Season come and gone
"This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to to the revolutions of the seasons as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse, and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.''
- From Henry David Thoreau's Journal; June 6, 1857
'Imperfection is beautiful'
"Beautiful Decay'' (acrylic, foam, and mixed media on cloth and wire), by Sarah Meyers Brent, in her show "Growth and Decay, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through June 25.
The gallery says:
"Sarah Meyers Brent pushes the boundaries of beauty and ugliness in 'Growth and Decay' with visceral, living works that traverse painting, sculpture and installation. Utilizing lush paint, recycled fabric, foam, decaying flowers, dirt and vines, her mixed-media pieces pour out of and accrete to the canvas and walls. Natural elements of flowers and plant materials appear throughout, drooping and decaying, maintaining beauty in muted colors. Brent's work is both personal and universal in theme, symbolizing how life feels, from anxieties about parenting to climate change, and trying to represent the good and bad. 'Imperfection,' she says, 'is beautiful because it is alive and feels real.' Brent sees richness in material that might otherwise be considered trash. Combining remnants of the natural world with collected detritus, she transforms these fragments to powerfully organic forms simultaneously growing and decaying.''
Urban gentrification marches on
In the Upham's Corner neighborhood of Boston's Dorchester section.
Adapted from a recent item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,' in GoLocal24.com
One of my daughters lives in the middle of Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy, as it is usually called, has long been infamous as one of the most dangerous, highest-crime urban neighborhoods in the nation. But it has a superb stock of beautiful old brownstones and even some lovely parks.
Real-estate speculators developed most of these homes for the expanding middle to upper middle class from the 1890s to the late 1910s. Many have beautiful ornamental detailing inside and out.
As New York City has boomed in the past couple of decades, gentrification has spread even to such areas as Bed Stuy. So now there’s even a fancy, over-priced French restaurant a few streets from my daughter’s apartment, epitomizing the cycle of prosperity, decline, poverty/crime and revival that seems to happen in virtually every American city. The downside of the economic revival, of course, is that people (usually of color) who could afford to live in what had become a slum are forced out by the much higher rents and housing-purchase costs that accompany gentrification.
Consider a New England example: Parts of South Boston and Dorchester, which were once mostly lower-middle-class-to-poor sections of Boston. Large parts of them are now very expensive -places to live in -- and., it must be said -- much safer than they were 47 years ago, when I worked in Boston. They are sharing in the burgeoning wealth of the higher-education, healthcare, technology and financial-services powerhouse that is Greater Boston.
Boston's nickname was "The Hub'' when I was a boy. It certainly applies now, in some ways more than when I was young and the old city seemed tired and gritty.
Josh Hoxie: The mathematical and moral mess of the Trump budget
Via OtherWords.org
Federal budgets, while boring and wonky, can have a serious impact on our lives. They dictate our collective priorities for how we choose to spend our public resources in support of the common good.
That is, good budgets do that. But you’d be hard-pressed to call the most recent budget from the Trump administration good.
To be clear, it’s hard to even refer to this budget as serious. Sure, it’s written in official-looking thick blue books, and it outlines spending figures using precise numbers. But that’s about where the formality ends.
Tucked into the formal budget is a set of assumptions that present a fantastical approach to simple arithmetic.
Take the estate tax for just one example, also known as the inheritance tax. The estate tax is a pretty straightforward idea: a levy on the inter-generational transfer of immense wealth that only the very wealthy pay. It’s been on the books for about 100 years.
If left untouched, it will generate an estimated $174 billion over the next 10 years, precisely $0 of which will come from anyone who could reasonably be considered middle class.
The Trump budget proposes to eliminate the federal estate tax. Trump’s own family stands to benefit enormously from this gift to the wealthiest households.
The budget also proposes to dramatically cut federal student loan programs by about $143 billion. Notably, the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program is eliminated, a program that hundreds of thousands of graduates signed up for expecting their student loans to be eliminated after 10 years of service in the public sector.
Trading a massive tax cut for the ultra-rich in exchange for massive cuts to programs that help young people go to college is bad enough. But then there’s the math.
The Trump budget, despite proposing to eliminate the estate tax, still counts the estate tax revenue as part of its revenue projection. In fact, the administration expects estate tax revenue to top $300 billion, nearly double the normal projection. This lie is critical to their absurd claim that their budget will balance.
News flash: If you cut taxes, it means you don’t get the revenue from said taxes.
The estate tax double-count is just one of the many mystical components of their mathematical menagerie.
A poll of top-tier economists by the University of Chicago (which has among the most conservative econ departments in the country) found practically unanimous agreement that there’s no way the budget will balance. The administration’s assumptions are just too far-fetched — no matter how many times you spin in a circle, squint, and pray that the numbers on the page change.
Unfortunately, while the administration’s struggle with basic arithmetic can be amusing, the potential impact of this budget is far from humorous.
It will mean millions of families pushed off their health coverage, millions of mothers blocked from receiving nutritional assistance for their babies, and millions more families in our northern states forced to choose between heating their house and affording their groceries.
Long-time Rep. Barbara Lee of California put it well: “I have never seen a budget so devoid of compassion and empathy for families struggling to make ends meet,” she observed.
There appears to be no law barring Congress from enacting a budget with fundamentally bogus assumptions, and many of Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill are happy to play ball. One hopes their constituents will be much less willing to go along with the morally bankrupt mathematical mess this administration calls a budget.
Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for Policy Studies.
"In sight of my low monument'
The Berkshire Hills as seen from North Adams, Mass.
I gazed upon the glorious sky
And the green mountains round,
And thought that when I came to lie
At rest within the ground,
"Twere pleasant, that in flowery June,
When brooks send up a cheerful tune,
And groves a joyous sound,
The sexton's hand, my grave to make,
The rich, green mountain-turf should break.
A cell within the frozen mould,
A coffin borne through sleet,
And icy clods above it rolled,
While fierce the tempests beat--
Away!--I will not think of these--
Blue be the sky and soft the breeze,
Earth green beneath the feet,
And be the damp mould gently pressed
Into my narrow place of rest.
There through the long, long summer hours,
The golden light should lie,
And thick young herbs and groups of flowers
Stand in their beauty by.
The oriole should build and tell
His love-tale close beside my cell;
The idle butterfly
Should rest him there, and there be heard
The housewife bee and humming-bird.
And what if cheerful shouts at noon
Come, from the village sent,
Or songs of maids, beneath the moon
With fairy laughter blent?
And what if, in the evening light,
Betrothed lovers walk in sight
Of my low monument?
I would the lovely scene around
Might know no sadder sight nor sound.
I know that I no more should see
The season's glorious show,
Nor would its brightness shine for me,
Nor its wild music flow;
But if, around my place of sleep,
The friends I love should come to weep,
They might not haste to go.
Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom
Should keep them lingering by my tomb.
These to their softened hearts should bear
The thought of what has been,
And speak of one who cannot share
The gladness of the scene;
Whose part, in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the summer hills,
Is that his grave is green;
And deeply would their hearts rejoice
To hear again his living voice.
-- "June,''' by William Cullen Bryant
Don Pesci: 'The Parable of the Leaking Bucket'
From Mr. Pesci's remarks at the Connecticut Capitol on May 21.
I’ve been asked to say a few words about taxes, which has brought us here today. I should say it’s heartening to see gathered here many thoughtful, peaceful, responsible, tax-paying, non-deplorables. I only have fire minutes to review years of tax thuggery, and the best way do it is by means of a parable that might be called “The Parable of the Leaking Bucket.”
There is a hole in Connecticut’s milk bucket, and through it our precious revenues are leaking to other states. This disaster has now been confirmed by Department of Revenue Commissioner Kevin Sullivan and economist Don Klepper-Smith.
The problem with the leaking bucket is the hole, not with the quality or quantity of milk or the tears of those crying over it because it has spilled out of the bucket. The problem is not the deficit -- the spilled milk -- the problem is the hole -- overspending. If you do not patch the spending hole, you will continue to lose the milk.
It seems simple, doesn’t it?
For more than a quarter century, our politicians have been crying over that spilled milk. The problem, then Gov. Lowell Weicker said to himself in 1991, is that there is not enough milk in the pail. We need a larger bucket. Let us have an income tax.
And so it happened.
The last pre-income tax budget of Gov. William O’Neill was $7.5 billion. It’s three times that today. Mr. O’Neill’s budget deficit upon leaving office was $1.5 billion. We’ve just been told Connecticut’s deficit will be $5 billion during the next fiscal year.
Connecticut, the magisterial Hartford Courant said whenever a deficit occurred in the post-Weicker years, did not have a spending problem; it had a revenue problem. The paper’s message was plain and much appreciated by spendthrift politicians: Whenever you see a deficit coming through the rye, do not cut spending, always a painful remedy that would patch the hole; instead, raise taxes – milk taxpayers and spread it around. Get a larger bucket – forget the hole, the hole is not a problem.
And so it happened. When Gov. Dannel Malloy was put in charge of the milk wagon, he increased taxes twice – the first the largest, and the second the second largest tax increase in state history. And guess what has happened? As taxes increased, revenues decreased. It seems that economist Arthur Laffer may have the last laugh after all. That hole was drilled into the bucket by people like Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy and other progressive legislators behind these unheeding stones in back of me who have ears that hear not and eyes that see not.
Mr. Klepper Smith is now pointing somewhat frantically to the spending hole. Connecticut leaders, the people slumbering behind these walls, need to spend more time talking about, Mr. Smith said, “how to rein in our spending problem… We are treading water.” That’s a poetic way to put it: We are underwater. A weakened Connecticut economy, Mr. Klepper Smith warned, will put us at the head of the line should we enter another recession. Connecticut will be, as it is now, first in, last out.
So then, there is a spending problem after all. And Mr. Sullivan, who never met a tax increase he wasn’t willing to court and marry, agrees. Hallelujah!
Let’s try and wrap our brains around this stunning revelation from Mr. Sullivan. Tax cuts are beneficial, a chastened Mr. Sullivan now thinks. They leave disposable income in the hands of people who know better than Mr. Malloy how to invest money.
Here is the moral underlying Mr. Klepper Smith’s and Mr. Sullivan’s perceptions: If tax decreases are good, then tax increases must be resisted.
You are the resistance, and I have encouraging words for you from Sam Adams, known during his own day as “the father of the American Revolution.” Adams is here addressing the sunshine patriots of his day, but his admonition applies as well to the sunshine patriots of our day. Pass these words down to your children and grandchildren. As I leave you, I will leave them as the last tingle in your ears:
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Don Pesci is a political and cultural columnist based in Vernon, Conn.
'Killed by my father, married to my mother'
"My death was arranged by special plans in Heaven
And only occasioned comment by ten persons in Adams, Massachusetts.
The best thing ever said about me
Was that I was deft at specifying trump.
I was killed by my father
And married to my mother
But born too early to know what happened to me,
And as I was an only child
I erected selfishness into a personal religion,
Sat thinking forty years saying nothing.''
-- Opening of "A New England Bachelor,'' by Richard Eberhart
James P. Freeman: The hectoring Sen. Warren builds no coalitions and could drive you to drink
-- Photo by Jacob Rask
Even with the knowledge that it was meant to be an occasion for celebration, they still needed a coping mechanism against the anticipated overcast, over-earnest, and overwrought monotony. So, they put their fully formed, still sober minds to work, realizing there would be no safe spaces from which to escape. They created in advance The Elizabeth Warren Drinking Game.
Simultaneously honoring and mocking “Massachusetts’s favorite Senator,” theblacksheeponline.com at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (the university system's flagship campus) instructed The Class of 2017 to “rip a nip” if Warren “says and/or mentions” during her commencement address on May 12 any of the following: How She Started Law School with a Two-Year Old Daughter; Student Debt; W.E.B. Du Bois; The Disappearing Middle Class; Female Leaders; “It’s time to fight back”; and, The Donald. Seriously.
They weren’t disappointed.
Within the first two minutes of her remarks, with the jigger up but without the trigger warning, Warren said, “know this: Fireball is a nickname that Donald Trump uses on Twitter, not a beverage to be consumed by distinguished college graduates.” Soon thereafter, as if on cue, “Anyone here have a student loan?”
A Dr. McGillicuddy’s is a terrible thing to waste.
After admonishing newly minted alumni to “do a little studying,” Warren said something remarkable in an otherwise unremarkable speech: “I’m not trying to win Miss Popularity.” For next year’s Massachusetts senatorial contest, however, she will need enough popularity to win re-election, and voters, with a sense of humor that the senior senator lacks, may need to play the eponymous drinking game to survive what might be an insufferable campaign. To win, Warren, always in professorial mode, may have to retool and reboot herself into Version 2.018.
In “Why Is Elizabeth Warren So Hard to Love?,” Boston Magazine exposes vulnerabilities that she must overcome before considering running for president in 2020. The senator is the “de facto leader of the anti-Trump resistance,” certainly, but also “possibly the most deeply polarizing figure in the state.” A January WBUR poll revealed that only 44 percent of Massachusetts voters thought that Warren “deserved re-election.” The poll also showed that Warren’s favorability rating was at 51 percent while Gov. Charlie Baker (a bipartisan moderate Republican and not a Trump fan) was at 59 percent. Should he seek re-election next year, both will appear on the same Massachusetts ballot in 2018.
“The people of Massachusetts,” observes the magazine, “expect their senators to be national leaders but also local champions who deliver for the state.” Notably, when Warren announced her candidacy for U.S. Senate in September 2011, she didn’t mention Massachusetts at all. Six years later, when was the last time Warren spoke favorably about Massachusetts? Then again, when was the last time Warren spoke about Massachusetts, period? We are reminded that she “doesn’t aspire to be a bipartisan uniter,” and, at her core, she’s “an advocate for her specific issues, not a master legislator or dealmaker.”
Joylessly, it seems, Warren continues her national advocacy for progressive causes.
The progressive stage that she commands is, however, a motley concourse of contradictions. That stage may also be shrinking given that the elections of 2014 and 2016 were national repudiations of progressivism. And Democrats retaking Congress in 2018 would reflect a one-time anti-Trump sentiment, not a revival of the progressive populism so adored by Warren. Last month, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that 67 percent of all respondents believe that the Democratic Party “is out of touch with the concerns of most people.”
Warren’s new book, This Fight Is Our Fight (worthy of a quart of Dr. McGillicuddy’s) is a personal woe-is-me tale of hardscrabble, borderline-cruel, mega-unfair Americana, where everyone is a victim; in page after page after page, she constantly, unabashedly ties together tired progressive themes (financial regulations, student loan debt, big corporations). Ironically dedicated to the people of Massachusetts, it is full-bore regurgitation, not inspiration. Precisely in print what students feared would be presented in parlance.
A current tour of modern progressivism is not a refuge for Warren. Or voters.
Her signature achievement (“I proposed the government set up the consumer agency…”), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the massive Dodd-Frank legislation in 2010, and described by one conservative as “progressive authoritarianism,” was found to be “unconstitutionally structured” by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last fall. Defiantly, Warren writes, “the CFPB works.” Today, Republicans intend to slowly dismantle Dodd-Frank. Nevertheless, who will remind Warren that President Bill Clinton, in the late 1990s, began in earnest financial deregulation?
Warren doesn’t like financial institutions or the federal government making profits from student lending (pages 119-128) in the $1.4 trillion in student loan debt market. “Why,” she ponders, “isn’t every one of these elected officials who voted to keep raking in profits by overcharging on student loans facing an angry mob back home?” Although not disclosed in her book, who will remind Warren that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, another progressive project, fueled the federal government’s takeover of the student-loan market?
For five years, Warren asserts, Verizon, Boeing and General Electric paid “nothing in net federal income taxes.” Imagine her horror, then, upon learning that GE would relocate its global headquarters to the progressive sanctuary of Boston. Who will remind Warren that, at the May 8 ground-breaking ceremony along Fort Point Channel (dubbed Innovation Point), GE Chairman Jeff Immelt was flanked by both Governor Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh?
A recent New Boston Post story, “Elizabeth Warren Attacks, Left, Right and Center,” reflects the loneliness of being a populist crusader. Warren builds no coalitions, she bulldozes them. Everyone is targeted.
Obama is criticized for plans to deliver a $400,000 Wall Street speech. Trump is engaged as her social-media sparring partner. Last November she “broke with the rest of Massachusetts’s all-Democratic Congressional delegation to oppose a medical-research spending bill she claimed constituted a rich hand-out to the pharmaceutical industry.” The bill included a two-year allocation of $1 billion to combat opioid abuse. Supported by large bipartisan margins, it quickly became law with Obama’s signature.
For now, Warren is far from reimagining a new operating system. Until then, voters may cope just as citizens did nearly a century ago with a practical reflex from the first oppressive progressive era: bathtub gin.
James P. Freeman, a former columnist for the Cape Cod Times, in a New England-based writer and frequent contributor to New England Diary. This piece first ran in the New England Post.
At MIT, hacking away at healthcare problems
The MIT Media Lab houses researchers developing novel uses of computer technology.
This just in from the New England Council:
"Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a New England Council member, recently held the its fourth annual Grand Hack, a hackathon hosted with the goal of tackling some of the biggest problems in healthcare.
"The Grand Hack highlighted invisible conditions; robotics and intelligent technologies; and patient care continuum as the three broad areas in which to tackle problems. The event begins with a problem pitching session to identify challenges before dividing participants up into small groups based on their individual interests. At the end of the three-day program, the teams that presented the most innovative healthcare solutions in each of the categories received cash prizes between $750 and $1,500 in addition to the potential for funding and interest from startup incubators familiar with the event.
“'Hacking is a different lens of how people look at health care. It’s not just research or clinical study. It’s highly collaborative,' said Grand Hack Coordinator and MIT doctoral candidate, Khalil Ramadi. 'We try to help participants find elegant ways to streamline technology.'
"The New England Council thanks MIT for hosting this timely and innovative event that challenges participants to propose solutions to pressing problems facing the healthcare industry today.''
Good for guerrilla warfare
"Camo Trees'' (oil on linen) by Paula Martiesian, in the show "Heart of a Tree,'' at ArtProv Gallery, Providence, through July 8.
Rivka Solomon: Mass. recognizes Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Frustrated with the lack of movement on the national level to help the up to 2.5 million people in the United States with the devastating neuro-immune disease ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or ME/CFS, many advocates are focusing more on the local and state level.
So there has been a push to secure city and state proclamations or resolutions for ME awareness, as well as an effort to "light up" city halls in blue, the color for ME awareness. See this link:
We see these efforts as a smart strategy for raising local awareness about this debilitating disease. A list of proclamations is found here.
This year, inspired by the work of earlier activists, as well as the 2017 national advocacy effort co-led by Solve ME/CFS Initiative and #MEAction, more ME advocates have been using these proclamation initiatives to leverage as much as they can out of May 12, International ME Awareness Day.
With that in mind, in March, Charmian Proskauer, the president of MassCFIDS/ME & FM Association, the oldest state ME/CFS organization in the country, and I approached Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker's office. We asked if they would issue us a state proclamation for an ME Awareness Day for the Bay State on May 12. If we were to get it, it would be Massachusetts's first such state proclamation.
Luckily, we had a few prior success we could point to in our initial letter to the governor: Only a few months earlier, western Massachusetts ME activists and I had requested and secured a city proclamation from the mayor of Northampton. It is found here, and is mentioned in this news article. Other ME advocates also had recent state proclamation or resolution victories we could point to, including in Alabama, Georgia and Illinois.
Lastly, we told the governor's office, just a few months earlier, at a packed meeting, that Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) had publicly declared his commitment to advocate for people with ME. His first step was to sponsor a congressional briefing, offering any interested Capitol Hill health-policy staffers an opportunity to learn more about ME.
To our delight, Governor Baker's office granted our request for the proclamation. In the end, it required some back and forth with the staff on timing and exact wording of the proclamation, but we got it! See this link. And, to our relief, we got it in time for a May 12 deadline.
Now we were eager to get some type of photo opportunity (known as a "photo op" in the political world) with an elected official at the State House. We figured that if we could secure that, we could then disseminate the photo to news media and elsewhere, using it to raise awareness about ME. Plus, a photo with an elected official would add legitimacy to our cause, especially if we could get the official to post it to their own social media accounts.
It was more work to try to set up the photo op, but again, it was successful. In fact, it surpassed our expectations. In the end, on May 9, 2017, at the Massachusetts State House, in Boston, a group of ME advocates and allies held a very productive meeting with Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito and Senate President Stan Rosenberg, and their staff. This was a real coup!
Originally, the time with Polito and Rosenberg, two of the highest-ranking elected officials in the state, was scheduled as a short five-minute photo op. After all, those are not as hard to come by as an actual meeting.
But with the photo op (picture of it below) now secured, we quickly went about trying to morph it into something more by adding in a short introductory meeting with the staffers in charge of "constituent services" and health policy at the office of the powerful Senate president. We suggested to the staffers that we come in 15 minutes before the photo op, just long enough to allow for introductions. We explained that we hoped that this meeting could be a precursor to a longer meeting at a later date, when we would then present our official "asks" (asks are political lingo for the actions you would like the elected official take). The Senate president's staff agreed to this 15-minute meeting.
On May 9, more ME patients, advocates and allies showed up than originally expected -- 11 total -- but it worked out perfectly. We sat around an enormous table in an impressive room in the State House with Mr. Rosenberg's health-policy staffer, and we met with the senate president for much longer than we had originally expected. The meeting lasted half an hour, with us advocates going around the table introducing ourselves and describing our connection to ME.
The stories were personal and tragic. Patients and family members talked about struggling for decades, often in isolation, with a stigmatized illness that got little respect from the federal government, the medical community and news media. Allies who attended, including a researcher from a prestigious Boston hospital, and a disability-rights lawyer who advocates for people with ME, spoke eloquently about the legitimizing science of ME and the hardships that people with ME face.
We explained to the staffer that securing state proclamations and resolutions for ME is a grassroots effort to raise awareness about the lack of health equality for people with ME, many of whom have spent decades homebound and bedridden with little or no assistance.
We also explained that ME is commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome -- but that many found it a belittling name. We explained that it is a devastating disease with no diagnostic test, no FDA-approved treatment, no cure and little federal research funding.
When we told the staffer that ME disables 28,000 Massachusetts residents, up to 2.5 million Americans and 17 million-20 million worldwide, he seemed to take in the enormity of the situation.
After about 30 minutes, in walked Lt. Governor Polito, accompanied by Senate President Rosenberg. They seemed surprised to find so many of us there. Perhaps because of this, instead of rushing to do the photo op, they sat down to listen and, to our delight, ask probing questions for about 10 minutes. The lieutenant governor asked about the fact that 75-85 percent of those with ME are women (she was reading from the fact sheets we brought); with that, she honed right in to the sexism that has contributed to the disease being neglected for decades.
In the end, for over an hour, we ME advocates had the opportunity to explain to these government leaders and their staff just how hard it is to live with the severe neuro-immune disease that is ME, and how it affects the lives of not only the direct victims but also of their family members. At the end of the meeting, the senate president told Charmian that he wanted to hear more about the needs of our community and how the state might help. Thrilled, we are now scheduling a second meeting with his office.
In another success, the day after the meeting, the State House News Service took our press release and re-wrote it into an article that they disseminated to most Massachusetts newspapers. Right away, one newspaper picked up and ran the story. We were disappointed to not get more media attention, but we were happy to learn the Senate president tweeted about ME on May 12.
All in all, we feel quite satisfied with this start of our State House strategy. We know that it is just the beginning of our work there, but we are convinced that employing a local and state level strategy to get help for our community is a sound one -- and one that can yield much faster results than trying to work with the more cumbersome and recalcitrant federal government.
Yet even so, we will continue our advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill. In fact, just last week saw a new victory: Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern agreed to fight for people with ME at the federal level. And Senator Markey held his congressional briefing on ME with staffers from around Capitol Hill attending. Senator Markey opened the briefing, which you can watch here.
Not unlike earlier battles to get other health conditions recognized as serious diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson's, the battle to help ME victims will make big progress. In the near future, people who are struggling to live with the devastating illness that is ME will be able to leave behind, with great relief, the 30 years we spent in the shadows, mistreated and neglected by the medical community and government.
Rivka Solomon (@RivkaTweets) lives in Massachusetts and is a volunteer at MassCFIDS/ME & FM Association and #MEAction. Both organizations seek volunteers to do the important work of fighting for people with ME. Ms. Solomon is writing a book about her 27 years with ME, much of it spent bedridden and homebound.
In the Massachusetts State House: L to R: Rivka Solomon, Rick Glassman (Advocacy Director, Disability Law Center, Boston), Dr. Michael van Elzakker (ME/CFS researcher MGH and Harvard Medical School), Sen. Cynthia Creem, Robert Price, Senate President Stan Rosenberg, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, Charmian Proskauer (president of Massachusetts CFIDS/ME & FM Association), Dmitri Gridnev (representing Rep. Ruth Balser), Alina Kaminsky, Leah Williams, Elizabeth Potter, Robert Robitaille, Kathy Robitaille, Nancy Smith (those without titles are all members/volunteers representing Massaschusetts CFIDS/ME & FM Association).
Information, please, on Stone House weddings and receptions
The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.
We're doing some historical research on the Stone House, an old inn. We'd appreciate any information from readers about their own weddings and/or wedding receptions held at the Stone House or such events involving their friends and/or relatives. Dates of the events would be most appreciated. We'd guess that there have been weddings and/or wedding receptions there going back to the late Twenties, when there was a speakeasy in this lovely structure, built in 1854 as a private home.
Please email such information to:
rwhitcomb4@cox.net
'This charm is wasted on the earth and sky'
Rhodora
"On being asked, whence is the flower?''
"In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.''
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Rhodora'' (a flowering shrub of the northeast U.S.).
'Surging life'
''Some men there are who find in nature all
Their inspiration, hers the sympathy
Which spurs them on to any great endeavor,
To them the fields and woods are closest friends,
And they hold dear communion with the hills;
The voice of waters soothes them with its fall,
And the great winds bring healing in their sound.
To them a city is a prison house
Where pent up human forces labour and strive,
Where beauty dwells not, driven forth by man;
But where in winter they must live until
Summer gives back the spaces of the hills.
To me it is not so. I love the earth
And all the gifts of her so lavish hand:
Sunshine and flowers, rivers and rushing winds,
Thick branches swaying in a winter storm,
And moonlight playing in a boat's wide wake;
But more than these, and much, ah, how much more,
I love the very human heart of man.
Above me spreads the hot, blue mid-day sky,
Far down the hillside lies the sleeping lake
Lazily reflecting back the sun,
And scarcely ruffled by the little breeze
Which wanders idly through the nodding ferns.
The blue crest of the distant mountain, tops
The green crest of the hill on which I sit;
And it is summer, glorious, deep-toned summer,
The very crown of nature's changing year
When all her surging life is at its full.
To me alone it is a time of pause,
A void and silent space between two worlds,
When inspiration lags, and feeling sleeps,
Gathering strength for efforts yet to come.
For life alone is creator of life,
And closest contact with the human world
Is like a lantern shining in the night
To light me to a knowledge of myself.
I love the vivid life of winter months
In constant intercourse with human minds,
When every new experience is gain
And on all sides we feel the great world's heart;
The pulse and throb of life which makes us men!''
-- "Summer,'' by Amy Lowell
David Warsh: Brooks's thin-sliced baloney
Every columnist occasionally has a housekeeping day. Hard-working David Brooks, of The New York Times, is no exception. Last week Brooks offered nine, count-em, nine grand narratives packed into a single 866-word column, the material currently on his desktop cleaned up and put away, presumably to get ready for another week.
Four of these sources of identity were from a “superbly clarifying speech” by George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Not four, mind you, but the four. Depending on who doing the telling, Packer said, the American story is to be understood as fundamentally libertarian (“free markets and free minds”), or a matter of globalization (technology regnant), of multiculturalism (overcoming bigotry), or of isolationism (make America great again).
Since none of these narratives offers a basis for governing in the 21st Century, Brooks noted two more, found in an essay by Michael Lind, “The New Class War,” which appeared recently in a new maverick conservative journal. If you haven’t seen it, American Affairs, is worth a look, as is Jacobin, a new left-wing counterpart.
The transatlantic class war between neoliberal elites and working-class populists that produced the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump must evolve as “cross-class settlements” in one of two ways, wrote Lind. Perhaps a banana-republic world is here to stay, a Latin American model in which populists perpetually battle oligarchs and their managerial allies.
Alternatively, Lind wrote, the sort of social contract that guided Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore in the years after 1945 might emerge, different in details but similar in spirit: “cautious, suspicious, military-inflected development…” occurring within the borders of four great blocs: the U.S., China, perhaps India, and a politically divided Europe, the sort of world that George Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eight-Four.
Stimulated by Lind, Brooks adduced two slight variations, both of them descended from the original civic myth that Brooks described in a column a couple of months ago, namely the Exodus story. In that account, national unity in the U.S. had long depended on the shared experience of having at some point left the Old World for the New, of having ventured into a wilderness in order to join in the creation of a shining example to all humankind. But that story depended on a high degree of national self-confidence traditionally buttressed by religious conviction. For one reason or another, it no longer worked. An American “identity crisis” was at hand.
Hence Brooks offered two new possibilities for going forward. One of them was to embrace Lind’s mercantilist model of the U.S. as one contender among several in a multipolar world. “In this, to be American is to be a member of the tribe, and the ideal American is to be a burly protector of the tribe,” which Donald Trump aspires to be.
The other story that Brooks envisaged is about “the talented community,” a celebratory image of America as “history’s greatest laboratory for the cultivation of human abilities,” a generous, open, welcoming society in which “everything is designed to arouse energy and propel social mobility” – in short, “an Exodus story for an information age.”
I have a narrative, too, but it isn’t suited to the space or time I have today. So much, then, for this columnist’s housecleaning day.
David Warsh, a veteran economic historian and business and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.
Poetical Abstract Expressionism
From the show "The flowers not here yet/the flowers gone,'' the recent paintings of the Vermont-based poet Peter Richards. The show runs June 2-10 at Periphery Space, in Pawtucket, R.I.
War, remembrance and summer
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
-- From Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead.’’ It refers to the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, above, across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House.
Ah, Memorial Day: In somber remembrance of the dead of our wars and in celebration, especially in America’s cooler climes, of the coming of summer. A paradoxical holiday.
My strongest memories of the day are of the Memorial Day Parade in my little hometown. In the maximum lushness of the season, with the fragrance of cut, wet grass and gasoline from the lawn mowers on the common, the men (and a few women) marched, accompanied, I recall, with patriotic music by the high school band. They marched under the elm trees, of which there were still many, although Dutch elm disease was taking a heavy toll.
Most of them were men in their thirties who had fought in World War II, although there were still plenty of World War Ivets around, too. I remember that my father, who had been a Navy lieutenant in the war, and most of his fellow veteran friends, disliked being asked to march in the parade. They had no desire to put on their uniforms again.
Of course, we kids were still in school, which didn't end for another three weeks, but we saw the broad sunlit uplands of summer stretching ahead to the horizon that day. Time seemed to move so slowly then.
-- Robert Whitcomb
Fleeing to New York
Boothbay Harbor, Maine, during a fragrant low tide.
"In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.''
-- Elizabeth Strout (Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist)
Find a good governor to run for president
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Hillary Clinton should fight her combative instincts and keepa low profile so as not to take the oxygen out of potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2020, such as the highly effective and popular Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. Then there are New York Sen. Kristin Gillibrand and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, both smart, articulate and fast on their feet politically.
And wouldn’t it be nice if the very able and popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, ran for his party's presidential nomination? Of course, in the current rendition of his part, he’d probably have little chance.
As a general rule, it’s better to elect someone who has run a state than someone who has just served in Congress. Executive experience in a political and public-policy environment is invaluable for would-be presidents. It’s easy to spout off as a legislator, but a lot tougher to oversee administration. The record ofpeople running a state government gives voters quite a bit of useful information in how they might run the federal Executive Branch.
The public’s immune system needs a rest from the Clintons. The kids predictably loved her at Wellesley College’s commencement this year but I suspect that a large majority of the American electorate wants her to take a lower profile.