Chris Powell: Subsidize social disintegration and blame Walmart

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Some Connecticut state legislators are just wringing their hands and shrugging about the latest court decision in the latest school-funding lawsuit. That may be enough, since state Atty. Gen. George Jepsen is appealing the decision, considering it judicial overreach, and may prevail at the state Supreme Court.

Other legislators express concern that, because of state government's deteriorating finances, any extra state money for failing school systems will have to be taken from successful school systems, terminating the longstanding political consensus that it's OK for state government to put zillions more into failing schools without accomplishing anything as long as appropriations are maintained at current levels for successful schools -- the "hold harmless" policy.

But ending the "hold harmless" policy might be the best thing that Connecticut could do. For change may come only when more people have to start paying more for educational failure.

If, for example, West Hartford, Fairfield, Woodbridge, and Middlebury were told that they must lose millions in state grants so the money can be given to Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Haven, where education never improves no matter how much more is spent -- because most city students lack the prerequisite of education – PARENTS -- then Connecticut's focus might start changing.

People then might be less inclined to accept poverty and child neglect as a way of life and a business. People might be more inclined to demand results and accountability from the cities and their residents, and, upon realizing that good results are impossible when policy is only to subsidize social disintegration, they might clamor to change policy so it discouraged rather than fostered child neglect.

Indeed, while that school funding decision, issued by Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher, overreached as a matter of law, it should prompt Connecticut to reconsider far more than school funding. It should prompt Connecticut to reconsider its whole political economy. Apart from subservience to the government employee unions, that political economy consists mainly of three things:

1) State government taxes people who took education seriously, gained work experience, achieved self-sufficiency, lived responsibly and married before having children.

2) State government transfers that money to people who disregarded education, learned little but were advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas anyway, and, though uneducated, unskilled, unmarried and incapable of self-sufficiency, had children in the confidence that state government would give them EBT cards, food credits, housing vouchers and medical insurance.

3) And when the "illiterates" -- the judge's candid term -- grow up and can find only menial employment that won't support families, the state's intelligentsia blames Walmart and McDonald's for not paying their employees enough.

A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, while regarded as a flaming liberal, nevertheless argued that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. The collapse of schools, cities and the state itself is what happens when public policy disagrees.

xxx

MORE REGIONALISM, ANYONE? Last week Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin pitched his plan for more regionalism during an interview on a radio station in New Britain -- the city whose minor-league baseball team Hartford stole last year by promising to build it a $50 million stadium, only to make a mess of construction and prompt litigation that may cost the city a lot more money.

Also last week a court ruled that Hartford must pay $6.3 million in damages for failing to comply with state law on assisting people displaced from their homes, a ruling that came with a contempt finding against the city administration.

Mayor Bronin has yet to explain why anyone else should want to pay for the city's incompetence, nor how there can ever be any accountability if someone else does pay.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer,  in Manchester, Conn., and  a long time essayist on political and socio-economic matters.

This should be a banner year for new ones

"Theodore Roosevelt,'' by Taylor Jones, in his show "Presidential Caricatures,'' at Heritage Museums and Gardens, in Sandwich, Mass., through Oct. 30.

The shoe features caricatures of 24 U.S. presidents.

We're costing out the materials

"Study for Houses and Trees'' (oil on linen), by Paul Bloodgood, in his show through Nov. 6 at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.

Chuck Collins: In New England and elsewhere, anti-gas-pipeline activism picks up

Thousands of Native Americans at Standing Rock in North Dakota are protesting a pipeline project that puts their water supply at risk, threatens to plow up their sacred sites, and would worsen climate change.

Their rallying echoes hundreds of local struggles across the U.S. that question the prudence, safety, and necessity of thousands of new gas pipeline projects.

The gas industry tells us these projects promote energy independence and meet local gas needs. But the driving force behind most of these billion dollar infrastructure projects? Gas export.

Big gas is desperate to get their cheap shale gas to global export terminals — and they’ve dug up millions of backyards to do it. Fortunately for the industry, they have a subservient federal agency that grants them the power of eminent domain to take those backyards.

The anti-pipeline movement brings together mayors, state officials, and engaged neighbors concerned about health and safety, unnecessary rate increases, and the environmental irresponsibility of constructing new fossil-fuel infrastructure. They’re fed up with a system that allows the profits of private energy corporations to override local concerns and dictate our future.

Many politicians remain stuck in the “gas as a bridge fuel” perspective. But growing scientific evidence shows that methane from gas extraction and transportation poses a greater short-term climate change risk than burning carbon fuels like coal and oil.

We should be rapidly shifting away from all new fossil-fuel infrastructure projects, and investing in fixing existing gas leaks and using renewable energy like wind, hydroand solar. This shift will create millions of high-paying jobs in the new energy economy.

The anti-pipeline movement is gathering steam. Residents have mobilized to stop pipeline projects in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and have stalled others in Kentucky.

But not all anti-pipeline efforts have been successful.

In the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury, residents have vigorously opposed a high-pressure pipeline that arcs into the heart of a densely populated neighborhood and terminates across from an active blasting quarry. All of Boston’s elected officials unanimously oppose this project — but big business is still winning.

The Texas-based Spectra Energy sued the city and took their streets by eminent domain. The city of Boston is still trying to block the project in court, but construction is almost complete. In the last year, almost 200 neighbors and religious leaders have been arrested for blocking construction.

How is this possible in a democratic society?

The answer lies with a little-known and unaccountable agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Under the Gas Act of 1938, FERC may grant private corporations the power of eminent domain over local jurisdictions.

Maybe this was necessary in 1938 to build a modern energy system. But today, we need an energy agency that’ll balance a wider set of considerations, not just the interests of a politically powerful gas industry.

In the last few years, FERC has rubber-stamped just about every project the natural gas industry has sought to build. These include high-pressure pipelines running next to nuclear power plants, across fragile water supplies, and across traditional Native American lands.

In the words of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., FERC is a “rogue agency.” The U.S. Senate should convene oversight hearings to examine FERC overreach. Congress must modernize the Gas Act to protect communities and reduce carbon and methane emissions. And an independent agency should assess our nation’s real energy needs.

Decisions about our energy future shouldn’t revolve around a self-interested gas industry and investor-owned utilities. For the sake of the planet and our democracy, other voices must be at the table.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits . He is author of Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home and Committing to the Common Good. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Charles Chieppo: Will Providence, teetering on a fiscal cliff, finally face reality?

The longer a government's finances are allowed to deteriorate, the fewer options there are when corrective action is finally taken. Anyone who doubts that ought to look at a proposed 10-year plan commissioned by Providence and produced by the federal National Resource Network (NRN). It makes a number of important recommendations, almost all of which would require very unpleasant decisions --  the kind that all too many local governments are facing after years and decades of imprudent fiscal decisions.

Providence is confronted with tremendous fiscal challenges, ones severe enough that they could lead to municipal bankruptcy. The city faces an ongoing structural budget gap, one of the drivers of which is payments needed to rescue a public employees' pension that is officially just 27.4 percent funded.

The real pension picture is even worse, because that official funding ratio is based on the wildly unrealistic assumption that fund assets will earn an annual return of 8.25 percent. And there is more than $1 billion in unfunded liability for retiree health care.

The city also has a comparatively low credit rating, which boosts the cost of borrowing. The degree to which new taxes can be relied upon to raise more revenue is limited: Providence's property taxes and its overall household tax burden are already among the highest in New England. Business taxes also are well above average.

The recommendations by NRN, a public-private consortium that is a component of the Obama administration's Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative, could serve as a template for action for just about any fiscally struggling local government. To begin with, NRN suggests monetizing city assets and using the receipts to pay down pension and retiree health-care liabilities. A city-owned golf course could be sold, and the Providence Water Supply Board, which operates the state's primary system of reservoirs, water treatment and water distribution, could be leased with a large up-front payment to the city.

NRN also calls for suspending city retirees' cost-of-living adjustments. But a more radical recommendation is to freeze the existing defined-benefit pension fund and convert to a defined-contribution plan under which the city would be responsible only for contributing a set amount, not making specific periodic payments to retirees.

Other recommendations would also affect city workers. One calls for a dramatic reduction in raises based solely on longevity; another recommends reducing the number of paid holidays that employees receive. The Fire Department is a particular area of concern, one that provides yet another reminder of the perils of making topics beyond pay and benefits subjects for collective bargaining. The department has overtime costs and minimum staffing levels that are the highest among eight comparable New England cities. NRN suggests suspending existing minimum staffing levels once overtime spending reaches a set threshold. A more dramatic recommendation is that the city look at reducing the size of its fire department.

The story of how Providence dug itself into such a deep fiscal hole is a familiar one. During the 1990s, the city spent countless millions, most of it financed with debt, developing its downtown area. Unlike so many other cities that invested heavily in their downtowns, Providence did get something for its money: It soon gained a reputation as one of the nation's hippest medium-sized cities. But amid all of the attention city leaders seemed to forget that those creditors would eventually expect to be paid back.

Downtown Providence is indeed vibrant, but now the bills are coming due and the path to solvency has become extremely narrow. Whether Providence and its residents will find the will to take that difficult path remains to be seen. If the city does rise to the challenge, it might even end up providing a map for other cities facing similar self-inflicted fiscal crises.

Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is the principal of Chieppo Strategies, LLC, a public policy writing and advocacy firm. He is also a research fellow at the Ash Center of Harvard Kennedy School, where he is contributing editor to the “Better, Faster, Cheaper” blog on Governing.com.

In 2003 to 2005, Mr. Chieppo was policy director in Massachusetts’s Executive Office for Administration and Finance, where he led the Romney administration’s successful effort to reform the commonwealth’s public-construction laws, helped develop and enact a new charter school funding formula, and worked on a variety of public-employee labor issues such as pension reform and easing state restrictions against privatization.  This piece first ran on Governing.com.

Lure of the local restaurant

Photo by Thomas Hook

This sign at a restaurant in Woodbury, Conn., is the sort of  roadside kitsch that many of us now treasure in this age of standardized chain restaurants and stores. It recalls secondary-highway roadhouses in the '30s, '40s and '50s before the Interstate Highway System promoted advertising standardization and gutted nonchain establishments in many small towns by taking potential customers around, rather than through, these communities. That made travel easier and faster (for a while anyway) but it ripped apart the fabric of many nice  places.

Mr. Hook has a well-practiced eye for  roadside charm. So did Vladimir Nabokov, especially in his shocking (for the time!) novel Lolita, one of the great road novels, and published in the late '50s, before the Interstate Highway System really got going on all  cylinders and changed so much.

By the way, the  food at the Split Rail is said to be very good.

Frank Carini: Painting over the damage done by shore slobs

 

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Mike Pellini doesn’t get down to the seaside home his grandfather built in 1940 as much as the Massachusetts resident would like. When he does, however, he’s increasingly spending his time removing graffiti from coastal rocks and cleaning up after others.

“It’s so disheartening that people do this to such a beautiful place,” the Shrewsbury, Mass., resident said. “It’s disgusting and a huge problem, and the state doesn’t seem to care.”

“Do this” refers to those who spray-paint shoreline rocks with obscenities, leave behind beer cans, beer bottles and cigarette butts after a night of drinking, and generally trash Scarborough Beach and the Black Point recreation area.

Pellini, 52, said this type of thoughtless behavior has marred the area for as long as he can remember. He has spoken with employees from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) and the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) about the problem, to no avail.

“I’m always told we don’t have the resources ... no budget ... too expensive to clean the rocks,” Pellini said. “It’s so frustrating.”

The cleanup is instead left to people such as Pellini, Camilla Lee, Marianne Kittredge Chronley, and Holley and Ted Flagg. For the past three years or so, they have been cleaning up after the partiers. They pick up marine debris such as plastic bags, plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups. Holley, an artist who paints local nature scenes, mixes paints — donated by Jerry’s Paint and Hardware on Point Judith Road — to match the color of the defaced rocks.

Creating the right color, painting the rocks — Pellini, who is slightly younger than the others in the clean-up group, handles the painting of the harder-to-get-to rocks — and hauling out other people’s trash takes time and effort.

“It’s crazy the state doesn’t do anything about this,” Pellini said. “Rhode Island has this wonderful resource and the state allows it to be trashed.”

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.

They thrive with global warming

"In the Garden'' (acrylic on masonite) by Angela Mark, in her show "Despairing Beauty,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston Oct. 1-30.

A saint of suffering

Excerpted from the Sept. 8 Digital Diary in GoLocalProv

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

-- W. Somerset Maugham

The late Mother Teresa has been made a saint. That’s the Catholic Church’s business, but a lot of us think wish that she had used her fame mostly to lobby for truly effective humanitarian aid by nongovernmental and governmental organizations in teeming places like Kolkata (formerly called Calcutta),  which she encouraged to be even more teeming. The poor there need Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) a lot more than Mother Teresa’s sort of charity work, which included substandard medical care. 

Where she probably did the most damage was in fighting artificial birth control in grossly overpopulated Kolkata. The out-of-control population there causes vast human suffering and environmental devastation but her Catholic theology told her, in effect, to encourage her impoverished clientele to have even more babies. She was an impressive promoter of certain kinds of  selflessness and Catholicism but her stand against birth control and her glorification of suffering probably did more harm than good. 

-- Robert Whitcomb

Genghis Khan Night at the PCFR

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com)

The PCFR's next dinner comes fast, next Wednesday, Sept. 21, when our speaker will be:

Columbia University Prof. Morris Rossabi, one of the world’s  greatest experts on Inner Asia and particularly Mongolia: a democracy stuck between the aggressive police states of Russia and China, Sept. 21.  How does this faraway country do it? Professor Rossabi will be speaking to us  very soon after returning from Mongolia and Korea; he may say a few things about the latest in North Korea’s threats to northeast Asia and beyond.

Prof. Rossabi is the author or editor of 20 books, including China and Inner Asia, Kublai Khan: His Life and Times, Voyager from Xanadu, Modern Mongolia, and China Among Equals. He has also written more than 100 articles or chapters in books and wrote all of the sections on Inner Asia in three separate volumes of the authoritative Cambridge History of China.

(Perhaps he’ll say some things about Genghis Khan, who DNA evidence suggest was an ancestor of many of us. He really got around Eurasia.)

Morris Rossabi has served as a board member of the Project on Central Eurasia and chair of the Board on Arts and Culture of the Soros Foundation. Professor Rossabi has collaborated on exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has served as a consultant to foundations, museums, universities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Having taught Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Central Asian, and Islamic history, he conducts research in a dozen languages. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is an advocate of international and cross-cultural education.

This is the cheapest room we can rent you tonight

San Mateo 3 (archival pigment print), by Billie Mandle, in her show "San Mateo'' at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine, Oct. 1- 31.

The artist explores spaces that "have been stripped of their coded signage and purpose, taking on an elusive, ethereal feed.''

James P. Freeman: Howard Johnson nationalized New England food

“There’s many a king on a gilded throne

 But there’s only one king on an ice‐cream cone.

So we crown him today with friendly acclaim,

All over the country we’ll blazen his name.

With hot dogs barking in approbation,

He’s the man who believes he can feed the nation.”

n  Howard Johnson’s (1940)

Like many like‐minded entrepreneurs, his dream was built on a simple idea with blazing clarity: “I figured that America really preferred good food nicely served,” and if it was made “as attractive as I knew how, easy to look at and hard to forget,” it would surely be successful, reasoned the founder of the eponymous restaurant, Howard Johnson, during The Great Depression.

Johnson, raised in Quincy, did indeed feed the nation and helped create the modern hospitality industry. But as widely reported just before Labor Day weekend, just one restaurant, in Lake George, N.Y., now bears the name “Howard Johnson’s. ‘’

With a prologue set firmly in New England, the spectacular rise and fall of this cultural icon is a quintessentially American story; it represents brilliantly the paradox of the creative destruction in democratic capitalism — in which the outdated is constantly replaced by new and better products and, ultimately, new and better processes. And with a delicious irony — being the very purveyors of disposable consumerism they helped to create — the epilogue also reflects today’s Baby Boomers’ sentimental nostalgia about a past they helped destroy, itself a gorgeous paradox of cultural progress.

But what a story it was. Much of it is recalled in his wonderfully reverential book, A History of Howard Johnson’s: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon, by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco.

It began as a store in Wollaston, Mass., in 1926. In the 1950s he pioneered efforts at freezing complete meals, which became staples in supermarkets. By 1969, at its corporate peak and prestige, a new restaurant was opening every nine days and a lodge every two weeks.

So large was this conglomerate that by 1975 the company had grown to 929 Howard Johnson’s restaurants, 32 Red Coach Grill restaurants, 63 Ground Round restaurants, and 536 motor lodges in 42 states, Puerto Rico and Canada. Successful entrepreneurs rely upon risk and luck and Johnson had a hunch. He rightly thought that Americans would be mobile with the advent of the automobile and with the creation of the Interstate Highway System (after the Great Depression and after World War II) they would be hungry too. And eventually tired.

As Sammarco notes, the “phenomenal growth” of Howard Johnson’s was “based on the application of two relatively new and untried concepts.” Johnson pioneered the retail franchise (where others bore start‐up costs) and also standardized the operations (branding, menus, décor). Howard Johnson’s restaurants and motor lodges became familiar terrain on roads from Maine to Florida and points west, such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

In many respects, Johnson nationalized New England. While the fried clam had been on Boston’s Parker House (hotel) menu beginning in 1865, Johnson introduced the fried clam strip (known as the “Tendersweet”) to America in 1951. Later, chef Jacques Pepin was brought in to prefect New England clam chowder. And, Sammarco writes, Johnson’s colonial‐style motor lodges “were attractive to nostalgic Americans,” and the architectural style was from a “melting pot of New England style that triggered the ‘old‐fashioned comfort’” with Americans.

But in the 1970s America experienced economic discontentment and dislocation because of its first great energy crisis and inflation. Travelers were driving less and flying more. Fast food chains such as McDonald’s and up‐scale hotels such as Marriott perfected the business model that Johnson had begun 40 years before. Many in the public came to see Howard Johnson’s as “dated” and “old‐fashioned” and its traditions uncool.

The bulk of the company was sold to a  British conglomerate, Imperial Group Limited, in 1979.

Still, the story of Howard Johnson’s captures the rapid cultural changes of 20th‐Century America that continue to reverberate today. For many Boomers, their collective memory of “HoJo’s” is best remembered in faded family photographs taken over the years in the same rest stops along America’s highways and byways or Polaroids taken at the same restaurant for a sundae after a game or postcards sold in the lobbies of the same motor lodges during the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. It was a shared experience for which today’s generation can barely comprehend.

Today, for Millennials, there is no station wagon, no family road trip, no journey, no picture, no place like Howard Johnson’s; their idea of permanence and remembrance is a digital image “selfie” that disappears in 10 seconds on Snapchat.

Soon, service will mean a meal delivered by drone.

At the intersection of Routes 6A and 28 in Orleans still stands the structure that housed the first franchised Howard Johnson’s, in 1935 (about 25 miles from where the Pilgrims ate their first meal in the New World, in 1620). Since it was sold in 1979, it has changed names four times. Today it is painted in neutral browns and beiges. It looked and felt much better with the distinctive orange roof and turquoise blue shutters and 28 flavors, during an era that is by-gone, but not forgotten.

James P.  Freeman, a New England essayist, is a former Cape Cod Times columnist and was formerly in the financial-services industry. This piece first ran in The New Boston Post.

Jim Hightower: Rapacious Trump's huge tax lies

An old saying asserts that falsehoods come in three escalating levels: Lies, damn lies and statistics. But now there’s an even higher category of lies: a Donald Trump speech.

Take his recent address on specific economic policies he’d push to benefit hard-hit working families, including an almost-hilarious discourse on the rank unfairness of the estate tax.

“No family will have to pay the death tax,” he solemnly pledged, adding that “American workers have paid taxes their whole lives, and they should not be taxed again at death.”

But workers aren’t taxed at death. The first $5.4 million of any deceased person’s estate is already exempt from this tax, meaning 99.8 percent of Americans pay absolutely zero. And the tiny percentage of families who do pay estate taxes are multimillionaires — not workers.

Of course, Trump knows this. He’s shamefully trying to deceive real workers into thinking he stands for them, when in fact it’s his own wealth he’s protecting.

In the same speech, he offered a new childcare tax break to help working families by allowing parents to fully deduct childcare costs from their taxes. With a tender personal touch, Trump said his daughter Ivanka urged him to provide this helping hand to hard working parents because “she feels so strongly about this.”

Another deception — 70 percent of American households don’t have enough yearly income to warrant itemizing deductions. So the Americans most in need of childcare help get nothing from Trump’s melodramatic posturing.

Once again, his generous tax benefits would only flow uphill to wealthy families like his, giving the richest Americans a government subsidy for purchasing platinum-level care for their kids.

As another old line goes: “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.”

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This first ran on  OtherWords.org.

Welcoming and eerie

"Point Judith Blood Moon'' (photo), by Jurgen Lobert, in the show "Night Becomes Us: Photographs by the Greater Boston Night Photographers,'' at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., Sept. 18-Jan. 15.

Global warming lapping at our feet

Excerpted from the Sept. 8 GoLocalProv.com "Digital Diary'' column

Here’s an example of how a large part of the Republican Party has embraced ignorance and wishful thinking (and I am not just talking about its presidential nomination of a sociopath, against, sadly, a Democratic candidate with  enough  baggage to start a luggage company).

While senior military officials are urging the government to help them address global warming’s threats to national security, the GOP-controlled House, many members of which are proud ignoramuses about science,  history and other increasingly ignored matters, are blocking a broad program to address the security threats posed by such effects of global warming as rising seas. These threats are already very visible in such places as Norfolk, Va., where officials at the world’s largest naval base are trying to protect the facilities from  increasing flooding.

The New York Times, in a Sept. 3 story headlined “Flooding of Coast, Caused by Global Warming, Has Already Begun,’’ notes that “the Obama administration  has been  pushing federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to take more aggressive steps {to address rising  seas}. But without action in Congress, experts say that these efforts fall far short of what is required.’’

But then, as retired Rear Admiral David Titley, a former Navy chief oceanographer who now runs a climate center at Pennsylvania State University, told The Times: “In the country,  certainly in the Congress, it hasn’t really resonated ---  the billions and perhaps trillions of dollars that we would need to spend if we want to live on the coast like we’re living today.’’

-- Robert Whitcomb

Visual yoga

"A New End,'' installation by Jeppe Hein, at Trustees, in Boston, through Oct. 31.

The gallery says: "Jeppe Hein, from Copenhagen,  creates pieces in which the viewer can interact. His pieces include mirrors, paths and even benches in parks that encourage the viewer to sit on or play on, discouraging the idea that art is for viewing purposes only. ...Jeppe Hein's piece... encourages interaction between piece and viewer.... {He} uses large-scale mirrors to create a reflective labyrinth spiral. The piece is meant to function as vehicle for thought, reflection and relaxation, similar to yoga or meditation.. ..'A New End' encourages healing … within oneself.''

Chris Powell: He won't stand for the country that made him rich

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Good for President Obama for acknowledging that the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers has a right to protest racial injustice by refusing to stand when the national anthem is played.

Thanks to a heroic decision of the Supreme Court during World War II, schoolchildren also have the right to refuse to salute the flag in class -- a right that actually proclaims the flag to be the flag most worth saluting.

But the quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, isn't necessarily persuasive. For of course the country isn't and never will be perfect; it will always be full of legitimate grievances, like Kaepernick's -- recent shootings of black people by police officers, several of which, captured on cellphone video, seem murderous.

The key questions are whether such shootings are policy or aberrations and whether the country remains worth supporting for its ideals and the rights it bestows on everyone -- worth supporting for its objectives of "liberty and justice for all."

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick said last month. "To me this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

But "people getting paid leave" is only a matter of due process of law while they are being investigated. Further, since the criminal-justice system will always be imperfect, either because its participants are fallible or because proof is not always available, some people will always be "getting away with murder." They're not all white police officers. Some are black, like O.J. Simpson.

Kaepernick is black, and if this country is really so oppressive to black people, why does he stay? Obviously the country is not so oppressive to him, as he is being paid $114 million under a six-year contract with the 49ers, wealth that casts an ironic sheen on his indignation. That's because his own well-earned success, duplicated by many other members of minority groups, is no aberration. National policy, flawed as it may be, is to facilitate it.

Exercising them as he has done, Kaepernick at least has reminded people of their constitutional rights and thus of the country's greatness. But he still may be rebuked, since, as Robert Frost wrote:

No one of honest feeling would approve

A ruler who pretended not to love

A turbulence he had the better of.

INDIGNATION INDUSTRY IS ASKING FOR IT: Years ago the comedian Steve Martin apologized facetiously to the National Association of Colored People "for referring to its members as ‘colored people.'" The other day a host of ABC's Good Morning, America, Amy Robach, apologized seriously for having said "colored people" on the air in a report about casting practices in the movie industry.

For reasons that aren't clear, it is OK for the NAACP to perpetuate the phrase but insulting if not racist for anyone else to use it. It's also OK to say "people of color."

So what's the difference? Only fashion.

Robach may have been unaware of that fashion and she plainly meant no harm, but she was quickly condemned on "social media" and was intimidated. So she issued a statement calling her choice of words "a mistake" and "not a reflection of how I feel or speak in my everyday life," adding that she had intended to say "people of color."

The indignation industry may snicker at all the innocents it is intimidating, but if it wants to understand what has given rise to Donald Trump and other forms of angry reaction in politics and public life, it needs only to look in the mirror.

Chris Powell, an essayist on social, political and economic maters, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Robert Whitcomb: Transportation and other news

Excerpted from the Sept. 9 Digital Diary column in GoLocalProv.

Terrific transportation improvements in Boston in the last 20 years because of the Big Dig and the creation of the South Station intermodal transportation complex have helped make Greater Boston  richer. A key element has been the  expansion and uniting of train and bus service at South Station. (Linking  that facility with North Station via a direct MBTA train line would help expand the progress.)

Yes, these projects are expensive, but, as with the improvements in subway service in New York under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, the economic benefits of more efficient and pleasant transportation  are impressive.

Thus kudos to the Rhode Island Department of Transportation for working to create a sort of mini-version of the South Station public-transportation center in and around Providence’s Amtrak/MBTA station. The few bad things that happened with the revival of much of downtown Providence starting in the ‘80s included moving the train station up the hill to across from the State House and what was then called the Bonanza Bus Terminal way north of downtown to a gritty, windswept, pedestrian-unfriendly area next to Route 95. Stupid moves for a city that wants to be walkable.

Well, the train station is stuck  where it is but building a bus station complex right next to it would make public transportation a lot easier in Providence, which would boost its economy and quality of life. That a lot of younger adults avoid driving and the number of old people who  can’t or won’t drive is rapidly increasing, mean that the numbers who want to use public transportation can only swell.

As part of all this, there should be very frequent nonstop RIPTA shuttle buses to and from the new intermodal center to Green Airport, barring a big expansion in MBTA train service there from the Providence  train station.

The RIDOT’s project will help pullmore businesses and shoppers to Providence from a large swath of southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut.

Full speed ahead on this project.

xxx

In other transportation news: My wife and I were on Block Island for a (bravely scheduled) wedding on Labor Day weekend, though not for as long as we had hoped. While we were able to take in a big outdoor pre-wedding picnic on a spectacular heath from which you can often see Montauk Point, we had to leave hours before the wedding, scheduled for late Sunday afternoon, because the ferry folks told us that the last  trip for the next few days would leave soon because of concerns about Post-Tropical Storm Hermine.  As it turned out, the trip, while a bit bouncy at the start as we moved out of the harbor,  was pleasant enough.

There were on board a few somewhat oafish morning beer drinkers – a tribe traditionally associated with Interstate Navigation Co.’s ferries, but fewer than I remember from our first trips on the service, way back in the late ‘70s.  None threw up.

The trip reminded us of how dependent islanders are on the weather: However high tech they are they are, they must obey Mother Nature more  than most people. While this can be inconvenient, it’s also edifying (teaching patience and respect for, and sometimes fear of, Mother Nature) and adds some drama to programmed lives.

September has the best weather of the year, except when it has the worst, during those rare but memorable visits from hurricanes.  By the way, there’s something exciting about the  sexy term “tropical storm’’ up here that gets people’s attention. Thus even though Hermine was a post-tropical storm as she dawdled south of New England in the first part of this week, the National Weather Service kept using the phrase “Tropical Storm Warning’’ for the New England coastal areas being affected.

That’s because after Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, became an extra-tropical storm some people ignored the warnings as she slammed into the Jersey Shore. So the NWS decided to keep the ominous if misleading word “tropical’’ this time around, though Hermine by any other name  (such as “gale’’) would be as windy.

A house on the edge of meaning and the void

"Journey's End'' (oil/cold wax/molding on wood panels), by George Shaw, in the show  George Shaw and Marjorie Kaye: The Poetics of Space,'' Oct. 8-29, at Atlantic Works Gallery, East Boston.

The gallery writes: "George Shaw and Marjorie Kaye will present unique approaches examining the lyrical dissection of space and surface.''

"George Shaw's paintings and constructions are on and made of wood panels, and consist of oil paint, oil pastel, dry pigment, wax medium, molding and found objects.  This combination produces a balance between luminosity and saturation, with a focus on texture and the relationship between minimal objects and space.  The background and foreground is interchangeable, creating illusive space, yet there are very distinct relationships between them.''

Mr. Shaw writes: "The physics of consciousness, in relation to modern quantum mechanics theory illustrates my intention in regards to my work. I am interested in what consciousness truly is and the physical connection between our consciousness and/or spirit and the universe; and that we are truly interrelated." 

He says thatthe desire for an answer appears as a shelter, an anchor, a sanctuary:  home. 

 "Gradually, in my works, a house-like shape emerged, and became an important element: a counter-point to a universe, poised on the knife edge of meaning and the precipice of the void."

In an endless summer

Summer Relief

It's ninety degrees and sticky as glue

We're stuck at a visit to icky Aunt Sue.

She thinks it's delightful to eat on her deck.

The fruit punch has ice cubes -- want one down your neck?

-- Felicia Nimue Ackerman

(This first ran in The Providence Journal)