And THAT may be looking at things optimistically.

Please excuse my being a few hours late this week. I have been contemplating an extraordinary experience I had yesterday, when I would normally be writing this weekly message.
That special experience, which I would not have missed for the world, was a live performance by the Allentown Symphony Orchestra of Gustav Mahler's great Symhony No. 2, known as the "Resurrection" symphony for reasons unconnected with Easter.
It was stunning!
I have always believed that a mark of the good life in a particular place is the access its people have to music. All sorts of music, but especially classical music. This kind of music, to my mind, has a special spiritual content which attracts many even from other cultures. That is why even Japanese and Chinese cities have symphony orchestras, and in some cases opera companies; and audiences for them, too. Western classical music is far from the only music with spiritual content; but many find it indispensable. Everyone,in a civilized place, should have a chance to experience it.
Bethlehem's early Moravian founders understood this. Their Collegium Musicum was perhaps the first orchestra in Colonial America--at least in the English colonies. They had composers and instrument makers. They had the first performance in the United States of Haydn's "Creation;" and. much later, of Bach's B minor Mass. They now have the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, the Bethlehem Bach Festival, and of course many fine classical performers passing through Lehigh's Zoellner Arts Center and, to a far lesser extent, Musikfest.
But neither Bethlehem by itself nor the Lehigh Valley as a whole has ever been able to sustain a good classical orchestra for long. Now there is another chance--or rather, THREE other chances. For there are now three fine orchestras in the Valley, none in Bethlehem but all involving at least some Bethlehem people. All deserve the support, not only of Bethlehemites, but of those who care about Bethlehem.
The three are: the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra, Donald Spieth, music director, www.lvco.org; the Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, Allen Birney, music director, sinfonia@fast.net; and the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, Diane Witry, music director, allentownsymphony.org. This last I have personally heard come from being a pickup band, years ago, to being an ensemble capable of yesterday's incandescent Mahler performance.
My suggestion? Get in touch with one or all, find out what there is to hear, and find out how you can help get the word out.

It is edifying in some ways to watch competing forces struggling for the hearts, minds, and souls of Bethlehem and its residents. Nothing could do more to encourage the idea that the town and its people are worth the effort.
They are. But, however the struggle over casino gambling comes out, one group or another is going to feel the place is doomed, its fate sealed.
I know I will feel that way if the anti-gaming forces win. Yet I continue to be amazed by my own point of view. Decades ago I was asked to work at a bingo tent at the Carbon County fair before returning to college. Having every student's need, or at least desire, for more money, I accepted. It was a disquieting week. I could not fail to notice the glazed looks on the faces of some of the players. These people were not having fun; they were gambling the rent money, or whatever they could not afford to lose.
Would that happen here, with a casino? Yes, unfortunately. But it is already happening here, without the presence of a casino. The case of the Lehigh University student who was driven to rob a bank to pay his online poker debt illustrates this. People have always gambled, and will always gamble, wherever they are. The difference a casino will make to Bethlehem is to bring people here, to spend money and to supply jobs. We need jobs, so people can be fed, clothed, and educated; and not least so we can preserve at least part of the city's wonderful heritage.
It should be pointed out that there are no jobs, there is no potential economic development, without risk and without victims. The deaths caused by accidents at Bethlehem Steel and the railroads on the South Side--and, no doubt, by the zinc mills that were there earlier--cannot be written off as if they had never happened. Yet it is unlikely that anyone ever spoke against the steel company's presence in the Christmas City, at least purely on moral grounds.

NOTE ON ANOTHER WORK BY THE WRITER:
For those who have an interest in the Middle East, the memoir "Jerusalem Journal: Adventures In A Desert Landscape" is now available in a kind of preliminary edition. It may be had either as a print-on-demand book or as an ebook. For more information, go to http://lulu.com/campion1.

Yesterday about 100 people, most if not all of them evangelical Christians, walked to protest the possibility of a casino on the South Side. One participant said she thought Bethlehem was a nice place to live and work, and she and her associates want to keep it that way.
Bethlehem has always been a nice place to live, compared to other options available at any given time. But the woman making this comment clearly does not have any sense of the city's history. For the fact is that its attractiveness as a community has nothing to do with the amount of crime and vice here.
I have no doubt that crime was very low in the founding decades of the town, Probably, under the direct influence of the founding Moravians, crime was non-existent, or at least as non-existent as it is possible to get in human society.
But the settlement grew and diversified, and became more "average." This had nothing to do (as was whispered and often expressed) with the new kinds of people who arrived in the community to live and work. To take a short cut in explaining, it had to do with criminals. People who did not live here, but who ran mobs; and who came here only sporadically. They saw Bethlehem and certain other small cities (Pottsville, PA, for example) as relatively safe places for their criminal activities. And so it was.
But lots of good and decent people continued to live here--sometimes, out of economic need, caught up in the fringes of illegal activity; but by and large living normal lives, sending their kids to school and college, and so on.
The fact is, there was plenty of vice. There still is vice; and for an amusing look at it, try reading the "Bubbles" detective stories by Sarah Strohmeyer, daughter of famed former newspaper editor John Strohmeyer. (Strohmeyer's paper was, of course, the "Globe-Times.")
And in between periods of criminal "normality," there were the 20s and 30s, when it is likely that more people came to Bethlehem annually to sample the prostitution, numbers, and illicit liquour than now visit for Christmas.
Saturday's walkers have a perfect right to oppose the coming of a casino, although I disagree with them. But they should at least begin by understanding the city and knowing what they are talking about.

The question has been raised by more than one person I know: How can slots be tolerated at historic places, such as Bethlehem and Gettysburg? Beyond that, how can one person (this writer, for example) be for a slots parlor in one of these precious places and not in the other?
My answer to that is that I believe a slots parlor will destroy the nature of one place, but may save the other.
To put it bluntly, I'd as soon put a slots parlor in Arlington National Cemetery as at Gettysburg. The idea of even putting such a thing there, where so many thousands suffered and died for their disparate visions of the American future, strikes me as obscene. Not only that--it is hard to avoid the impression that the would-be Gettysburg developers chose that town, rather than some other pleasant central Pennsylvania town, because they KNEW the proposition of building such a thing there was obscene. Their proposal is, perhaps, a measure of how far America's spirit and values have fallen. It deserves to be fought tooth and nail.
Why should I feel so differently about the Bethlehem area, where I have lived for so many years? It is because a casino would play a different role here. Bethlehem began as a City In The Wilderness, a center of spiritual development and mission work. It has retained much of its spirituality, but its role relative to the society of which it is part has changed.
No longer is the city a settlement of one church; its people trace their origins to many nations, and belong to many churches and religions. So that, instead of a limited palette, we have rich multiple hues. I submit that many colors are in this case better than one, or only a few.
But we are at the point at which many of the things that have made Bethlehem individual and special are in danger. Many of those things have to do with the giant industry that, far more than the Moravian settlement, made the city famous. When people from our city have traveled around the world, it has been Bethlehem Steel, far more than anything else, that they have been asked about.
The Steel site is likely the only site of its kind left in the world. I understand that the steel mills of Germany are far different from our blast furnaces. The blast furnaces and the buildings that surround them are a kind of industrial Stonehenge, a monument to a vanished way of life that, for all its limitations and the genuine horrors it perpetrated, also did many magnificent things.
I believe that, without the casino, Bethlehem as we have known it, in all its ethnic and cultural richness,is doomed. And this great world-class monument, so unmistakable a symbol of the city's special greatness, will be doomed first of all.
So far, nobody has offered a better prospect of preserving at least a memory of the essence of this small, remarkable place than have the BethWorks people. And that is why, unless someone has a better idea very soon, I am for a slots parlor on the banks of the Lehigh. Right here at Bethlehem.