Whitcomb: Thanks for No Thanksgiving; Honoring Our Postal Pals; Vermont vs. Virus
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Thanks for No Thanksgiving; Honoring Our Postal Pals; Vermont vs. Virus
“The young buck takes me in with a long glance
That says that I, not he, am here by chance.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
And they all go their ways, as I must go,
Up through the green and down again to snow.’’
--From “A Guest,’’ by May Sarton (1912-1995), a New England-based poet, novelist and memoirist
“Unfortunately, in our culture the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him, and the media may undo him.’’
(Paging Rupert Murdoch)
-- Ella Baker (1903-1986), human-rights activist
“If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.’’
-- Ted Williams (1918-2002), legendary Boston Red Sox slugger
What’s going on in Washington is deeply distressing of course – see below -- and who knows how it will end? It sometimes seems as if we’re entering the last days of The Great Republic.
But hope erupts! We can apparently look forward to a vaccine for COVID-19 being made available to many of us by next summer. But the next few months will be brutal and it would be foolish to make any important social and travel plans until all the leaves are on the trees. And beware Trumpian QAnon anti-vaxxers, who will passively kill some of us.
I was surprised that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just came out with a report that wearing masks helps protect the wearers as well as others. Wasn’t that obvious?
“In times of pestilence, gaiety and joyousness are most profitable.’’
-- Jacme d’ Agramont, Catalan physician and writer. He wrote this in 1348, during the plague called the Black Death, which killed him as well as many millions of others and transformed Europe.
That many Thanksgivings gatherings won’t be happening this year isn’t all bad. After all, many folks have long dreaded the seemingly obligatory travel in an exhausting four-day weekend, often made worse by bad pre-winter weather. And plenty of people have found the family feasts themselves tiresome, both to prepare and to get through. So this year will offer some unexpected relief in the quiet, simplicity and low population of a four-day weekend at home. But let me extend my condolences to the many others for whom Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday.
Nice in Our Neighborhood
Then there are other local glimmers of light. An example: In the past couple of weeks, some of our neighbors in Providence organized outdoor parties to honor a couple of friendly (including to dogs) and very reliable mailmen in our neighborhood who recently retired. It was a joy to see such benign civic activities bringing people together.
But events like this are less likely today in our dispersed, suburban/exurban society, in which interactions are increasingly on screens. We make fewer opportunities to do things together in person.
Consider that we don’t shop together as much. I thought of this the other week as I strolled around the little downtown of the town where I spent much of my boyhood. Back then, everyone went to the village’s locally owned grocery store (accurately called “Central Market” and smelling of ground coffee) and the town’s only drugstore, also locally owned. You’d bump into friends and neighbors there. Indeed, you’d make friends there.
Both have long since closed, succeeded by chain drugstores and chain supermarkets dispersed around the area. While many villagers a half century ago would walk to the downtown almost daily to shop, now pretty much everyone drives to wind-swept store parking lots.
I wonder if, when the COVID crisis fades, whether pent-up demand for real, in-person interactions might help revive small downtowns. And after all, malls and big-box stores at the periphery of the old downtowns had been closing at a good clip before the virus in the Amazon avalanche.
Think local!
Vermont, under the firm leadership of old-fashioned moderate (and anti-Trump) Republican Gov. Phil Scott, has been a leader in controlling COVID-19 through tight travel/quarantine rules, adherence to face-mask rules and, probably most important, the Green Mountain State’s traditionally strong, unselfish civic sensibility. Now, as the virus explodes around America, it faces new challenges. States can’t post the National Guard at all roads leading into their states to check for possibly infected travelers from high-risk places! But I’m pretty sure that Vermont will face its COVID challenges decisively and effectively.
Hit these links for some background.
Of course, some would say that the fact that Vermont is a largely rural state makes it easier to control the spread of COVID-19. But look at how terrible the rural Red States, such as in the Great Plains, are doing with it! And consider that Vermont is in the Northeast, the nation’s most densely populated region
xxx
I try to avoid eating animals, especially my fellow mammals, but I’ll miss (well, in a way) the annual game dinner at the Congregational church in Bradford, Vt., which has been cancelled, perhaps permanently, after 64 years. I had attended, off and on, with a bunch of friends since 1989. I went after friends’ annual relentless urgings that I join them.
The proximate cause of the cancellation, of course, was the pandemic. Couldn’t have all those folks sitting shoulder to shoulder at those long, communal tables. But before COVID, the church had had increasing difficulty in getting people to work at the event, the church’s biggest annual fundraiser.
Another little piece of Americana goes down.
xxx
All those leaves drifting down and carpeting the ground seem like something out of a French pointillist painting.
COVID Camp Fire
On a recent chilly night, a couple of friends invited me over to see their new $135 fire pit in their small, urban backyard. It’s a metal contraption wherein propane gas is lit and heats up pumice-like stones until they take on a cheery glow. My friends bought the thing as a way of spending more time outside in the cold weather as we await a COVID vaccine. It expands their living space in these claustrophobic times, in which many people don’t want anyone outside of their family pods inside their houses or apartments.
So we sat very quietly around the fire, chatting from time to time but mostly just gazing at the flames and reveling in the warmth as the last leaves of the trees above crinkled in the breeze. Another good thing out of the emergency.
We need to learn more about Excel Academy, a Boston-based charter-school organization that wants to enroll students from Providence, Central Falls and North Providence. Given how badly many urban Rhode Island public schools have performed for many years, Excel deserves full consideration. Meanwhile, a very big challenge in fixing the Ocean State’s public schools continues to be the rigidity of the teachers unions’ contracts. All in all, students got a better education before these unions arrived on the scene.
Some will complain about Excel’s rigor in trying to ensure that kids show up at school, and its emphasis on maintaining classroom order, in part through a demerit system. Well, it’s tough to teach and learn in chaotic classroom with disrespectful students. Demerits can help. I was a student in a public school with a demerit system, pre-teachers unions. Having a punishment system based in part on demerits helped teachers keep the lid on. I also taught in high school for a few months back in the late ‘60s, when good order and discipline were disappearing.
Old Cities Getting Younger
Some demographers are pushing the idea that old industrial cities like Brockton, Fall River and New Bedford in the wider Greater Boston area will enjoy big long-term revivals as residential and commercial refugees from dense, high-price places like Boston seek cheaper and larger digs in the many still-solid old industrial buildings in these old cities, which had thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And then there’s even a bit of new building there.
I had thought, for example, that Brockton, which used to call itself “The Shoe Capital of the World,’’ would never revive. But now it’s welcoming many new arrivals, some from Greater Boston. And most of these people are quite young.
More Cars Coming
Prepare for more pollution and denser car traffic as the MBTA plans big service cuts starting next spring and summer to address pandemic-slashed revenues. The only offset is that many people will not return to commuting even after a vaccine becomes available now that so many employers have found that so many of their employees can efficiently work at home most of the time.
The ever-useful Commonwealth Magazine reports that the agency seeks to impose $128 million in service cuts. This would include eliminating all commuter-rail service on weekends and after 9 p.m. on weekdays, halting bus and subway service at midnight and stopping all ferry service. The commuter rail cutbacks will of course be a big hit to Rhode Island.
To read more, please hit this link:
xxx
It’s interesting that some New England museums, unable to open inside to full capacity, or at all, because of the pandemic, are trying to make more use of their grounds to show art or just for walking, at least before big snowstorms arrive.
“COVID will go away after the election.’’
-- Donald Trump shortly before the election
American democracy is under assault by a treasonous, kleptocratic gangster regime and its deeply cynical congressional and other enablers (financed by dark money from the likes of the ruthless billionaire Mercer family) that seek to overturn the results of the election and install a kind of fascist dictatorship, or call it a Latin American-or-African-style Banana Republic tyranny. What has been going on since the election is nothing less than an attempted slow-motion coup.
This comes after Trump continues to cause tens of thousands of deaths through his lies, coverups and incompetence in the pandemic. He cares nothing for anyone but himself.
Wouldn’t it be satisfying if manslaughter could be added to treason, fraud, money laundering, rape and tax evasion in the case against this sociopath?
And please stop calling these thugs “conservatives.’’ They are anything but. As for the avaricious “Christian’’ evangelical con men and women who so relentlessly support him….
All Americans who value their democracy must rise to its defense. Even the military must consider that it may have to act to protect us by defending the Constitution. Trump’s efforts to stay in power are made more frenzied by his fear of prosecution for his numerous crimes once -- or if – he leaves office.
As the old line goes, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’’
Trump is also fighting his own country in order to line his own pockets. Please hit this link:
But then, the national Republican Party has become a cesspool of treason, greed, grifting, bigotry, willful ignorance and non-stop lies.
‘Weather’ Report
Jenny Offill’s brilliant and strange novel Weather is a story, narrated by a humble New York City librarian, about contemporary family, friends and America via one small journal-or-diary-style entry after another, sometimes sad and anxious and sometimes joyful and funny. I’ve never read a novel structured like this before. But it reminds me of the old line that “life is just one damn thing after another.’’