Whitcomb: Boston Bathos and Beauties; Schools Asked to Do Too Much; Heavily Armed Minority

Sunday, May 29, 2022

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave

All that they were, and might become, that we

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With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea

Reweave its patterning of silver wave

Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay.’’

-- From “The Young Dead,’’ by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), mostly known as a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist.

 

 

“June is bustin' out all over
The feelin' is gettin' so intense
That the young Virginia creepers
Have been huggin' the bejeepers
Outta all the mornin' glories on the fence!’’
 

-- Just some of the embarrassing lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) in the song “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” from the musical Carousel (music by Richard Rodgers, 1902-1979), which is set in Maine.

 

 

“All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.’’

 

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer

 

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Memorial Day PHOTO: file

Memorial Day is for a lot of us our favorite holiday, despite its official purpose to mourn America’s military dead from wars stupid and necessary.

 

The air is fresh, leaves here in southern New England are at their most intense green, flowers display their maximum variety of colors and the summer stretches alluringly ahead, if frustratingly for some students still facing final exams and papers.

 

Of course, it can be hot, but the heat doesn’t seem as oppressive as in July because it tends to be less humid than it will be in a few weeks. And we get New England’s famous “back door cold fronts’’. Too bad the water’s still too cold to comfortably swim in the ocean, except for masochists or those clad in wetsuits. But the cold water keeps heat waves from the immediate shore if the wind is right.

 

Most of us have made pleasure plans for the summer by now, having briefly deluded ourselves that we’ll have plenty of time to get in the fun. Of course, we won’t, as workaday obligations start to pile up before Labor Day even as the heat hangs on. Adults know how fast summer goes.

 

I wonder how the pandemic has changed how people see summer. It’s the season when it’s easiest to be outside in the North, and hence to avoid infection from COVID, if not from ticks, etc. At the same time COVID has forced/permitted many people to work at home,  and perhaps that has diluted the pleasure of enjoying, say, a backyard or even vacations.  For many of us it has certainly changed the sense of the passage of time.

 

Sometimes Happy in the Hub

I drove up through Boston to Medford, Mass., last Sunday to have dinner with a niece, her husband and their son (8) and daughter (11). I did so with some trepidation because Boston and its inner suburbs have such tangles of streets and bad/confusing/nonexistent signage that GPS often can’t handle it in any coherent way and maps on paper tend to be outdated. And indeed, it was tough to find the restaurant on the Fellsway.

 

“Boston, Boston, Boston/Oh what a town to get lost in” as an old song goes. I lived in the city in 1970-71, and had jobs there in the ‘60s, and it doesn’t seem to be less confusing than it was back then, whatever the grandeur and promises of the Big Dig projects.

 

Greater Bostonians, like Rhode Islanders, are infamous for bad driving – not signaling, accelerating without warning on the right,  swerving and so on. But the former are worse because they commit these sins at higher speeds.

 

Having dinner with children, especially bright, engaging ones like the ones mentioned above is fun, but it’s always good to bring games and reading materials for them.  Few things are as boring to children as being trapped at a table for a long meal with adults while impatiently awaiting dessert.

 

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Fenway Park PHOTO: file

However confusing Boston is, I tip my hat to the efficiency of the Boston Red Sox. Boston’s biggest weekly paper, The Boston Guardian, on whose little board I sit, was being honored, with other community organizations, in a pre-game event on the field at Fenway Park, on May 20, just before a game with the Seattle Mariners. (Boston won.) I’ve rarely seen such smooth coordination in moving people (including me) onto and off the field for the photo ops, etc.

 

It was comforting – sort of -- to see the police snipers on the roof of the stadium, ready for a terrorist attack or just another deranged young man with an assault rifle he just bought at Walmart. “Aren’t you happy they’re up there?’’ one of the photographers said.

 

I had to head back to Providence before the game ended and so had to leave the fancy lounge in the nose-bleed section above Fenway’s stands before Sox and Boston Globe principal owner John Henry showed up and played the guitar for our little group. He’s become my hero for supporting bookstores.

 

Boston can be beautiful, if exasperating! I fondly remember from the ‘60s running around the still somewhat Dickensian “Hub’’ on job errands, many of which I’d volunteer for to get out of stuffy offices, first in a shipping company on the waterfront and then at the gritty tabloid newspaper the Record American. I’d go to the tiny local stock exchange to pick up the day’s trading records or to the glorious State House to get something from a politician or a bureaucrat and nip into an ice-cream shop (or, as they were often spelled then, shoppe) for myself and into tobacco stores to buy cigarettes and cigars for my older co-workers. Occasionally I’d pick up a bag of peanuts to feed the rapacious pigeons on the Boston Common.

 

I did most of this walking, which is far and away the best way to get around the city.

 

 

Making a Better Entrance

It’s good to see that plans are afoot to make one of the primary gateways to downtown Providence – North Main Street -- more attractive. It’s mostly an ugly, depressing strip now. What would help a lot is simply planting lots of trees, on both sides and in the median. And real, protected bike lanes. Yes, many, many more people would bike if the lanes were protected. And how could bus service on the road be improved?

 

Now is a good time to see what can be done to improve North Main, as economic and technological change undermine the business models of many of the enterprises along the street, forcing many to close, leaving land to be used in different ways.

 

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Reading about the controversy in South Kingstown, R.I., over eliminating the school district’s dual-language immersion program and the push (almost obsession, at least in rhetoric) for  “diversity, inclusion and equity” makes me ask how much such programs divert resources – money, time, etc. – from basic instruction, in, well – the old phrase comes to mind:  “reading, writing and arithmetic” -- for the mass of students. It sometimes seems that public schools are called upon to address all the ills of society.

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Fraud at Home?

Let RI Vote legislation would allow eligible voters to apply online for absentee ballots, await their arrival by snail mail at home, mark them and then mail them in without witnesses or notaries having confirmed that the votes are by the individuals for whom the ballots are intended. Yes, most people vote honestly but in rare cases other people living at the same address might decide to grab the ballots and vote as they want to. And campaign workers could show up at the address and “help” people vote.

 

Fraudulent votes made possible by Let RI Vote could swing some close elections.

 

Here are the current rules on absentee voting, which strike me as sound, though it’s best if as many people as possible vote in person.

 

https://vote.sos.ri.gov/Voter/VotebyMail

 

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PHOTO: file

A University of Virginia study predicts that Rhode Island, the second-most densely populated state (after New Jersey), will lose population in the years leading up to 2040. I don’t think it will. There are far too many variables for someone to feel very confident in making such predictions, but my guess is that global warming and fascist politics in the Red States that have been gaining population for years may well lead to a reverse migration to the Ocean State and other Northeast states. New residents will be in search of a milder climate, better public services and a more civilized  (everything’s relative!) society. They come and they go.

Whether tiny Rhode Island should even be a state and would be better off merged into Massachusetts or split between the Bay State and Connecticut, is another question. Just joking?

 

 

Falmouth’s Housing Program

The Cape Cod town of Falmouth, like many towns these days, has a surplus of closed big-box stores and other detritus, bordered by windy, gritty parking lots, left by Amazon’s assault on the brick-and-mortar world. The town, like most communities in New England, also has a very serious lack of affordable housing to buy or rent, made even more challenging by the fact that it’s also a summer-resort community.

 

So the town is now letting owners of business-zoned land in and near the downtown add up to 20 rental-housing units per acre, as long as it’s “affordable,’’ which generally means tenants paying no more than 30 percent of their gross income for housing.

 

Eric Turkington, a former state representative from Falmouth, reports in Commonwealth Magazine that the zoning change “has generated its first project: The owner of an auto repair shop on Main Street has submitted plans to replace it with a restaurant and 10 residential units. Further down the street, the owners of one of the big box stores with acres of asphalt is talking with the town about building a major rental housing development on their property.’’

Lessons for Rhode Island?

 

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Stefan Pryor, running for General Treasurer PHOTO: GoLocal

Stefan Pryor, who has done a capable job as Rhode Island’s commerce secretary, could be a formidable candidate now that he’s decided to run for state treasurer in the Democratic primary. He has almost astonishingly impressive experience and connections. Consider:

 

Besides serving as the top economic-development officer for Rhode Island Governors Gina Raimondo and Dan McKee, Mr. Pryor worked in key economic-development jobs for Republican New York Gov. George Pataki and New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani (Republican) and Michael Bloomberg (Republican, then independent and then Democrat).

 

Mr. Pryor also headed the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which played an important role in rebuilding the area of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11. And he was Connecticut’s education commissioner.

 

He’s also got some charm. Too bad he’s not running for governor.

 

Insane, or Just Corrupt America?

An article in the Smithsonian Magazine details how guns were heavily regulated in the Old West, contrary to the popular notion. For that matter, the Second Amendment --- the only part of the U.S. Constitution that gun cultists seem to revere – is about ‘well-regulated’’ militias in the age of muskets.

 

Hit this link:

 

Indeed, the amendment was written way before military-style rifles engineered to kill as many people as possible as rapidly as possible were developed and used to kill people in Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, etc., etc….

 

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