Whitcomb: Cancer Then & Now; Service With Static; Broken Bridges; Good for South Coast; Bible Grift
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Cancer Then & Now; Service With Static; Broken Bridges; Good for South Coast; Bible Grift
“To some the gain, to some the loss,
To each his chance, the game with Fate:
For men must die that men may live—
Dear Lord, be kind to those who wait.’’
-- From “The Cod-Fisher,’’ by Joseph Lincoln (1870-1944), an American author of novels, poems and short stories, many set on a fictionalized Cape Cod.
“The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’’
--Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), British writer and physician
“Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.’’
-- Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986). Anglo-American writer
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The crimson buds popping on maple trees are a heartening offset to the generally grim world news. (But then, the world news has almost always sounded grim.) Not that Mother Nature gives a damn whether we’re heartened or not.
It’s sensuous, now that the days are softening, to stroll around outside without a hat.
Be on the lookout for mourning cloak butterflies at this time of year. They’re dark maroon, or occasionally brown, with ragged pale-yellow edges, and iridescent blue spots between the maroon and the yellow.
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For a long time, many, perhaps most people would avoid talking about cancer suffered by family and friends. Given that few families have been untouched by cancer, this code of silence did damage, sometimes even in delaying treatment.
Obituaries would usually omit reporting cancer as the cause of death. They’d often cite “pneumonia’’ or just “a long illness’’ as the cause. And indeed, in the final stages of cancer, pneumonia is often the coup de grace. In the earlier part of the AIDS epidemic, the same sort of cover-up was applied. But you could often guess – not many 30-year-olds die of pneumonia unless they have cancer or AIDS (which can include various cancers).
The fear of cancer was so severe that some people wouldn’t visit patients with it, for fear that they’d get it. Cancer is not contagious.
We’re more open and honest these days about cancer.
The other thing that the princess’s not fully described abdominal cancer reminded me of is the alarming and mysterious increase in the incidence of a range of cancers in people under 50, most notably colon cancer. Researchers are trying to figure out why.
Do ultra-processed foods, sugary drinks, eating red meat, air and water pollution, plastics, sleep problems, obesity, and physical inactivity (the last two items not an issue with the Princess of Wales) play parts in the growing incidence of early-onset cancers? These can cause problems such as inflammation, which is associated with some cancers, and heart disease.
Write Them a Letter Instead?
One of the many frustrations of life today in America is the decline of service (except for those rich enough to have concierge service, etc.) We’re increasingly forced to “talk” with computers or with the many low-paid service people who, after we’re put on hold for half an hour or more – “your call is very important to us’’ -- speak to us with foreign accents that are so thick as to make their responses to our questions virtually incomprehensible. (Having lived and worked in a place where English isn’t the dominant tongue, I’m sympathetic, but….)
One thing I like about living in a compact city such as Providence is that it’s easier than in most of the U.S. to go to places where you can talk to people in person about a service problem, say about medical-insurance coverage. Even if those people have thick accents, you can usually make out what they’re saying, sometimes with a bit of lip reading. Of course, many of the service people you’re forced to deal on the phone with don’t live in America.
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Here’s another irritant, albeit only for people trying to find an on-street parking space on Providence’s College Hill: The city’s deal, struck in 2012, with private Brown University to lease city-owned parking spaces to Brown, in what always struck me as a dubious reverse “taking,’’ to use the legal term. This has made it difficult for many people to find parking before, say, going to the courthouse on Benefit Street. And the parking signs along the streets with these Brown/city spaces confuse many.
The city reaps the revenue from people without a Brown permit who get stuck with a parking ticket.
Basically a Good Thing
Some in New Bedford and Fall River fear that when the very, very long delayed new MBTA train service from Boston starts, hopefully later this year, that poor and middle-income people will suffer because the new easier access to the capital of New England’s affluent metro area will bring new residents to the South Coast who will bid up housing prices.
Well, that’s probably true, although taking urgent steps to build more housing would alleviate that.
But all in all, the coming closer transportation integration with Greater Boston will be a boon. It will bring many more high-paying tech and other companies to the South Coast. Much of the new money will be spent at new and established local businesses, such as stores and restaurants, providing new jobs for many low-and-middle-income people. It will make more money available to local charities.
And, very importantly, the new rail service will tend to reduce traffic congestion on Route 24 and other highways connecting New Bedford and Fall River to the Boston area. That will enable many businesses and individuals to go about their days more efficiently, and will reduce air and water pollution in densely populated southeastern New England.
The destruction of Baltimore’s Key Bridge by a gigantic out-of-control container ship is a reminder of how much safer tunnels are than bridges. That is, they’re safer to use if not to build, and they obviously cost more to construct – perhaps three times as much. It’s also a reminder of the need for resilience in transportation infrastructure in such crucial areas as Baltimore Harbor, one of the nation’s biggest ports. That includes offering more routes and ports to handle container ships.
Who’s to blame for the Key Bridge disaster? Maybe nobody, which will frustrate the many of us who seek the identification of culprits to soothingly clarify a complex series of issues.
Anyway, we’d be better off if we made more use of smaller ports so that we weren’t so economically vulnerable to a disaster at one big one. This would require, among other things, more dredging to let smaller ports handle larger ships, as well as laying down new rail connections and improving automation of port operations.
Quonset, the Port of Providence and Boston come to mind as ports that could help offset some of the Baltimore disaster.
There may be lessons for rebuilding the Key Bridge (and the Route 195 West bridge between Providence and East Providence) in the fast fix last year of a collapsed section of Route 95 in Philadelphia. The reconstruction included cutting regulatory red tape and virtually unprecedented cooperation among state, federal and local authorities, unions and building-materials suppliers.
The six road workers who died in the disaster were from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
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Well, something good has come out of the Route 195 West bridge mess: This year’s Providence Marathon and Half Marathon, which had been scheduled for May 5, have been canceled. And so key parts of the city won’t be paralyzed that day after all.
Maybe a canoe or kayak race instead?
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It’s good news for our air quality and climate that New England’s last two coal-fired electricity-generating plants will close in the next few years. Granite Shore Power will shut its Schiller Station, in Portsmouth, N.H., by the end of 2025 and its Merrimack Station, in Bow, N.H., by June 30, 2028. The company plans to transform the two places into sites for large-scale battery storage facilities for storing energy from renewable sources. Merrimack Station will also include a 100-megawatt solar-energy array.
The aim of a lot of the leading American Fascists churning out lies is to make money off those lies. Their leader, of course, has a decades-long grifting tradition. His latest scam is particularly impressive.
The most immoral – both in public and private life – president in American history has tried to peddle anything not nailed down. And now he’s selling Bibles to his willfully ignorant and/or moronic fans! His ads say it’s “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump.” (Note his ad copy never says “former president’’).
Then there’s Trumper Alex Jones, who cooks up massive lie-based conspiracy theories to draw people to his media, where he markets the likes of quack health supplements. This man, like his leader, is so corrupt that it’s difficult to decide which of his outrages to put at the top, but high up is his theory (which he knew full well from the start was a lie) that the massacre by a young lunatic with an assault-style rifle of 20 little children and six staffers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, was a hoax meant to encourage gun control. In doing so, he has made life hell for the families of the murdered up to the present.
Hit this link, which includes the trailer for the film about this low life’s scams:
Historians, sociologists and psychiatrists can look into why tens of millions of Americans find this squalor acceptable, with some embracing it. Maybe more than a few are jealous; they wish they could pull off lucrative scams, too.
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Garry Kasparov notes that Putin’s history suggests that the terror attack at the entertainment venue near Moscow could have been an inside job directed by the tyrant to justify even more vicious attacks on Ukraine and worse repression at home. Putin has been more than happy to kill fellow Russians to keep himself in power. Or perhaps the regime, which had been warned by the U.S. that a terror attack was in the offing, just let it happen. Security people took their time in arriving at the venue.
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The disturbed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is receiving lots of money from Trump backers with the aim of draining votes from Biden. Indeed, he could well put the thug back in the Oval Office. Just about everyone in Bobby’s family opposes his candidacy, basically saying he’s crazy, but that might not be enough to block his toxins from resulting in an open-ended Fascist and kleptocratic dictatorship starting next January.
Kennedy’s worst legacy so far is his promotion of lies about public health measures in general and especially about vaccines, about which his conspiracy theories and lies have been lethal. A look at his very troubled private life, marital, drugs and otherwise, suggests why he’s so dangerous to America in his public life.