Whitcomb: Road Blocks Coming? Getting Out of the Booths; They’re No ‘Ladies’; Soothing Rx for Social
Sunday, April 09, 2023
After the spring thaw, their voices ringing
At dusk would beckon him through the meadow
To the edge of their pond where, barefoot,
He would wade slowly into the water
And stand there in the last of light
To see the mating toads….’’
-- From “Thoreau and the Toads,’’ by David Wagoner (1926-2021), American poet and teacher
Hit this link to read the whole poem:
“All Yankees are known for their frugality, I suppose, but well-to-do Yankees most perfectly embody the idea. In no other part of the country are the rich so cheap.’’
.. John Sedgwick (born 1954), American writer, in the September 1991 Yankee Magazine
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“It’s clear that the cost to clean up the damage those storms {recent tornadoes} created will be substantial. The federal government is currently covering 75 percent of all costs incurred during our recovery process, but that arrangement must go further to help Arkansans in need. Today, I’m asking the federal government to cover 100 percent of all our recovery expenses during the first 30 days after the storm.”
-- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, far-right governor of Arkansas and former Trump spokeswoman, who said in her election campaign that “as long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, D.C., will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River.’’
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Cold ocean water delays Southern New England’s warm weather in the spring but that same ocean, rapidly heated in the summer, warms our autumns. As the years roll by, climate change extends the warmth later and later. For now, we adjust to spring’s frequent alternations of warmth and damp chill, as anyone who has sat at Fenway Park can attest. “Boston’s famous east wind’’ can drop the temperature 15 degrees in 20 minutes!
Teaches humility and/or fatalism.
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It’s too bad that regular police patrols apparently aren’t enough to stop the invasions of illegally operated ATV’s and dirt bikes in Providence. But in any case, I applaud the creation of a Providence Police Community Response Team to combat these assaults by lawbreakers, some of whom are full-fledged thugs who threaten the safety of pedestrians and law-abiding drivers and their passengers and certainly scare people away from the city. Good luck in this initiative, which is very timely with the arrival of warmer weather.
But I wish that the team was officially a joint group with the Rhode Island State Police. Many of these barbarians come from outside Providence, and state cops are in a position to oversee a lot of territory, which helps to provide early warnings. Further, bad actors tend to fear the State Police more than local officers.
The Human Factor
Most of the people who had been manning the ticket booths behind heavy glass in New York City’s subway system are now roaming the stations to bird-dog problems/threats and help passengers with ticketing and other questions, such as directions. This will be of particular help to those many passengers who aren’t New Yorkers, or even Americans, and could use the help in that world city, which can be overwhelming to some anxious people.
The new program may also reduce crime and/or the fear of it in the system by putting more people in uniforms on the platforms.
With ticket-buying automation, few transit workers are needed in booths these days.
What a fine, humanizing way to get more people to use mass transit. We’ll see how it goes, but this could be a model for other cities. Of course, one worries about the safety of some of these new guides, even with the presence of well-armed transit police.
By the way, what are called “personal service” jobs, such as helping disabled and elderly people, travel guides, dog walkers and so on, are, maybe obviously, among the positions least likely to disappear under the artificial- intelligence avalanche.
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In less happy personal-relations news, the Easthampton (Mass.) School Committee has yanked its offer to Vito Perrone to be superintendent because he used the term “ladies” in an email to two women school committee members. “Micro-aggression”!
How have we come to this? And must we “ban’’ the expression “ladies and gentlemen” across the board?
The frequent harshness of daily life is softened by such honorifics. I suppose that holding a car door open for a woman might, to some, now seem very sexist, but such polite formalisms as “lady’’?
How about, as a sign of respect, standing when an older person comes to your table, which many of us once did automatically? Or writing thank-you notes with a pen and not by email?
And you generally used Mr., Miss (or later, Ms.) and Mrs. in addressing people you didn’t know well, and only their first names if invited by them to do so. All civilizing signals and signs of respect.
Now of course, most of us are often addressed by complete strangers (especially online) by our first names, in bogus friendliness. As with most of us, they guess at nicknames, such as calling me “Bob,’’ though the nickname that my old friends apply to me is quite different.
All this reminds me of the old saw that “if you’re friends with everybody, you’re friends with nobody.’’
Back when I was in high school, a girl invited me to spend the weekend with her family on Nantucket. I sort of enjoyed it, though her parents were a bit stiff, if cordial, and I found that island even back then a tad too precious. Then I made the mistake of not sending my thank-you letter until more than a week after that weekend. They were outraged at my slovenly manners, and it ended my friendship with her; they were right to be irritated.
Anyway, the nice thing about some of the old formalities is that they gave you a structure. You generally knew how to act in most social situations. Now, who knows? The “he/him/her/they’’ sexual-identity stuff adds a new layer of chaos. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,’’ to misappropriate a line from W.B Yeats.
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I wonder if lots of those metal fire pits people bought in order to be “safely” outdoors with family and friends during the worst of the COVID pandemic are being junked or given away, or will most folks keep them for relatively safe campfires to stare at in the night (and add some fragrant air pollution)? Most people, after all, are mild recreational pyromaniacs, and looking at a campfire is soporific.
The pits will come in handy to escape infection in the next pandemic, unless that comes so far in the future that the pits have rusted away.
Easy to Fix, With a Little Political Courage
The New England states, with their big percentage of old people, might have a particular interest in panicky warnings about Social Security going bust. Well, it won’t, though some billionaire GOP/QAnon funders might like that. There would be a political firestorm; old people are the most persistent voters.
The fact is that the system’s deficits are easily fixable if we can get by GOP/QAnon opposition to any tax increases, even those that will have no effect on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The suggested reforms below wouldn’t force them to sell their private jets, resign from their country clubs or even cut back on money to send to the Trump and DeSantis presidential campaigns.
Common-sense steps that can be taken:
*Jack up the age at which full benefits can be taken to 67 from 66 since (with the COVID effect excluded) people are generally living longer.
*Widen the income base upon which the payroll tax is used to fund Social Security. This tax only applies to the first $160,200 of income, which makes that tax regressive.
*Make all new state and local government employees pay the payroll tax and, of course, get the benefits. Federal law lets certain state and local governments exclude employees from Social Security coverage if those employees are provided with a sufficiently generous pension.
Social Security has done a wonderful job keeping old people out of poverty, It can be easily strengthened so it can continue to do so.
Here’s a useful look at the Social Security tax cap:
Growing Knowledge
What a fine project -- providing fresh food while helping kids learn about growing vegetables in containers year-round at “Freight Farms’’ run by Boys & Girls Clubs south of Boston.
See:
https://www.freightfarms.com/case-studies/boys-and-girls-clubs-metro-south
Here’s some background from, yes, Wikipedia:
“Freight Farms is a Boston-based agriculture technology company and was the first to manufacture and sell "container farms": hydroponic farming systems retrofitted inside intermodal freight containers. Freight Farms also developed “farmhand’’, a hydroponic farm management and automation software platform, and the largest connected network of hydroponic farmers in the world. The company has installed more than 200 farms around the world, on behalf of individuals, entrepreneurs, educational and corporate campuses, and soil farmers.
“In 2018 the company announced Grown by Freight Farms, an on-site farming service for institutions and organizations that would benefit from food grown on-site.’’ Good for places with the cool snap called “winter.’’
Spy Video
The whining by (especially young) people opposed to forcing the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company, or if that doesn’t work, have the U.S. shut down TikTok, is wrongheaded. Some users of this idiocy-rich, often manic but sometimes charming video-sharing social-networking service act as if not being allowed to waste time on it would be deeply damaging to their health.
Reminder:
China is an aggressive dictatorship that uses everything that it can to boost its power. All Chinese companies, in the end, report to the government, which runs an Orwellian surveillance state.
TikTok can send data about its American users to the Chinese Communist Party, and TikTok can be manipulated to con U.S. users to support the regime’s goals.
TikTok should have been fully Americanized or shut down long ago. It’s a threat to national security.
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You often hear false equivalence (“whataboutism’’) about America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and a few other places). Well, as screwed up as our invasions were, they came in response to the bloody aggression by Saddam Hussein, the murderous and sadistic dictator running Iraq, and the cruel Islamo-Fascists running and ruining Afghanistan while providing safe haven for fanatics attacking us.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is a democracy (flawed, as they all are) that was invaded at the orders of a murderous and sociopathic dictator with certain Hitlerian tendencies. He aims to wipe Ukraine off the map as an independent nation and absorb it into the vast kleptocratic police state called Russia.
Meanwhile, as some have noted, as tragic as was the return of Afghanistan to barbarism with the messy exit of American troops, the departure has made more military and other support available to help Ukraine (and thus Europe) defend itself – a defense that’s far more important to the security of the West and its allies than Afghanistan and Iraq. (We still have some troops in the latter.)
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Representatives of non-Arab, Shiite Muslim Iran and uber-Arab, Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, long bitter rivals for Mideast dominance, have met with smiles lately as they reestablish diplomatic relations. But given their histories, anxieties, and ambitions, it’s hard to see them becoming more than frenemies.
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And then there’s tyrannical China and its main junior partner, tyrannical Russia. They’re arm-in-arm against the West, its allies and democracy. But what happens, in the fullness of time, when, say, the densely populated Middle Kingdom wants Russia to give back the land, still thinly populated, north and east of the Amur River, that it took in the 19th Century?
Edwardian Entertainment
“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’’
-- The first line of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, set in 1900.
Lapham’s Quarterly, the beautiful history publication and educational organization, has an annual fund-raising gala called The Decades Ball, held in New York City. The next one, on May 8, is to celebrate the period 1900-1910. But Newport might have been the perfect place for the evening, since it was a capital of high life and conspicuous consumption in Edwardian times, with plenty of poverty there, too.
No, Lapham’s (laphamsquarterly.org) doesn’t pay me. I just love its mission.
A brief look at Edwardian times:
The best novel I can remember about Newport/Aquidneck Island is Thornton Wilder’s (1897-1975) highly autobiographical 1973 book Theophilus North, based on his memories from the 1920s. He presents the rich, the poor, the ethnic groups, the provincial, the urbane and various other aspects of the culture and socio-economics of what he dubbed “The Nine Cities of Newport.’’
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Tiny Central Falls has terrific “ethnic” restaurants.
Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.
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