Patty Wight: Maine abortion-rights advocates try to change minds by going door to door
Planned Parenthood volunteer Sarah Mahoney talks to a voter about abortion access outside a home in Windham, Maine.
— Photo by Patty Wight/Maine Public Radio
It’s Saturday, and Sarah Mahoney is one of several Planned Parenthood volunteers knocking on doors in Windham, Maine, a politically moderate town not far from Portland.
No one answers at the first couple of houses. But as Mahoney heads up the street, she sees a woman out for a walk.
“Hey! We’re out canvassing,” she says. “Would you mind having a conversation with us?”
Mahoney wants to talk about abortion — not a typical topic for a conversation, especially with a stranger. But the woman, Kerry Kelchner, agrees to talk. If this were typical door-to-door canvassing, Mahoney might ask Kelchner about a political candidate, remind her to vote and then be on her way. But Mahoney is deep canvassing — a technique that employs longer conversations to move opinions on hot-button issues.
Planned Parenthood in Maine has deployed the strategy for several years amid what it says are increasing threats to reproductive rights. This year alone, states have enacted more than 100 restrictions on abortion, including one in Texas that bans most abortions after six weeks. This month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case about a Mississippi law that could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. And though state law in Maine protects abortion rights even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion opponents have gained traction in the state in recent years. So volunteers like Mahoney start conversations. And they can get quite personal.
Mahoney first assesses Kelchner’s baseline attitude on abortion access on a scale of 0 to 10. A 10 means the interviewee believes anyone should be able to get an abortion for any reason.
Kelchner says she’s a 7.
Next, Mahoney asks Kelchner a series of questions to better understand her values.
“Can you tell me a little bit about what shaped your views on abortion?” she asks. “Have you known anybody who’s had an abortion, a friend or a family member?”
“My mother,” says Kelchner. She explains her parents were young when she was born, and they weren’t ready for another baby.
Then Mahoney, who’s 60, shares that she also had an abortion. “I was in my early 20s,” she says. “I was a little conflicted about it, and I wanted to have a family. I knew I wanted to have a family, but I was in no way ready to do that.”
Mahoney points out that she and Kelchner have similar views on what an unplanned pregnancy can mean. Then she asks her opening question again, to see whether Kelchner’s feelings about abortion access have shifted on the 0-to-10 scale.
“Still around 7,” Kelchner says.
Mahoney probes further. “What would be the circumstances where you would say, ‘No — they shouldn’t have the right to have an abortion?’”
Kelchner pauses. “That’s a good question.”
They talk more. Ultimately, Kelchner can’t think of any circumstance in which she believes someone should be denied an abortion.
“There should be no judgment,” she says.
“So that would be a 10?” Mahoney asks.
“Yep,” says Kelchner.
In the five years she’s been deep canvassing for Planned Parenthood, Mahoney said, she hasn’t had a single unpleasant conversation.
“What we’ve found doing this is that it is an effective way to change minds about abortion,” said Amy Cookson, director of external communications for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.
Cookson said Planned Parenthood started deep canvassing in Maine in 2015, after Paul LePage, an anti-abortion Republican, won a second term as governor. Gay rights advocates in California had used deep canvassing on the same-sex marriage issue, and she wondered: “Can it work around abortion stigma?”
Joshua Kalla, a political scientist at Yale University, has conducted research that found the technique can change people’s deeply held beliefs. The crucial elements are that canvassers listen without judgment and share their own stories.
“So whether the person had an abortion and is talking about their abortion story,” said Kalla, “or whether the person is an ally and is talking about a friend or family member who had an abortion and is sharing that story, the effects seem to be quite similar.”
Kalla has also studied Planned Parenthood’s efforts in Maine and said the group has added something else that’s effective: moral reframing. Canvassers listen for the moral values a voter emphasizes and then incorporate those values into the story they share.
But deep canvassing is not exclusively a progressive tactic, Kalla said. Conservative groups can use it, too, and he thinks that would improve political discourse: “You know, it would be good for American society if the way we had political conversation was more grounded, and listening to the other side, and being nonjudgmental, and being curious.”
Back in Windham, Mahoney continues to walk through the neighborhood. She meets a man outside his apartment building who gives only his first name, Chris. He says he’s a 4 on the abortion access scale. He opposes abortion except in cases of sexual assault. Chris tells Mahoney that he had a daughter when he was 15.
“Do you talk about, I’m curious, birth control and abortion?” Mahoney asks.
“I do with her a lot,” Chris says. She’s a teenager, he says, and he’s not sure what he’d do if she got pregnant accidentally.
“It’s her own life,” he says. “I don’t know if I would even try to change her mind. Because it’s her decision.”
As the conversation goes on, Chris seems as though he supports access to abortion. But at the end, he doesn’t budge on his rating.
Mahoney said that’s OK. Some people won’t change their minds right away.
“The worst way to think about this is that it’s some kind of Jedi mind trick,” she said, “and I’m going to let them talk about themselves and then — pow! — I’m going to change their mind.”
What Mahoney wants most from these conversations is for people to think more deeply about the nuances around abortion and identify common ground: “I just feel like we all need to be taking steps to hear one another and move towards each other, instead of just diving into this divisive, contrary, hostile, red and blue world.”
Because of the success Planned Parenthood in Maine has had with deep canvassing, it has trained volunteers in other states, including Texas and Kansas. Next year, Kansas voters will cast ballots on a referendum question that seeks to revoke abortion access as a fundamental right.
Patty Wight is a journalist with Maine Public Radio.
This story is part of a partnership that includes Maine Public Radio, NPR and Kaiser Health News.
Not precisely bustling Main Street in the village of South Windham c. 1910.
Windham’s motto is “Windham Works for Maine’’
And indeed, the town, now mostly a Portland suburb and summer resort area because of its location on large and beautiful Sebago Lake , once was a thriving industrial center.
In 1859, for example, when Windham's population was 2,380, it had eight sawmills, a corn and flour mill, two shingle mills, a fulling mill, two carding mills, a woolen textile factory, a barrel factory, a chair-stuff factory, a famous gunpowder factory and two tanneries.
Oriental Powder Company, Maine’s largest gunpowder factory, remained in operation until 1905 providing rock-blasting powder, gunpowder for the Crimean War, and 25 percent of the the Union gunpowder supply for the Civil War.
A charcoal house, saltpeter refinery, mills and storehouses were separated along a mile of both banks of the Presumpscot River to minimize damage during infrequent explosions.
Beach at Sebago Lake State Park. The lake is lake-rich Maine’s second largest, after Moosehead.
Beautiful day in the branches
This hawk — or is it an owl? — seems well camouflaged on a bright December day on the Brown University campus, in Providence.
— Photo by Lydia Whitcomb
And that was before the private-equity folks
Edgartown Harbor
—Photo by D Ramey Logan
Main Street in Vineyard Haven
“Today the human footprint is all over the place. The old salts and first families are only dimly evident, towns are run by business interests….No one even considers the possibility of keeping the Island as it was. Instead they debate the ideal rate of growth.’’
Anne W. Simon, (1914-1996) in On the Vineyard II (1990). She was a rich American author, writer and environmentalist who summered on Martha’s Vineyard.
Snowstorms: Joy and agony; Jewish Christmas songs
The Dec. 12, 1960 blizzard prepares to slam New England.
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I wrote this on the anniversary of a Dec. 12, 1960 blizzard I remember well partly because I was soon to move to another town, and so I’m thinking about snowstorms as a young person.
When my four siblings and I were kids, we loved the drama of big snows. The stillness before the first flakes, which in memory always seemed to come late at night. Then the muffled sound of the snowplows around dawn, as the northeast wind came up, as it did sometimes ferociously where we lived on a hill along Massachusetts Bay
Then, school having been cancelled (oh happy day!), we went out in our itchy and water-absorbing woolen snow pants, coats, mittens, caps and vulcanized rubber boots, with buckles, into the white and the wind, taking particular pleasure in the drifts, into which we’d try to make snow caves. With all this activity, a pair of gloves would rarely remain together for more than a week or two.
The day after the storm, if we were fortunate enough to again have no school, we’d enjoy what was usually a bright, crisp, crackling-dry and exhilarating day, with sledding and even a little skiing, though the work needed to climb up our little hill soon made that pall. On our way to a higher hill, it was fun to drag a toboggan on roads that the town hadn’t gotten around to plowing yet. The town was ours!
I should have known to feel sorry for my father, who had to do most of the snow-shoveling (until I was about eight and could seriously help) and often found it very difficult to get to his job in downtown Boston during and after blizzards. But as usual, he never complained. Some years in the future we children, like him, also came to see snowstorms, whatever their brief beauty, simply as irritating inconveniences in obligation-heavy workaday lives.
Indeed, as thaws and rain left a glaze of ice on the snow after cold fronts pushed in, and the snowbanks along roads became filthy with sand and dog poop in a town where most of these creatures ran around unleashed, even we as kids lost the joy of what the radio and TV people insisted on relentlessly calling the “white stuff’’.
After a few days, we were happy that a warm, southeast rainstorm would wash away all or most of the snow – until the next nor’easter came up the coast and brought more snow, which we’d enjoy for only a couple of days.
Of course, without weather satellites and the many other high-tech forecasting gizmos we have now, predictions weren’t nearly as accurate back then. Every once in while there would be a surprise snowstorm. I remember one that led Carl DeSuze, a WBZ radio personality, to jovially taunt the station’s chief meteorologist, Don Kent, with:
“Well, Don, I shoveled eight inches of ‘partly cloudy’ off my sidewalk today.’’
Have Yourself a Secular Christmas
Robert May, who was a secular Jew by background, created the Rudolph story, which May’s brother in law Johnny Marks, who also was Jewish, turned into an alarmingly popular song. May converted to Catholicism late in life.
Jews wrote all or part of most of the best known American nonreligious Christmas songs, mostly created in the mid-20th Century. Among them:
“White Christmas”; “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (deliciously maudlin!); “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (also maudlin); “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”; (retailers’ favorite?); “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”; “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (revolting song!) and “The Christmas Song’’ (“Chestnuts Roasting Over an Open Fire”). The last could be called cocktail-lounge music, perfect for a wan, cigarette-smoking pianist with a drink by his side.
Why? Well for one thing, Jews found that music was one field (another was the movies) open to them in an era when anti-Semitism was still rife in America. And many Jewish immigrants brought a high appreciation for music with them from Europe. Further, Christmas in the mid-20th Century was becoming more of a secular (and commercialized) celebration and diversion in the darkest days of the year and less a Christian feast day. Note, by the way, that Dec. 25 is the only federal holiday that’s also a religious one.
Anyway, a special thank God for the Jews at Christmas. And remember that Christianity started as a Jewish sect.
Michelle Andrews: In Conn., a 'facility fee' for a televisit to a hospital
The Yale New Haven Hospital campus
When Arielle Harrison’s 9-year-old needed to see a pediatric specialist at Connecticut’s Yale New Haven Health System in June, a telehealth visit seemed like a great option. Since her son wasn’t yet eligible to be vaccinated against COVID-19, they could connect with the doctor via video and avoid venturing into a germy medical facility.
Days before the appointment, she got a notice from the hospital informing her that she would receive two bills for the visit. One would be for the doctor’s services. The second would be for a hospital facility fee, even though she and her son would be at home in Cheshire, Conn., and never set foot in any hospital-affiliated building.
Harrison, 40, who works in nonprofit communications, posted on Twitter about the unwelcome fee, including an image of Marge Simpson of TV’s The Simpsons with a disgusted look on her face, captioned “GROANS.”
She called the billing office the next morning and was told the facility fee is based on where the doctor is located. Since the doctor would be on hospital property, the hospital would charge a facility fee of between $50 and $350, depending on her insurance coverage.
“It’s just one of many examples of how this is a very difficult system to use,” Harrison said, referring to the intricacies of U.S. health care
Hospital facility fees have long come under criticism from patients and consumer advocates. Hospitals say the fees, which can add hundreds of dollars or even more than $1,000 to a patient’s bill, are necessary to cover the high cost of keeping a hospital open and ready to provide care 24/7.
But it’s not only hospital visits that result in facility fees. Over the past several years, hospitals have been on a buying binge, snapping up physician practices that often then begin charging the fees, too. Patients seeing the same doctor for the same care as at earlier visits are now on the hook for the extra fee — because of a change in ownership.
Charging a facility fee for a video visit where the patient logs in from their living room is even more of a head-scratcher.
“The charges seem crazy,” said Ted Doolittle, who heads up Connecticut’s Office of the Healthcare Advocate, which provides help to consumers with health coverage issues. “It rankles, and it should.”
Facility fees for video appointments remain rare, health finance experts say, even as the use of telehealth has soared during the covid pandemic. Medicare has allowed hospitals to assess a small fee for certain beneficiaries who get telehealth care at home during the ongoing national public health emergency, and people in private health plans may also be charged for them.
Harrison, however, was lucky. Doolittle reached out to her after seeing her tweet to offer his office’s assistance. In Connecticut, hospitals are prohibited from charging facility fees for telehealth visits.
Connecticut imposed what may be the only state ban on telehealth facility fees as part of a broader law passed in May that was intended to help residents access telehealth during the pandemic. The prohibition on facility fees sunsets at the end of June 2023.
Pat McCabe, senior vice president of finance at Yale New Haven Health System, said he can’t explain why Harrison received a notice that she’d be charged a facility fee for a telehealth visit. He speculated that her son’s appointment might have been coded incorrectly. Under the new law, he said, the health system hasn’t charged any telehealth patients a facility fee.
But such fees are justified, McCabe said.
“It offsets the cost of the software we use to facilitate the telehealth visits, and we do still have to keep the lights on,” he said, noting that the providers doing telehealth visits are on hospital sites that incur heat and power and maintenance charges.
The American Hospital Association didn’t respond to requests for comment about the rationale for facility fees for telehealth care.
As the pandemic began overwhelming the health system last year, hospitals essentially closed their doors to most non-covid patients.
Telehealth visits, which made up about 1% of medical visits before the pandemic, jumped to roughly 50% at its height last year, said Kyle Zebley, vice president of public policy at the nonprofit American Telemedicine Association, which promotes this type of care. Those appointments have dropped off and now make up roughly 15% of medical visits across all types of coverage.
Before the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services severely limited telehealth coverage for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. But with seniors more vulnerable during the pandemic, the agency loosened telehealth rules temporarily. As long as the public health emergency continues, the agency is allowing Medicare beneficiaries in urban areas to receive such care, which was previously covered only in rural areas. And patients can get telehealth care at home rather than having to go to a medical facility for the video appointment, as was previously required. The agency also beefed up covered telehealth services and expanded the types of providers who are allowed to offer them.
Medicare lets hospital outpatient departments bill about $27 for telehealth visits for certain beneficiaries receiving care at home. Patients are generally responsible for 20% of that amount, or about $5, although providers can waive patient cost sharing for telehealth, said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF.
At the beginning of the pandemic, patients with commercial health plans were often not charged a copay for telehealth visits, said Rick Gundling, a senior vice president at the Healthcare Financial Management Association, a membership group for health care finance professionals. But lately, “those fees have been coming back,” he said.
Facility fees for telehealth visits in commercial plans averaged $55 for the year that ended June 30, before insurance discounts, according to data from Fair Health, a national independent nonprofit that maintains a large database of insurance claims. In 2020, just 1.1% of commercial telehealth claims included a facility fee, according to Fair Health. That’s lower than for 2019, when the figure was 2.5%.
Experts predict telehealth will remain popular, but it’s unclear how those visits and any accompanying facility fees will be handled in the future.
McCabe said he expects the Yale New Haven Health System to reinstitute the facility fees when state law permits it.
“There are real costs in the health system to provide those services,” he said.
Michelle Andrews is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
andrews.khn@gmail.com, @mandrews110
Llewellyn King: Join the moving revolution in cities
Delivery e-bike with license plate in Manhattan.
Pedicab in Manhattan.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have seen the future of urban life and wasn’t quite what I expected. It was whizzing all around me in New York City on a recent visit.
My wife and I were there to do that most Christmassy of things: see Radio City Music Hall’s “Christmas Spectacular’’ starring the Rockettes. It is great and you should see it if you can, but it isn’t what bowled me over.
What bowled me over figuratively and a couple of times almost literally was the new urban mobility.
I saw the future of city transportation, dashing all around me every time I ventured to cross a street. Like cities the world over, New York has installed bicycle lanes, but they have been taken over by what might be described as Space Age people-movers in astounding configurations.
These denizens of the new mobility hurtled by on electric bicycles, electric unicycles, electric skateboards, electric, gyroscopic one-wheeled skateboards and, of course, those ubiquitous electric scooters. I didn’t think it was the end of civilization as I have known it. Instead, I longed to be a good deal younger so I, too, could join the transportation revolution.
You may not like this new order, and almost certainly if you are over 50, you’re not ready for it. However, it is here, it is happening, and it is the first exciting thing in cities, perhaps since traffic lights.
The future of urban transportation isn’t what supporters of public transit, such as myself, have been advocating for decades: more buses and trains.
City visionaries, like Scott Sellars, city manager of Kyle, Texas, a small but rapidly growing city of 60,000 between Austin and San Antonio, are looking beyond what they call “destination public transportation” to new ways of moving people or, more exactly, new ways of letting people move themselves.
Kyle has made the bold decision that the future of city transportation belongs not to buses and trains, but rather to ride-sharing companies. It has contracted for Uber to become the city’s main public transportation mode. Sellars explained the concept on Digital 360, a Texas State University weekly webinar on which I am a regular panelist.
Sellars told me that Kyle has a subsidized contract with Uber to take care of those unable to afford its fares. Residents qualifying for assistance get a voucher and an app on their cell phones and can make any local journey for a standard $3.14. There are even vouchers for the unbanked. But there isn’t a way yet to use the service if you don’t have a cell phone or access to one.
To avoid having to take lanes away from cars, Kyle has been able to build an alternative system called the Vybe, which is 12 feet wide and can accommodate all people-movers, including golf carts, bicycles and all those electric-powered wheels which are now running around New York. There are charging stations for golf carts and other electric transporters on the Vybe. The Vybe runs most places people might want to go and doubles as a right of way for utilities of all kinds.
While many of us have thought that the smart cities were going to be about super-electric connectivity, few of us realized the first tranche of city smartness would come with new forms of transportation, usurping or challenging the car, bus and train.
The transportation revolution isn’t confined to the surface of cities. Elon Musk’s Boring Company continues to plow ahead with fast, subterranean tunnels, now being implemented in Las Vegas and studied in Los Angeles, Miami, and many other cities.
Look up, too. There is a profusion of companies working on drone-like, urban sky taxis which will whip you from your home to an airport or office tower.
Above the ground, on the ground and under the ground, urban mobility is itself on the move. Hold onto your hat.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island
Web site: whchronicle.com
‘An older, simpler’ Paris
“Delacroix Les Biscuits Olibet”, by Fabienne Delacroix, in her show “Fabienne Delacroix: La Belle Epoque, ‘‘ at MFine Arts Gallerie, Boston, through Dec. 30.
Fabienne Delacroix (b. 1972), the youngest child of French painter Michel Delacroix, has been painting since the age of ten.
The gallery says:
"Until recently, Fabienne was known mainly for her seascapes and pastoral landscapes while her father was renowned for his Parisian cityscapes. However, now, Fabienne has expanded her lists of subjects to include the streets of Paris. Like her father’s, Fabienne’s Paris is an older, simpler one with horse-drawn carriages filling the streets."
Don Pesci: JFK Democrats and JFK Republicans fade into history
JFK in 1963
VERNON, Conn.
"Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others"
-- Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), German chancellor
New England – most conspicuously Connecticut and Massachusetts – has been a school of hard knocks for Republicans who in the past have been liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues. This brand, popular for many years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, has not sold in either state for decades.
The last fiscally conservative, socially liberal congressman in Connecticut was Chris Shays, whose politics was a mirror image of that of Republican Party destructor-elect Lowell Weicker, a maverick U.S. senator for many years whose long run in Congress was cut short by then Connecticut Atty. Gen. Joe Lieberman in the 1988 election.
Wise heads conjectured at the time that Lieberman had bested Weicker because Lieberman was a Democrat who, like Weicker, was socially liberal and fiscally conservative – a Jack Kennedy kind of Democrat. Weicker’s political hero, he often claimed, was New York Sen. Jacob Javits, a Jack Kennedy Republican – certainly not a conservative.
For the past half century, conservatives had been zeroed out in Connecticut, and never mind that William F. Buckley Jr., who had helped reinvigorate conservatism through his magazine, National Review, had been a lifelong resident of Connecticut, a thorn in the side of such as Weicker, a fervent anti-Reaganite. Buckley called Weicker a gasbag. It sometimes seemed that Weicker regarded Ronald Reagan as a far greater threat to the nation than, say, Soviet ally Fidel Castro, the communist maximum leader of Cuba. Reagan referred to Weicker only once in his published diary -- he said Weicker was a “fathead.”
When Weicker lost his Senate seat to Lieberman, few politically awake commentators in Connecticut were surprised. Registered Democrats in the state, then and now, outnumbered Republicans roughly by a two to one margin, a gap that fully explains Weicker’s political overtures to socially liberal Democrats. Weicker’s liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating in the Senate during his last years in Congress, was higher than that of liberal Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd.
Sensing the whiff of postmodern Democrat progressivism in the wind, a combination of whipped Republicans, fervent Jack Kennedy Democrats, and politically unaffiliated independents, showed Weicker the door and voted for Lieberman.
On the opposite side of the aisle, fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans in Connecticut’s congressional delegation, beginning with Nancy Johnson and ending with Shays, were replaced by – how to put this gently? – fiscally progressive, socially progressive Democrats. The political moral of the tawdry tale is -- if you are a Republican pretending to be a Democrat, you will lose to Democrats who have moved sharply to the left.
Jack Kennedy, Bill Buckley, Weicker –and fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republicans -- all have disappeared in puffs of smoke, leaving the political shop in Connecticut to such progressive Democrats as former Gov. Dannel Malloy, state Senate President Martin Looney, and millionaire Gov. Ned Lamont.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, perhaps the last Jacob Javits Republican in New England {along with Vermont Gov. Phil Scott?} survived for a bit, but now even he has thrown in the towel. Like Vermont, where socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders rules the roost, Massachusetts has gone the way of Connecticut. Republicans, fiscally conservative on economic issues, liberal to moderate on social issues in both states have been vanquished.
The rout in Connecticut, nearly complete, has touched the congressional delegation, all Democrats, the constitutional offices in the state, all Democrats, and the General Assembly, mostly Democrats presided over by postmodern progressives.
The dead branches on New England’s political tree are fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republicans, clipped in the bud for decades by New England academics, hungry postmodern progressives supported by an uncritical media almost wholly in the camp of the victors, and moderate Republicans, a politically unplugged species in Connecticut.
The live branches on the Democrat side of the political barricades just now are postmodern progressives, Gramsci cultists, traditional liberal enemies of the captains of industry, and radical redistributionists flying, knowingly or not, the flag of postmodern Marxism.
These are not Jack Kennedy’s political heirs. The liberalism of Jack Kennedy exists among some forlorn Democrats in the Northeast only as a consummation devoutly to be wished.
On the right in Connecticut, the conservative branch has put forth new buds. Both conservatives and libertarians in Connecticut make no attempts to accommodate their politics to disappearing moderate, fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican antecedents. That way, they have learned from bitter experience, points to the political grave. These relatively new actors on Connecticut’s political stage are energetic, barely noticed, and tendentiously misunderstood by nostalgic academics and old-time political religionists hoping for a resurrection of a once fructifying liberalism vanquished by postmodern progressivism, which has nothing in common with the liberal prescriptions recommended by Jack Kennedy in an address to The Economic Club of New York a year before he was assassinated.
Just as Weicker may have been the last Jacob Javits Republican in New England, so Jack Kennedy may have been the last classical liberal U.S. president.
You can learn a great deal from history, but you cannot set up house in the past. Those who do so are doomed to irrelevance, because time marches on – usually over the prostrate bodies of those who have, as Otto von Bismarck said, learned from their own mistakes but rendered themselves vulnerable by refusing to learn from the mistakes of others.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Caitlin Faulds: Trying to save a drowning coastal marsh
Wenley Ferguson, of Save the Bay, and many others have spent more than five years trying to save the drowning Sapowet Marsh, in Tiverton. R.I. marsh.
— Photo by Caitlin Faulds/ecoRI News)
Common reed (Phragmites australis) is an invasive species in degraded marshes in the Northeast.
Salt marsh during low tide, mean low tide, high tide and very high tide (spring tide).
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
TIVERTON, R.I.
The grasses are dying. Clusters of broken, denuded stems stand in shallow pools of brackish water, making a patchwork of the low-lying marshlands.
The slow balding is invisible from the blacktop of Seapowet Avenue, hidden behind a thick curtain of phragmites. But standing boot-deep in the peat, surrounded by the sulfuric scent of decomposition, the bare ground is clear evidence of the steady saltwater creep happening in marshes across Rhode Island.
Spartina alterniflora, or smooth cordgrass, is notoriously salt-tolerant and a common feature in saltwater marsh environments.
“They can grow along the edge of the cove and get flooded twice a day, but they can’t grow in standing water,” said Wenley Ferguson, shovel in hand. All around, the sunlight glints off pools of standing water, unable to drain and slowly growing with each high tide.
The average sea level in Rhode Island has increased by about a foot since 1929. Storm surges and king tides have pushed further and further inland. Normally, the marsh would respond to the rising high-water line by matching the migration inland.
But with the sea on one side and a dense web of roads, development, cultivated fields, and invasive species on the other — and accelerated sea-level rise on its way — Sapowet Marsh has nowhere to move.
But Ferguson, the director of habitat restoration at Save The Bay, is working to save the marsh from that saltwater grave.
Ferguson has been working with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) at the Sapowet Marsh Wildlife Management Area, a 260-acre state property, for more than five years now.
The coastal edge of Sapowet has seen more than 90 feet of shoreline erosion in the past 75 years. Under Ferguson’s watch, Sapowet has become home to the largest marsh migration facilitation project in the state — a small counter to the forces at play.
“When I say facilitate marsh migration,” she said, “it’s kind of like prepping the land for the marsh to migrate.”
Back in 2017 and 2018, Save The Bay and DEM, along with the Tiverton Conservation Commission, restored 9 acres of coastal grassland and reestablished beachside dunes on the northern side of the marsh to slow erosion.
Now the work has moved to the west and southeast sides of the marsh — and the strategy has changed to match.
Along the western front
The cordgrass roots are taut, but they cut easy. Just one stomp and the shovel sinks through the muck, water pooling up and over the toes of Ferguson’s black rubber boots.
It was a warm and clear November day — too warm, according to Ferguson. She packed for a cool fall day and wore a blue-flowered fleece, but 60 degrees means she’ll be sweating by midday.
Earlier in the week, Ferguson — along with a handful of DEM employees and volunteers — used shovels and a small excavator to dig a weaving network of runnels through the marsh. These shallow creeks will give the pooling water a route out to Narragansett Bay, allowing the area to slowly drain.
If the root zone of the marsh plants is able to dry even slightly, they will grow “healthy and happy,” Ferguson said. Healthy plants build up a stronger root base, and a stronger root base makes a coastline more resilient to erosion and sea-level rise.
But “we don’t want to drain it too fast,” she said. It has been three days since they dug the first runnels and the water level has dropped only slightly, exposing a few inches of bare mud — exactly as planned.
The standing water is thick with unconsolidated sediments and topped by a bacterial mat. If the water rushes out all at once, this sediment will pour into the bay. It’s better to dig in phases and let it settle out in the marsh, maintaining as much high ground as possible.
They are back on this day to adjust the runnels, excavating the areas where the muck has naturally dammed up. Lucianna Faraone Coccia, a Save The Bay volunteer and an environmental science master’s student at the University of Rhode Island, shovels out a cluster of grass roots.
“If that’s in there, it could plug up this whole runnel,” said Faraone Coccia, glancing down to point out a fiddler crab fumbling its way along the channel with its unbalanced claws.
With each shovel-full, the flow of water grows incrementally stronger and piles of dislodged peat beside the runnels grow larger.
“That’s technically considered fill,” said Ferguson, tossing another glob of peat toward the pile beside her. “We actually leave the peat on the marsh and we create these small little islands.”
These islands are about a chunk of peat thick —some 6-12 inches, not too high, Ferguson said — but that small elevation rise “is like a mountain in a marsh.”
Ferguson fought to keep the peat in the marsh, acquiring additional permits from the Coastal Resources Management Council, DEM’s Office of Water Resources, and the Army Corps of Engineers. This microtopography is essential for a healthy marsh surface, she said.
“These areas will just be a little higher, and they might recolonize,” Ferguson said. “And when I say might — they do recolonize.”
Within one season, the islands will host new sprouts of cordgrass, or they’ll prove high and dry enough to support clusters of high marsh grasses. The clusters of high grass will make ideal nesting habitat for the saltmarsh sparrow.
As healthy salt marsh has waned, so has the population of the saltmarsh sparrow — a bird that makes its nest out of a cup of dense high marsh grasses. The nests are built to withstand the highest moon tides, created with a dome so “the eggs float, but they don’t float out of the nest,” Ferguson said. But the area here is flooding too frequently, contributing to nest failure.
“That’s why these little islands that we’re creating are really valuable habitat,” Ferguson said.
Wenley Ferguson is constantly looking for clues to what shaped the marsh seen today.
Old ways and leftover lines
The state of marshes today are the result of centuries of human development and marshland intervention. According to Ferguson, nearly every marsh in the country holds some sort of historical impact. They are in no way pristine.
“So many of them were manipulated in this area for agricultural activity. And then in more recent years, we put roads along them,” Ferguson said. “We culverted them. We created duck habitat and impounded them. We filled them.”
From the 1700s to the 1900s, about 50 percent of marshes in the region were filled, according to Ferguson. Agricultural embankments have manipulated the marsh surface too, dating back to about the 1600s, when people started haying in these areas.
“The fresher the marsh grasses, the fresher the water table, the greater the value of the hay,” she said.
When she digs these runnels, Ferguson is always scouting for clues to what shaped the marsh seen today. A shovel full of root matter means a stagnant pool was once a field. Water pooling along straight lines could be a sign of an old embankment. Long straight trenches are likely remnants of old mosquito ditches — once made to reduce mosquito breeding grounds but now speeding marshland erosion.
The marsh’s tired past — coupled with its location in an old river valley whose steep sides make marsh migration difficult — spell out a challenging future.
“That’s why what we’re doing today is trying to restore some health of the marsh … under current conditions,” Ferguson said, “but always looking at where the marsh wants to go.”
An excavator heads into a thicket of phragmites growing on the eastern edge of Sapowet Marsh.
The eastern blockade
“Be careful of your eyes walking through this,” said John Veale, habitat biologist with DEM’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, as he pushed away the sharp corners of dozens of broken phragmites. “It can be a little bit dangerous.”
In the past century, invasive phragmites species — few native phragmites remain — have taken advantage of weakened saltwater marsh ecosystems to rampage through North American. The eastern edge of Sapowet Marsh, tucked below Old Main Road and several DEM-owned cornfields, is no different.
In many ways, phragmites are the perfect storm. Their feathery seed heads catch the light beautifully, but they also catch the wind and spread like wildfire. Once the seeds take hold, the reeds grow so densely they all but eliminate animal habitat and outcompete native grasses.
On Sapowet Marsh, it serves as an impenetrable blockade to marsh migration. Only a few grapevines are brave enough to reach their tendrils into the thicket. For the marsh to move away from the encroaching seawater, the phragmites need to loosen their hold. But that’s a notoriously difficult task.
“There’s no way we could do it with a shovel,” Ferguson said. “I mean, it’s just so hard. It’s one thing a little patch of phragmites. It’s another thing when it’s head-high.”
Mowing and burning do little to control phragmites, and pulling them out by the roots quickly proves costly. But like the smooth cordgrass, it is vulnerable to salt water. If Ferguson can drain the pooling fresh water and facilitate tidal flow up into the phragmites, they might dissipate — and the native grasses might have a chance at survival.
“We’re not going to get rid of the phragmites, but we can reduce the height and vigor of the phrag by facilitating that freshwater drainage,” she said.
Ferguson is in the early stages of battle on this front, just figuring out the plan. The phragmites grow 10-12 feet high in places, obscuring the lay of the land.
“There’s enough water,” Ferguson said. “It’s coming from someplace. I just can’t figure out the drainage cause it’s too thick.”
She has called in the help of an excavator. Within a few hours, the machine has established a clearing in the reeds and deepened part of a natural creek. Once some of the standing fresh water drains it will be easier to gauge the direction of the water flow.
Ferguson and her team intend to elongate the creek and the old agricultural ditches — putting past mistakes to better use — but for now the plan is still in development. Better to move slowly than be patching more mistakes up in a hundred years.
“The deterioration along the marsh edge is pretty remarkable, in a terrifying sort of way in my mind,” said Ferguson, pausing to point out a flock of buffleheads skimming into the water. “So that’s why we want to be really cautious on not making new openings for that erosion to expand upon.”
Caitlin Faulds is an ecoRI News journalist.
New England may soon become the world’s nuclear-fusion capital
The Sun generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 500 million metric tons of hydrogen each second.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Happiest news of the month?
Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC has just gotten $1.8 billion in private funding to build and operate the world's first commercial fusion-energy machine at its facility in Devens, Mass. The company, based in Cambridge, thus is moving faster toward what may bring about a revolution in electricity generation. It could eliminate the scary problem of trying to find safe places to store the radioactive waste that’s produced by nuclear fission, which is what nuclear-power plants use now.
Commonwealth Fusion hopes that it can prove, by 2025, that its fusion reaction creates more energy than it uses and then build a commercial-scale power plant by 2030.
What an environmental and economic boon for the world – massive amounts of clean, noncarbon-based energy -- and a boon for New England to have such an enterprise growing in its midst.
‘Like a hummable melody’
“Sky on Fire,’’ by Sue Charles, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Ms. Charles is based in Amesbury, Mass., on the Merrimack River. Her artist bio says:
“The northeast coast of the Atlantic is my subject…. Paintings exist in many dimensions;They depict three dimensions of light and space with two dimensions of color, they express the fourth dimension of time in their marks and they reveal metaphysical dimensions of thought and emotion. Finding the intersection between these ways of perceiving is my goal. I work to express the long lines of landscape space, light and air connecting everything and the quiet profundity of nature. A good painting contains only the essentials and it stays with you like a hummable melody. I aim for that. www.suecharlesstudio.com.’’
View northeast from Powwow Hill, in Amesbury
Dare to fail
“Dr.” Edwin Land presenting the Polavision home movie system, in1977.
“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.’’
— Edwin Herbert Land (1909-1991) scientist and founder of Polaroid Corporation, founded and based for many years in Cambridge, Mass. (It’s now based in Minnesota.)
He was best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corp. for inventing inexpensive filters for polarizing light, in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948 and made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less.
For decades, he was probably the best known figure in Greater Boston’s world renown high-technology sector. He was always called “Dr. Land,’’ although he never got a college undergraduate or advanced degree. Later in his career, though, Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate for his scientific and business achievements.
Polaroid Land (name for Mr., Land) Camera Model 95, the first commercially available instant camera, in 1948.
Bumps, bruises and beauty
“Spring Assurance and Fall Endurance” (oil on canvas), by Gayle Mandle, in the group show “HOUSEGUESTS: Endurance,’’ at Atelier Newport (R.I.), Dec. 18-Jan 18.
Members of this revolving group, the gallery says, provide visual metaphors for “the bump and bruises’’ we all endured in 2021 and the perseverance we needed to get through it.
“The show focuses on female artists, women who devote their lives to the arts and their families….
“Gayle Mandle's recent paintings are inspired by her late husband, Roger Mandle {who served as president of the Rhode Island School of Design}, and and his love of nature and gardening. That artisanal of beauty witnessed from her studio view inspired this body of work. She celebrates Roger's handiwork with a series of paintings entitled, ‘Seasonal Quartet’.
“These paintings are also inspired by Roger's love of poetry. The paintings are paired with poems he had written over the years”
Like them, shapeshifting and camouflaging
“Phantom Limbs Can Still Play Hide and Seek’’ (clear and fluorescent acrylic, Stonehenge Aqua, ultraviolet ink), by Kenson Truong, in his show “Bespoke,’’ at Boston Sculptors Gallery.
The gallery says that Truong taps into the psyche of cephalopods, such as cuttlefish and octopuses, while tying in his identity as a gay Asian-American man. He notes their “aptitude to shapeshift and camouflage in plain sight through its cognitive ability to learn systems of deception using spatial memory, personalities and motor play” and how experiments on them “have developed into metaphor for psychological phenomena represented by cognitive dissonance and social cognitive theory.”
Octopus opening a container by unscrewing its cap.
N.E. Council joins group battling anti-semitism
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
BOSTON
“As the Hanukkah season ended Dec. 6, The New England Council was pleased to join a coalition of 60 North American organizations, including corporations, in support of the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Shine A Light on anti-semitism national initiative. This national initiative will illuminate the dangers of anti-semitism through education, community partnerships, workplace engagement and advocacy.
“Amid a widespread rise in anti-semitism in North America, Shine A Light seeks to catalyze conversations within and across communities, on school campuses, and in the workplace, so that people will better understand what constitutes anti-semitism and take steps to respond. The nationwide campaign was launched on Nov. 28, 2021, the first day of Hanukkah, and includes a wide array of resources for corporate partners.
The New England Council encourages members to consider becoming a Shine a Light corporate partner.
Shine A Light also includes community and educational events around the country; educational resources for teachers, parents, and school districts; advertising; and social media tools. Learn more here.
An anti-semitic 1892 cartoon in Judge magazine showing the advancement of poor Jewish immigrants.
The most encouraging place in America to play baseball?
“It is said that Jim Thorpe once hit a ball into an adjoining state when playing semi-professional ball in Texas. I don’t know what the big deal is; they do that all the time in Rhode Island.’’
— Jim Hart, in “Swing for the Fences” speech in Des Moines on July 25, 2001
Cardines Field, in Newport, home of the Newport Gulls, a collegiate summer baseball team. The Gulls have played at Cardines Field since 2001.
America’s Cup Boulevard is to the left.
— Photo by Nick Lima
Rainy, icy and small
Black Mountain Ski Area, in Jackson, N.H.
— Photo by Jrclark
— Mikaela Shiffrin (born 1995), American Gold Medalist skiier
Beyond carpentry
From the series "Everyday Museum” (wood rulers mounted on a wood board), by Eduardo Terrazas, in the show “Re-inventing the Every-day,’’ at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn.
It features works by Gabriel de la Mora, Martín Soto Climent and Mr. Terrazas.
The gallery says:
“The artists in the exhibition celebrate the aestheticization of ordinary objects through a diverse set of interrogational approaches. They are concerned with a non-hierarchical discourse and formal aspects of art-making, selecting ready-made or discarded materials as metaphors for cultural commentary. Theirs is a meticulous, processed-based approach that seeks to balance the rival goals of formalism and conceptualism.’’
Some stuff I don’t believe
Skaters on the Boston Common Frog Pond.
— Photo by Tkperlman
“I don’t believe in seeking sheet music
by Boston Common on a snowy day, don’t believe
in the lighting of malls seasonably
When I’m sleeping I don’t believe in time
as we own it, though some of the others might….’’
— From “Veteran,’’ by Fanny Howe (born 1940), a Boston-based poet and essayist
“Boston Street Scene (Boston Common),” by Edward Mitchell Bannister, a depiction of the street and Boston Common area in 1898–99
1890 map
Chris Powell: A joke on Danbury’s homeless
— Photo by Eric Pouhier
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Woody Allen movie fans might appreciate the joke that Danbury's Zoning Commission is playing on homeless people in the city and, really, on the whole state.
In Allen's spoof of Russian novels, Love and Death, the comic hero at last wins the woman he adores and on their wedding night puts his arm around her in their marriage bed. She replies: "Not here."
But if not there, where?
The Danbury News-Times reports that Pacific House, a Stamford-based organization that has been helping the homeless in Fairfield County for 20 years, has acquired a former motel building in Danbury with the help of the state Housing Department, which came up with $4.63 million to purchase the property. Pacific House has been operating it as a shelter under one of Gov. Ned Lamont's emergency orders. But the order expires in February and last week the Zoning Commission voted 6-3 against allowing the shelter to operate permanently.
Commissioners accepted complaints that the shelter will harm the character of the neighborhood -- as if homeless people roaming the city and nearby towns without the supervision and services that Pacific House provides won't risk the character of many neighborhoods.
Of course, those needing shelter are problematic, but the homeless are less problematic, more successfully treated, if their treatment begins with what is called "supportive housing." Once the trauma of having no safe place and privacy ends, sobriety and rehabilitation come easier, especially since the needed services -- medical, counseling, and transportation -- can be more centrally provided.
A former motel is perfect for supportive housing. Residents of such a facility may actually be less transient than the people who stayed at the motel. And while opponents of Pacific House's Danbury facility concede the need for a shelter in the area, they offer no other location even as Pacific House's facility is already operating.
Of course, only saints want to live near people who have problems. But people with problems have to go somewhere, and it's far better for them to go where they may be helped out of their problems than to be merely sheltered in a barracks overnight, out of the cold and damp, only to be shooed back into the cold and damp at daybreak.
When supportive housing has a responsible sponsor and state government's support, as Pacific House's facility in Danbury does, state law should exempt it from local zoning. So the issue in Danbury is one for the whole state and the General Assembly should address it urgently when it reconvenes in February.
xxx
Criminal penalties aim to set standards, deter, and punish, but for offenses less than murder they are not meant to ruin lives. For most offenses forgiveness can be earned.
But former Hartford lawyer Corey Brinson is asking for more than forgiveness for his conviction for fraud, his using his former law firm to launder money for stock swindlers while taking a cut. According to The Hartford Courant, Brinson is asking to be restored to a position of honor under state government -- commissioner of the Superior Court -- with reinstatement of the law license he lost with his conviction.
A lawyer disciplinary committee has voted 3-1 to recommend reinstating Brinson's law license, finding that he has rehabilitated himself after a three-year prison term. Maybe he has, but becoming a lawyer is a lot of work, and no one who becomes a lawyer has any excuse not to know that financial fraud is doubly wrong for a lawyer, an offense against the law itself as well as the privileged public office he holds.
The decision on Brinson's reinstatement rests with a committee of Superior Court judges. There is precedent for the committee to decide either way. Decades ago Connecticut's courts maintained that a felony conviction required a lawyer's permanent disbarment. But in recent years standards have been lowered and felonious lawyers have been reinstated.
Such reinstatements have set bad examples. They have shown lawyers that getting caught committing a serious crime is not necessarily the end of their professional careers, and thus have removed an incentive to maintain integrity. Such reinstatements also have diminished regard for the legal profession. But then maybe the profession no longer deserves much regard.-
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Panoramic view of Danbury in 1875, when it was known as the hat-making capital of America.