Ancient themes in a modern setting: Dr. Nassim's office now open.

Here's one cribbed from the Healthblogger's post-it note:

Despite controversy, Nassim building to open, by Amany Ali (from the Saturday edition of the New Albany Tribune).

Here are edited excerpts:

A well-known local doctor met with opposition in her attempts to expand her operation, but she has accomplished her goal and will start a new chapter … Dr. Cynthia G. Nassim, M.D. said Friday that she is excited about getting back to just practicing medicine …beginning Monday, the doctor will begin seeing patients at a much larger facility at 2305 Green Valley Road near the Ellen Court subdivision …

… She faced opposition from neighbors of the Ellen Court area who didn't think a medical facility suited their neighborhood.

Warren Nash lives on Ellen Court and is still against the medical offices at the Green Valley Road location.

"It obviously doesn't fit in with the neighborhood," Nash said. "It shouldn't have been approved."

Nash said he has already face problems exiting his neighborhood because of construction equipment. He thinks the problem will be worsened once the office opens.

Several months ago, when Dr. Nassim’s case was brought before the City Council, it prompted a famously cantankerous episode in which then-council president Bill Schmidt, also a resident of Ellen Court, at first refused to recuse himself owing to a painfully obvious conflict of interest stemming from his involvement with those in the neighborhood who opposed the project, before relenting and permitting deliberations to proceed in his absence.

Longtime community political leader, former mayor and real estate agent Nash was among those speaking against the offices, and now, perhaps a year later, his annoyance is unabated even as the medical offices are finished -- a development that can only be good for the community as a whole.

Consequently, the Nassim case has all the elements of Greek tragedy, which specializes in narratives that result in its heroes being humbled by internal contradictions.

Certainly most of us looking on at the time felt bad for the residents of Ellen Court, a quiet and well maintained older subdivision now hemmed in on most sides by commercial development along State Street. Speaking personally, I still feel bad for them. They’re solid people with nice homes, and the older homeowners certainly didn’t foresee the way that their immediate vicinity would change during their period of residence.

But it has changed … and there’s the rub.

It is indisputable that many decades of civic service and involvement have been proffered to the community by Nash and Schmidt, and to their credit.

However, it follows that their proximity to the various levers of power implies an intimate connection with the processes of local zoning and the many precedents for interpreting these processes.

The New Albany that these Democratic politicians helped to tolerate, encourage and create – sometimes purposefully, sometimes in the breach -- is the same one that ultimately generated Dr. Nassim’s presence in the council chambers, asking for zoning exceptions and considerations that have long since been regarded as reasonable in the main, and generally approved as a matter of course by men like Nash and Schmidt until brought uncomfortably close to their own backyards.

There’s no intended moral to this story, although readers are encouraged to brown-bag it and provide their own.

At the same time, it is encouraging that men like these, when faced with developments that they find disagreeable – which undoubtedly make them mad as hell – nonetheless comply with the law even when the law seems to be taunting them. They’re not donning masks, lobbing bricks, shutting down sewage facilities, breaking and entering, and making dire threats against the community that has nurtured them – their community, after all.

Then again, perhaps that is the moral.