 Hello, my name is Tim Waters. I serve on City Council representing Ward 1, which is the east side of Longmont. If the outset of this video, I want to just take a little bit of time to say thanks to the multitude of people, the first responders, medical personnel who show up every day sacrificing potentially their health and safety and the health and safety of their families. In my interest and in our interest, they show up every day to do their job so we can do what we're supposed to do to contain this virus by staying home. So thanks to our folks who are on the front lines of this crisis. Thanks as well to the City of Longmont staff. They are working tirelessly around the clock in service to this community and in the interest of the health safety and welfare of every Longmont resident. Thanks to the grocers, the folks who work at pharmacies, the bankers, folks who are showing up every day on the job. So when we venture out, we can do so quickly and safely and get back to what we are doing as we isolate socially distanced from one another so they can do their jobs. So with those thoughts in mind, I want to take just a few minutes to reflect on the situation we find ourselves in in this crisis. And the the tendency for each of us to focus on the worst fears we bring to situations like this. We all have them. We bring them to every, we bring them every day to almost every experience we have, but in circumstances like this where we see in a 24-hour news cycle kind of examples of our worst fear playing out in real time, it would be it would be easy to focus only on our worst fears and begin to develop strategies for trying to avoid them. History teaches us that doing that increases the likelihood that we actually create them. So for me, going forward rather than focusing on worst fears, I believe my time and my energy and my imagination will be more effectively utilized by focusing on my best hopes. Which we all have just as we bring worst fears, we all also have best hopes. And my best hopes as we as we move forward will be that on the other side of this we find ourselves in a in a community that has a deeper and and clearer understanding of the concept of a common good and what we all do to contribute to the welfare and the benefit of everyone. That what I do makes a difference in the lives of others. And I have an obligation to contribute to the welfare and the benefit of the larger community, common good. Number one, number two, to get through this, I'm going to remember four R's responsibility that I have a personal obligation to comply with the guidance we've received from our public health officials and our local municipal officials. It's my responsibility, my obligation to do my job by socially isolating so others can do theirs. I also need my neighbors to do the same thing. So the second R's reliability that as I fulfill my responsibility I need to count on everybody else in the community fulfilling theirs. And as a result, we're more reliable as a community to do what we need to do to contain the virus. Number three is resilience. This is a tough situation, a lethal, faceless adversary that we're dealing with. And as we see the new cycles playing out, it would be easy for us to throw up our hands and say, you know, I'm just going to go ahead and do my own thing because I don't see anything good on the other side of this. But we need to keep bouncing back. We need to get up every day understanding it's our job to stay in this with one another. No matter how many times we get knocked down, it's not about how many times you get knocked down, it's about how many times you get back up, we've heard that a lot of times. Resilience is going to be critical to this. We have to hang in together. So on the other side of this, we continue to stay connected as a community, like we were before we got found ourselves in this situation. And fourth is resourcefulness, the fourth R. We were blessed on the front end of this crisis to have deep talent reserves. We've got incredible people in this community. We've got an enormous amount of social capital and we have terrific assets, all sorts of assets. So what we need to be very thoughtful about and mindful of is how we optimize those resources and extend them to those who are going to need more from us as we go through this. So responsibility, reliability, resilience, and resourcefulness. So I'm going to remember personally one of the big lessons learned by somebody by the name of Victor Frankel, who was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who became a 20th century psychiatrist. In his reflections on his experience in the concentration camp, reflected that under the worst of circumstances, the one thing that no one can take away from us is our attitude, the path we choose forward in light of whatever crisis or trauma or drama we're working our way through. So as we go forward, for me, I'm going to choose a path that keeps me focused on my best hopes. I'm going to do that with the serenity prayer in mind, which we've all heard and I'll just remind one more time, that God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Take care of yourselves and be kind to one another.