Chris Powell: Snowstorm news coverage is ridiculous
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Government in Connecticut is often mediocre but it usually excels at clearing the roads during and after a snowstorm like last week's. Maybe this is because while some failures are easily overlooked or concealed, there is no hiding impassable roads. They risk political consequences.
So people in Connecticut can have confidence that even the heaviest accumulations will not cause catastrophe -- that their road crews will defeat the snow before anyone starves to death.
Then what explains the obsession of the state's news organizations, especially the television stations, with celebrating the obvious when there is going to be snow?
First they tell us that the road crews will plow the roads again. Then they show us the plows, as if we have never seen them before. Then they interview someone or even the sand at a public works garage. Then they stand out in the snow to show that it's falling. Then they broadcast from their four-wheel-drive vehicles as if snowy roads are a surprise. And when the storm has passed they spend almost as much time reporting that the snow fell and was plowed out of the way.
The actual information conveyed in these tedious hours could be distilled into a couple of short sentences, and even then it seldom would convey anything that couldn't have been guessed.
Meanwhile, the investment banks are looting the country, the state and municipal employee unions are looting state and municipal government, Connecticut's cities are suffering horrible mayhem every day, and some longstanding and expensive public policies keep failing to achieve their nominal objectives -- but nobody reports much about those things even when the weather is warm and sunny and offers nothing to scare people with.
Maybe market research has assured news organizations that people crave to be told what they already know, since what they don't know risks being scarier than a mere snowstorm.
But then news organizations should not call snowstorm reporting news.
Maybe it is meant only as entertainment, but then even reruns of The Jerry Springer Show might be more enlightening than watching snow fall on a TV screen when it's also falling in even higher definition on the other side of the window.
After they have explained whatever is meant by their snowstorm reporting, maybe Connecticut's news organizations can explain how they can call "tax reform" the proposals of state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and his colleagues on the liberal side of the Democratic caucuses in the General Assembly.
For "reform" conveys a favorable judgment -- "reform" always sounds good. But the accurate and impartial term for these tax proposals is increases, even when they are aimed at "the rich," since "the rich" already pay far more taxes than everyone else.
Further, Looney and his allies long have said they want "the rich" to pay "their fair share," but ever since the state income tax was enacted in 1991 no formula has been offered for calculating a "fair share." In these circumstances "fair share" means only more, even as journalism again fails to question the terminology.
Ever since 1991 more taxes generally and more taxes on "the rich" particularly have not saved Connecticut as was promised back then. Instead Connecticut still faces huge state budget deficits, is the second most indebted state on a per-capita basis, is losing population relative to the rest of the country, and despite many public needs government here has made only one legally binding promise: to pay pensions to its own employees.
As a matter of law in Connecticut, all those other public needs can go to the Devil, and indeed are on their way, casualties of "tax reform."
News organizations are just as misleading when reporting about Connecticut's "defense" contractors. For manufacturing munitions isn't automatically defensive, since munitions also can supply the stupid imperial war of the moment. Two decades of war in Afghanistan have not been "defensive" any more than a decade of war in Vietnam was.
The accurate and impartial term is military contractors even if, being full of military contractors, supposedly liberal Connecticut seems ready to abide any war, no matter how stupid, no matter how long.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
You can have her/him for free
“Love’s Lost Child at the Information Booth” (oil and pencil on board), by Thorton Utz (1914-1999), for the cover of the Dec. 20, 1958 Saturday Evening Post. It’s at The National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, R.I.
(c) 2020 Images Courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.
Closed-in comfort
“The wind washes the fog away
Today it’s not my friend
Rather I enjoyed the closeness
Confined to near-sighted news….’’
— From “Interior Clarity,’’ by Rachel Maher (a North Bennington, Vt.-based poet and elementary school official.
The village of North Bennington, Vt.
— Photo by Mark Barry
Catch the Pawtuxet polluters
Scum at the waterfall on the South Branch of the Pawtuxet River at the grand Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick. The Royal Mills, built in 1890 and then rebuilt in 1920, after a fire, was for years the site of a major textile mill making stuff under the brand name of Fruit of the Loom — a brand still extant.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com
Attention Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State Police! What’s the source of the revolting yellow scum and suds that appear on the South Branch of the oft-scenic Pawtuxet River, particularly when the water is high after a rainstorm? It’s especially noticeable at the otherwise beautiful waterfall along the Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick.
This pollution is killing birds and other wildlife, and proximity to it can’t be good for people either.
Locals have been asking the DEM for several years to find out why this is happening and to stop it, but as yet nothing has happened.
Is this industrial waste? There’s not much industry left in the valley. So is the pollution draining from an old closed factory? From sewers?
Or, as seems much more likely, are people dumping stuff directly into the river, which would be a crime? These sorts of miscreants, often dressing in black to avoid detection, particularly favor dumping at night to avoid the expense and inconvenience of proper disposal.
Anyway, this has gone on far too long!
Sort of the way it should look
It only looks like a muffin
"Internal Sala” (mixed media, pastel) by Ponnapa Prakkamakul, in the “Unexpected Relationships’’ show, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, Ms. Prakkamakul is a Boston-based artist and landscape architect. A sala is a Southeast Asian term for a living room.
'Can only work at balance'
A group of of dog whelks on barnacles, which they eat.
“Acorn barnacles fight tides to hold
to one bony purchase, while dog whelks
worry them and bore toward
flesh in the rush to change
what can only work at balance…’’
— From “Rocky Shore,’’ by Nancy Nahra is a Burlington, Vt.-based poet and teacher.
Waxed winter wonderland
“Dragon Journey Book’’ (inside), 4.5" x 7” (folded), 27” x 7” (flat), monoprint, antique paper, encaustic, on BFK paper), by Soosen Dunholter, based in Peterboro, N.H., a town in Monadnock Region long famous for its painters and writers. It’s the home of the famed McDowell Colony, a residency and workshop center for artists of various kinds.
View of Peterboro in 1907, with Mt. Monadnock in the distance
Bond Hall at the McDowell Colony
View of Mount Monadnock from the Cathedral of the Pines, in Rindge, N.H.
‘The end or the beginning’
On the Cape Cod National Seashore
“A great ocean beach runs north and south unbroken, mile lengthening into mile. Solitary and elemental, unsullied and remote, visited and possessed by the outer sea, these sands might be the end or the beginning of the world.’’
— Henry Beston, in The Outermost House (1929)
David Warsh: Are today’s politics dangerously polluted by ‘othering,’ ‘aversion’ and ‘moralization’?
American National Elections Studies’ feeling thermometer responses 1980–2016, showing a rise in affective polarization. It’s gotten worse since 2016.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
I winced at the Dec. 18 editorial cartoon in The Washington Post, “All the Republican Rats’’: state attorneys general and Congress members all named and depicted as street rats for “collaborating with President Trump in his attempt to subvert the Constitution and stay in office.”
I winced because a couple of days before I had read Thomas Edsall’s New York Times online column, “America – We Have a Problem’’. Edsall is a particularly talented political journalist. For 25 years he reported on national political affairs for The Post. Since 2011 he has contributed a column to The Times’s Web site.
Edsall related the gist of an article that appeared in the Policy Forum section of Science magazine in October. In “Political Sectarianism is America,’’ 15 political scientists at various major research universities wrote that “The severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement” to the extent that a new term was required to describe the phenomenon.
Political sectarianism, they suggested, drawing a parallel with more familiar construct of religious sectarianism, is “the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another.” Three core ingredients characterize political sectarianism:
othering – the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion – the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans -- and moralization – the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous. It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere.
I have my doubts about whether political sectarianism has been overtaking the United States, but it certainly exists, and I know it when I see it. Herblock, the great editorial cartoonist of The Post from the 1950s until he died in 2001, famously depicted Richard Nixon as emerging from a sewer, but never, I think, as anything other than human.
Humanists – politicians, lawyers, business folk, religious and civic leaders, community organizers, journalists, artists, historians – will gradually get us out of the present situation. In the meantime, newspaper editorial cartoonists should show restraint.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
© 2020 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR
Sheridan Miller: Decline in number of new high-school graduates could hurt New England’s economy
At Providence’s prestigious (despite its ugly Brutalist architecture) Classical High School
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
BOSTON
The number of new high-school graduates in New England is expected to shrink by nearly 13 percent by 2037, according to the 10th edition of Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, released this week by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).
Published by WICHE every four years, Knocking at the College Door is a widely recognized source of data and projections more than 15 years forward on the high school graduate populations for all 50 states.
The latest edition includes projections of high-school graduates through the Class of 2037. The data include estimates for the U.S., regions, and the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for public and private high-school graduates, as well as a forecast of public high-school graduation rates by race/ethnicity.
Among key findings, NEBHE’s analysis of the report finds that, by 2037:
The number of new high-school graduates in New England is expected to decline from 170,000 to 148,490, a 12.7 percent decrease.
The number of public high-school graduates in the region is projected to fall by 11 percent, while the much smaller number of students graduating from New England’s private high schools will shrink by 23 percent.
The region’s high schoolers will continue to become increasingly diverse. Over the next 16 years, the number of white high-school graduates will decline by 29 percent, while Black high-school graduates will increase by 7 percent, Hispanics by 54 percent, Asian and Pacific Islanders by 18 percent, and those who identify as two or more races by 42 percent.
New England’s challenges with an aging population and falling birth rates has been well chronicled. With these new projections and declining state revenues (to say nothing of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the report does not calculate), the number of public and private high schoolers expected to graduate in the region calls for a closer examination. High-school graduation rates are an especially important indicator of college matriculation and future success. We know that the more education that people have, the more likely they are to have a family-sustaining wage. If high-school graduation rates are declining in the region, this suggests that college graduation rates will do the same and have far-reaching effects on the success of individuals and our region’s economic competitiveness.
The projected overall decline in the number of New England’s high-school graduates will be largely driven by significant declines in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, as each state is projected to see a decline of 18 percent. The initial decline in the region’s number of high-school graduates is expected to be modest, with much steeper drops projected to occur after 2025.
Projected regional graduation declines from 2019 suggest:
From 2019 to 2020, the number of high-school graduates in the region fell by 0.3 percent.
Between 2019 and 2025, this group is projected to shrink by 0.5 percent.
Between 2019 and 2030, the number of high school graduates in New England is projected to drop by 8 percent.
Between 2019 and 2037, the number of graduates is projected to drop by 12.7 percent.
With the number of high-school graduates expected to fall significantly across New England in the next decade and a half, legislators, educators and leaders in higher education must act proactively to make sure we can mitigate the impact of these declines in our region.
Public and private high schools
Overall, New England public and private high-school graduates constitute 4.5 percent of all high-school graduates in the U.S. New England has a higher percentage of private high school graduates than the rest of the nation. In fact, even though New England comprises a small proportion of the total U.S. population, the region’s private-school graduates made up 7 percent of all private-school graduates in the U.S. in 2020. New England public-school graduates made up only 4 percent of the nation’s total. By 2037, the region’s public high schools are projected to see an 11 percent decline in the number of graduates, and the data anticipate a larger decline of 23 percent among private high schools.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
As mentioned above, because New England’s high-school student population is predominantly white, much of the average decline that is projected to occur over the next 16 years can be explained by the decline of white student graduates and the region’s increasing diversification. Between 2020 and 2037, the number of New England’s white student high-school graduates is expected to decline by 29 percent. Nationally, the number of white graduates during this same period is expected to decline by 19 percent.
By comparison, the number of minoritized high school graduates in New England is expected to increase slightly across certain demographic groups, with the number of Black high school graduates rising by 7 percent over the next 16 years, the number of Hispanic graduates growing by 54 percent, Asian and Pacific Islander graduates growing by 18 percent, and graduates who identity as two or more races growing by 42 percent.
Additionally, the number of Alaska Native and American Indian high- school graduates in New England is expected to decline by 35 percent over the next 16 years. Though this group represents a small fraction of New England’s high-school student population, it is critical that education leaders and policymakers support these students.
As we continue to think about our roles in furthering equity, it is important to remember that our education system has historically been set up to cater to white students. As our student population becomes more diverse, we should focus on learning how best to support students of color while preparing educators in primary, secondary and higher education who also reflect the changing demographics of our students in the region.
Among the many significant implications of WICHE’s report for educators, legislators and higher education leaders, the projected decline in high-school graduates will have long-term effects on the rates of higher-education enrollment in New England and beyond. While this is bad news for the vast majority of the region’s postsecondary institutions that are enrollment-driven, the projected declines could also hurt our regional economy, as fewer individuals will be able to compete for good-paying jobs that require an education beyond high school and eventually fewer employers may be drawn to the region for its educated labor. Additionally, it is critical to consider the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—both in the short- and long-terms—on high-school graduation rates and individuals’ decisions about whether to pursue higher education.
NEBHE will be answering questions about the implications of WICHE’s report in a Webinar in the New Year. More details to come soon.
Sheridan Miller is coordinator of state policy engagement at NEBHE.
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Everything will be....
“Ever Ok Ever’’ (acrylic over mixed media), by McKay Otto, in his show at Atelier Newport through Jan. 22.
The gallery says:
"McKay wants the viewer to have the feeling of not entering an artwork but a sanctum filled with ethereal light. McKay believes in the invisible , underlying reflections inherent in natural light like color and its reaction with light. McKay's work is abstract, drawn in part from the ordered universe and leaving any recognizable imagery - figures, landscapes, material world behind. Transparent-lucent acrylic canvas is his signature material, and painting and sculpture are his preferred gestures. McKay is as confident of his mastery of reflecting light to produce ethereal colors as he is his artistic vision and his ability to see the possibilities within light and beyond. McKay thinks of ways to work with the powerful forces waiting in the light just to be reflected. But the other side of this is the powerful ability to read the possibility inherent in the light and it's his intuitive sense to look at a material object and just know that there is an art work there ready to be transformed and transcend itself in his almost ephemeral state of mind necessary for achieving the unthinkable".
xxx
"Everyday I play with the light of the universe to find a way to a deeper dimension of reality in which all paths might ultimately converge."
- McKay Otto
Melissa Bailey: In Mass. and elsewhere, climate change hurts patients’ health
Mount Auburn Hospital's first building, the Parsons Building, built 1886. Patients had to be moved in the Cambridge hospital in 2019 because of a heat wave.
BOSTON
A 4-year-old girl was rushed to the emergency room three times in one week for asthma attacks.
An elderly man, who’d been holed up in a top-floor apartment with no air conditioning during a heat wave, showed up at a hospital with a temperature of 106 degrees.
A 27-year-old man arrived in the ER with trouble breathing ― and learned he had end-stage kidney disease, linked to his time as a sugar-cane farmer in the sweltering fields of El Salvador.
These patients, whose cases were recounted by doctors, all arrived at Boston-area hospitals in recent years. While the coronavirus pandemic is at the forefront of doctor-patient conversations these days, there’s another factor continuing to shape patients’ health: climate change.
Global warming is often associated with dramatic effects such as hurricanes, fires and floods, but patients’ health issues represent the subtler ways that climate change is showing up in the exam room, according to the physicians who treated them.
Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, said that she was working a night shift when the 4-year-old arrived the third time, struggling to breathe. The girl’s mother felt helpless that she couldn’t protect her daughter, whose condition was so severe that she had to be admitted to the hospital, Salas recalled.
She found time to talk with the patient’s mother about the larger factors at play: The girl’s asthma appeared to be triggered by a high pollen count that week. And pollen levels are rising in general because of higher levels of carbon dioxide, which she explained is linked to human-caused climate change.
Salas, a national expert on climate change and health, is a driving force behind an initiative to spur clinicians and hospitals to take a more active role in responding to climate change. The effort launched in Boston last February, and organizers aim to spread it to seven U.S. cities and Australia over the next year and a half.
Although there is scientific consensus on a mounting climate crisis, some people reject the idea that rising temperatures are linked to human activity. The controversy can make doctors hesitant to bring it up.
Even at the climate-change discussion in Boston, one panelist suggested the topic may be too political for the exam room. Dr. Nicholas Hill, head of the Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Division at Tufts Medical Center of Medicine, in Boston, recalled treating a “cute little old lady” in her 80s who likes Fox News, a favorite of climate-change doubters. With someone like her, talking about climate change may hurt the doctor-patient relationship, he suggested. “How far do you go in advocating with patients?”
Doctors and nurses are well suited to influence public opinion because the public considers them “trusted messengers,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who co-organized the Boston event and co-directs the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard’s school of public health. People have confidence they will provide reliable information when they make highly personal and even life-or-death decisions.
Bernstein and others are urging clinicians to exert their influence by contacting elected officials, serving as expert witnesses, attending public protests and reducing their hospital’s carbon emissions. They’re also encouraging them to raise the topic with patients.
Dr. Mary Rice, a pulmonologist who researches air quality at Beth-Israel Deaconess Medical Center here, recognized that in a 20-minute clinic visit, doctors don’t have much time to spare.
But “I think we should be talking to our patients about this,” she said. “Just inserting that sentence, that one of the reasons your allergies are getting worse is that the allergy season is worse than it used to be, and that’s because of climate change.”
Salas, who has been a doctor for seven years, said she had little awareness of the topic until she heard climate change described as the “greatest public health emergency of our time” during a 2013 conference.
“I was dumbfounded about why I hadn’t heard of this, climate change harming health,” she said. “I clearly saw this is going to make my job harder” in emergency medicine.
Now, Salas said, she sees ample evidence of climate change in the exam room. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, for instance, a woman seeking refuge in Boston showed up with a bag of empty pill bottles and thrust it at Salas, asking for refills, she recalled. The patient hadn’t had her medications replenished for weeks because of the storm, whose destructive power was likely intensified by climate change, according to scientists.
Climate change presents many threats across the country, Salas noted: Heat stress can exacerbate mental illness, prompt more aggression and violence, and hurt pregnancy outcomes. Air pollution worsens respiratory problems. High temperatures can weaken the effectiveness of medications such as albuterol inhalers and EpiPens.
The delivery of health care is also being disrupted. Disasters like Hurricane Maria have caused shortages in basic medical supplies. Last November, nearly 250 California hospitals lost power in planned outages to prevent wildfires. Natural disasters can interrupt the treatment of cancer, leading to earlier death.
Even a short heat wave can upend routine care: On a hot day in 2019, for instance, power failed at Mount Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, Mass., and firefighters had to move patients down from the top floor because it was too hot, Salas said.
Other effects of climate change vary by region. Salas and others urged clinicians to look out for unexpected conditions, such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, that are spreading to new territory as temperatures rise.
In California, where wildfires have become a fact of life, researchers are scrambling to document the ways smoke inhalation is affecting patients’ health, including higher rates of acute bronchitis, pneumonia, heart attacks, strokes, irregular heartbeats and premature births.
Researchers have shown that heavy exposure to wildfire smoke can change the DNA of immune cells, but they’re uncertain whether that will have a long-term impact, said Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford University’s center for allergy and asthma research.
“It causes a lot of anxiety,” Prunicki said. “Everyone feels helpless because we simply don’t know — we’re not able to give concrete facts back to the patient.”
In Denver, Dr. Jay Lemery, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said he’s seeing how people with chronic illnesses like diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease suffer more with extreme heat.
There’s no medical code for “hottest day of the year,” Lemery said, “but we see it; it’s real. Those people are struggling in a way that they wouldn’t” because of climbing temperatures, he said. “Climate change right now is a threat multiplier — it makes bad things worse.”
Lemery and Prunicki are among the doctors planning to organize events in their respective regions to educate peers about climate-related threats to patients’ health, through the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Initiative, the effort launched in Boston in February.
“There are so many really brilliant, smart clinicians who have no clue” about the link between climate change and human health, said Lemery, who has also written a textbook and started a fellowship on the topic.
Salas said she sometimes hears pushback that climate change is too political for the exam room. But despite misleading information from the fossil fuel industry, she said, the science is clear. Based on the evidence, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.
Salas said that, as she sat with the distraught mother of the 4-year-old girl with asthma in Boston, her decision to broach the topic was easy.
“Of course I have to talk to her about climate change,” Salas said, “because it’s impairing her ability to care for her daughter.”
Melissa Bailey is a reporter for Kaiser Health News.
Melissa Bailey: @mmbaily
All business in Brooklin
The moose, the state mammal, at the Maine State Museum, in Augusta
— Photo by Billy Hathorn
“There has been more talk about the weather around here this year than common, but there has been more weather to talk about. For about a month now we have had solid cold — firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency. Clean, hard, purposeful cold, unyielding and unremitting. Some days have been clear and cold, others have been stormy and cold. We have had cold with snow and cold without snow, windy cold and quiet cold, rough cold and indulgent peace-loving cold. But always cold.”
— E.B. White on his first full year at a his farm in Brooklin, on the Blue Hill Peninsula, on the Maine Coast. This essay appeared in his collection One Man’s Meat (1944). Winters tend to be milder and shorter now.
“In Deep Winter,’’ by Richard von Drasche-Wartinberg
‘Weather’s glamorous deceits’
“Wheat Stacks, Snow Effect,’’ by Claude Monet
“doesn’t need us, wants to be still…
not hurried into life
by the glamorous deceits
of a sudden thaw….’’
From “The Garden in Winter,’’ by Lawrence Raab (born 1946). He lives in Williamstown, Mass., in The Berkshires.
N.E. COVID update: Eli Lilly partners with UnitedHealth; ER visits in early pandemic
Encaustic painting by Nancy Whitcomb
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
BOSTON
”Eli Lilly & Company has partnered with UnitedHealth Group to develop promising new treatments for COVID-19. Researchers will study Eli Lilly’s new monoclonal antibody treatment for non-hospitalized patients who have recently contracted COVID-19. Read more here.
“Researchers at Harvard Medical School have published a study on the decline of emergency room visits in the early days of the pandemic. The investigators, working at Massachusetts General Hospital, raised raised concerns that critically ill patients were not seeking care because of fear of COVID-19 infection. Read more here.’’
Maternal mysteries
“Mother Courage” (onion skins, mixed media), by Marsha Nouritza Odabashian, at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Jan. 8-31, in the “Heroes and Villains” show.
Manfred Wekwerth and Gisela May during rehearsals of Mother Courage and Her Children (1978). The play was written by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), a Communist.
'Lost in fleeces'
—- Photo by Sean the Spook
It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.
— By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), of Amherst, Mass.