Whitcomb: Fare Break on MBTA; Multi-Use Coastal Crop; A Tawdry Time
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Fare Break on MBTA; Multi-Use Coastal Crop; A Tawdry Time
“I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
For traffic lights he handed at (sic) red and green
lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go slow, children.’’
-- From “Mr. Mine, ‘’ by Anne Sexton (1928-1974), Massachusetts-based poet
"Prudence is no doubt a valuable quality, but prudence which denigrates into timidity is very seldom the path to safety.”
-- Robert Cecil (1864 to 1958), a British lawyer, politician and diplomat
"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.’’
-- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), English writer
The robins sing into the darkness on these late-spring evenings, as blossoming reaches its annual crescendo.
The MBTA serves many Rhode Islanders, most notably users of commuter rail to and from Boston, as well as throngs of Bay Staters. Its board has approved half-off fares to people earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level – about $30,120 for a single person and $62,400 for a family of four, reports CommonWealthBeacon magazine. The plan is for the program to start this summer.
For economic stimulus via increasing regional mobility, and for the environmental benefits of reducing car traffic, this could be good, but I wonder about verifying income – via income-tax returns? How many of the folks affected even file them?
I’d suggest that the fare deal could encourage more people to take the train to see a game at Fenway Park, but who of these folks could afford that?
Some localities, such as Worcester, have been experimenting with free passes for local public transit buses. The program seems very popular, including with the business community, mostly because it helps more employees get to work, and will probably continue indefinitely.
Speaking of economic mobility, the biggest impediment to southern New England being able to keep an adequate workforce to maintain long-term prosperity is housing costs. Thus, state governments must gird themselves to take on ever-louder local opposition in some towns (not so much in cities, which, of course, are already dense) to build more housing, which would tend to moderate, or even reduce, dwelling expenses. These confrontations won’t often be pleasant, and many compromises will be needed on zoning ordinances and other local rules and practices. But in the end, it’s the state’s call.
But parts of America, especially in the Sun Belt, that have lured many new residents with lower housing costs are now facing much higher property expenses because of global-warming-related problems. For example, residents of Texas and Florida are being hammered by soaring costs for property insurance – that is, if they can get such coverage at all -- as storms, floods and fires become more frequent and intense. Believe it or not, southern New England’s climate is comparatively benign.
From watching the national evening news on TV with all that free video of tornadoes, you’d get the impression that the tempests are stationary over the same stretches of land every day.
Expand This Coastal Crop
When I was a kid living along Massachusetts Bay, we often saw seaweed (various species of marine macroalgae – kelp, etc.) as somewhat irritating. It could get in the way of fishing lines, and it would pile up on beaches in rank rows.
But seaweed, which, blessedly, grows rapidly, is looking better and better. It absorbs carbon dioxide, absorption that directly fights global warming, and it offsets a bit of ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide from our fossil-fuel burning; it slows coastal erosion by weakening the force of waves in storms that have worsened as sea levels rise, and provides shelter for innumerable marine creatures. It’s used to make food, fertilizer, medicines, bioplastics, biofuel and animal feed.
(I’m sure that many readers have tried the seaweed salad in ethnic Asian restaurants.)
And now researchers are investigating its use as a source of minerals, such as platinum and rhodium, as well as “rare-earth” elements (which actually aren’t that rare), that are crucial in the renewable-energy sector and in other technological applications, too. Seaweed sucks up these minerals.
Much more research needs to be done to demonstrate all possible uses of seaweed, but the potential for seaweed aquaculture seems enormous. I can see many profitable new seaweed farms being developed off the southern New England coast. There’s already a large kelp-farming sector in the Gulf of Maine, benefiting from the size of available waters, and the industry is growing along the Rhode Island and Connecticut shoreline, too.
It’s heartening to see scientists working on all-natural ways to address global warming. Of course, in some places there will be fights over which sites to take over for seaweed farming; I hope that the broad public interest will usually win over, say, the demands of summer yachtsmen. Certainly, these farm sites should be chosen carefully, with guidance from the likes of the Marine Biological Laboratory, in the village of Woods Hole in Falmouth, Mass.
Fiscal Benefit From Immigrants?
A few months ago, there was a solid bipartisan bill in Congress to tighten controls at our southern border in order to dramatically reduce the number of migrants illegally entering the U.S. But Trump ordered his timorous servants in the House to kill the bill, fearing that it might help Biden get re-elected.
In any event, you might take a look at economist Tyler Cowan’s report that new research shows that low-skilled immigrants (which means most of the illegals) provide a net fiscal benefit to the U.S. of about $750 each.
But it’s complicated, and the data can be interpreted in various ways. And consider that immigrant influxes, whatever their net economic effects, can foment fear, anxiety and resentment among many citizens. You can see this in the anti-immigrant stance of even places, such as West Virginia, that get few migrants, legal or otherwise. Indeed, localities with few new immigrants seem most afraid of them. Is that ignorance or something else?
In any event, there’s a limit to how much rapid additional multiculturalism and identity politics America can take without coming apart further, especially with demagogues at the ready. Things need to slow down, which the bill above would have helped bring about.
And part of all this is that while America, in the long run, might be stronger if more of us were multilingual, as so many people are in Western Europe, the fact is that many Americans resent the increase in numbers of people who either don’t speak English, or don’t speak it well, as in the case of many service people on the phone.
The lyrics of Cole Porter’s song “Love for Sale” came to my mind when reading about the stuff below. Here they are:
What struck me most about the encounter between Stormy Daniels and Trump last week is how tawdry so much of American culture has become. She seemed obsessed with money, and he with money, power, and sex. (Based on Trump’s psychopathic history, I assume that pretty much everything he has said about his interactions with the porn star is a lie.)
That his millions of supporters/worshippers continue to support this creep shows just how widely the cultural rot that his rise reflects has spread, intensified by social media and television. Millions of Americans are showing themselves as semi-passive sociopaths and many others, desensitized by the likes of Trump, just fatalistically accept the dominance of tabloid culture. “That’s just Trump being Trump. Big deal.’’
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To fit in with the fashion-model face that Trump and his fans seem to favor, the dog-killer and liar Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who has wanted to be his running mate, has clearly had “work’’ done, most notably, to me, to puff out her lips. I’m curious to know how appealing this is to salt-of-the-earth South Dakotans.
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Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who, as a federal judge in Florida, is doing everything she can to protect her patron from his outrageous misuse of secret government documents, continues to display the corruption that he seeks in his underlings. The aim of Trump’s lawyers and Trumpian judges is to protect Trump through the election. If he wins, he’ll move to close down all the federal cases against him and, like any dictator, seek to ruin the lives of those who brought the cases.
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Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserts that a parasitic worm from a foreign trip entered his brain years ago and ate a bit of it before dying. Some nasty wag quipped to The Washington Post that “If it only eats brains, the poor thing starved to death in RFK Jr.’s head,’’ but sadly, Mr. Kennedy does have a range of mental- and physical-health problems, for which compassion should be shown.
The worm was one of various health issues he claimed in his deposition during a contentious divorce from his second wife about a decade ago. (That ex-wife, Mary Richardson, later killed herself.) I’m sure that the public would much appreciate full, honest and unedited medical records of this unhinged creature (not the worm), and of Biden and Trump, too.
One of the depressing things about the anti-Israel demonstrators at colleges this spring is the cowardice of so many of them, who cover their faces to prevent being identified. Such camouflage was unusual in, for example, the now legendary anti-war demonstrations during the late ’60s and early ’70s, most of whose participants were willing to take responsibility for their actions.
It's deeply depressing that some of the protestors seem to support the Islamo-fascist terror group Hamas and not just oppose Israeli policies. And they take out their remarkably misinformed opinions on fellow students who just want to complete their college educations. The numerous cancellations of commencement ceremonies are leaving many graduating students disappointed and disillusioned. And remember that many undergraduates began their college years amidst the painful disruptions of COVID.
Crummy ways to enter a full adult life.
Whatever, an Axios poll suggests that the Mideast is far down on the list of election-year concerns of college students:
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/poll-students-israel-hamas-protests
A dozen Trump-appointed federal judges say they won’t hire Columbia University graduates because of the nasty anti-Israel protests there. Talk about unfair! Only a small number of Columbia students have taken part in the actions, and some outsiders also participated. Columbia is one of the world’s greatest universities (including a distinguished law school) and has almost 37,000 students.
Post Graduation in Gotham
The coming of high-school graduations and college commencements (where protests haven’t led to their being cancelled) reminds me of when a dozen of us classmates, some with girlfriends hovering nearby, celebrated our graduation from a then all-boys high school in Connecticut by renting rooms at the New York Hilton and having a silly two-day, paint-the-town-red party, inspired in part by the fact that the drinking age was then 18 in the Empire State. It wasn’t the healthiest time – most of us were smoking cigarettes, too -- but there was a lot of inane comedy, and I remember it fondly.
It was the last time I saw at least half of that crew, who dispersed around the country and beyond, and I think that at least half of them have since gone on to the big bar in the sky, with Saint Peter, skeptical bartender, presiding. I wistfully look back at it all every June.