Whitcomb: Pontoon Bridge Needed? Making a Marsh; the Choice They Wanted; Early-Onset Cancer

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

Now burst above the city’s cold twilight

The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:

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For day is done. Along the frozen docks

The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.

Thro’ factory doors a stream of dingy light

Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks

To hut and home among the snow’s gray blocks.—

I love you, human laborers. Good-night!

Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!

Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,

To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,

To the poor boy who can no more! I vow

The victim soon shall shudder at the stake

And fall in blood: we bring him even now.

-- “Six O-Clock,’’ by Trumbull Stickney (1874-1904), American poet who spent much of his short life in France

“Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you because the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.’’

-- Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), among America’s first great business magnates

“There’s little question that Vermont (particularly Vermont), Maine, Boston, and Cape Cod, are, together, responsible for the New England image. New Hampshire just doesn’t fit in.’’

- -Judson D. Hale Sr. (born 1933) in “Vermont vs. New Hampshire,’’ in American Heritage magazine April, 1992. He was the long-time editor of Yankee Magazine.

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I miss those clear, cold (say about 35 degrees F) and calm winter days that used to be so common around here. Global warming seems to be giving us Irish and English winters – cloudy and clammy day after day.

Meanwhile, some of us wish that public-works people and some businesses and individuals wouldn’t dump so much ice-melting salt that you need a shovel to get rid of it. Of course, we all want roads and sidewalks to be safe, but a little more restraint in ladling on what can be poison to plants and animals and corrosive to vehicles and other equipment would be appreciated.

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Washington Bridge PHOTO: RIDOT

It now appears that the westbound part of the Washington Bridge complex, which carries Route 195 traffic over the Seekonk River at the head of Narragansett Bay, may have to be entirely rebuilt as a result of our tradition of delayed maintenance, exacerbated by our salty environment. That means months – or more – of snarled traffic. Most hurt would be East Providence.

If so, we all hope that state officials are hard at work on plans for clearer signage to direct drivers to alternate routes to get across the river. And can we put more buses in service to take cars off the east-west roads on each side of the river? The Washington Bridge disaster may remind Rhode Islanders that RIPTA needs a lot more money.

Time for ferry service across the Seekonk?

And you’d almost think that we need another, temporary bridge across the river. A pontoon bridge -- the sort that got the U.S. Army across the Rhine near the end of World War II?

In any event, there will be more people trying to avoid the traffic jams by bicycling across the Henderson Bridge, if they can figure out how to navigate the exciting roundabout on the East Providence side, which seems to have been designed by Druid labyrinth creators. Of course, bike riding on icy routes can be a little too dramatic, and bridges freeze first!

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Governor Dan McKee -- RI's RICAS scores have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee says he wants the state’s public schools to be as good as Massachusetts’s by 2030. He must know that’s unachievable.

Massachusetts schools are often ranked first in the nation. But that’s because the Bay State has long been ranked among the richest states on a per-capita basis. Generally the richer the place, the better the schools. Further, it has America’s longest and strongest tradition of promoting public and private education. Consider that it was the first state to mandate universal public education, in 1852, and English settlers created, in 1635, the first public school in what would become the United States – the Boston Latin School.

But obviously, Rhode Island’s schools should and can be much better. One email acquaintance of mine suggested that the Ocean State hire Massachusetts to run its schools. I’m guessing he was joking.

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I love ingenious things that communities do to make life better.

Consider that New Bedford is building a salt marsh at Riverside Park, in a densely populated neighborhood of the Whaling City. The project will eliminate a small stagnant pond.

New Bedford’s parks director, Mary Rapoza, noted to WGBH:

“A working salt marsh has many benefits. It does create a sponge so that when the river rises, it can absorb a lot of that water, so that it's not flooding the neighborhood. Working salt marshes also provide habitat for fish, especially spawning fish, and also many of our native birds.’’

And part of the project will involve removing the 10-foot-high intensely invasive phragmites – tall tasseled reeds that have provided cover for illegal dumping. These plants are out of control all over the place.

Hit this link:

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PHOTO: Will Morgan

Some dreamers around America, especially in California, have proposed building entirely new towns, or even cities, to address housing-shortage-and-affordability issues. It would be tough to do that in New England, where almost all of the land is incorporated. Still, there are certainly areas, such as defunct shopping centers, where a lot of housing could be put up without offending the pull-up-the-bridge residents of middle-and-upper-class neighborhoods.

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President Joe Biden v Former President Donald Trump

Political Daze

There’s a lot of hypocritical whining about the fact that we’re facing a Biden-Trump rematch, as if the current president and the cult leader/wanna-be fuehrer opposing him somehow got into their positions from nowhere. But the fact is that they’re popular within their parties, if hated by people in the other party. Each handily won their party’s backing in 2020 and seem destined to do it again. Indeed, many Trumpers consider the traitor, thief and rapist to have been sent by God. (Time for a Black Mass?) Most Democrats are more reserved, if kindly, about their too-elderly and boring, but affable, leader, though he’s won some big policy victories for them.

The people particularly likely to whine about the allegedly crummy choice are those who didn’t take a few minutes to vote. If they dislike the candidates so much, why don’t they show up to vote for someone else? It’s never been so easy to vote.

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As Mark Twain (1835-1910) noted: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes,’’ as you can see in this documentary:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-usa/

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“The one to whom nothing was refused, whose tears were always wiped away by an anxious mother, will not abide being offended."

– Seneca (4 B.C.-65 A.D.), Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome

A look at a psychotic and our sick republic:

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Former President Donald Trump PHOTO: File

Watching the GOP presidential candidates who recently bailed out and endorsed Trump is an alternately nauseating and hilarious spectacle of obsequiousness. The pathetic Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, may have set the record so far in sucking up to the thug, who I’m sure looks down on these weak if ambitious characters.

“I just love you,’’ the slobbering senator told his maximum leader at a campaign event in the Palmetto State, the overwhelmingly Republican jurisdiction that was the Cradle of the Confederacy. (Most Republicans in the South are political descendants of Southern Democrats (aka “Dixiecrats’’), not to be confused with Northern Democrats, whose support of civil rights drove White Southerners into the arms of an increasingly right-wing Republican Party in the 1960s and ’70’s. I watched the process.)

Of course, Mr. Scott, who is Black, wants to be Trump’s running mate. Balanced ticket! Apparently, to try to raise his chances in the generally gay-disliking party, the 58-year-old long-time bachelor has just announced that he’s engaged to a woman.

I suspect that some of Trump’s endorsers are physically afraid of crossing Trump, some of whose worshippers are violence-prone, which their leader encourages. I’m quite sure that many Republican leaders hate Trump and pray for the death of the obese and increasingly incoherent 77-year-old. But they fear him and his cultists far too much to speak out.

One of the ironies in all this is that behind the grievances of the cultists are Republican (and Clintonian Democrat) policies that have exacerbated income inequality through rich-favoring tax and deregulatory policies (the latter helped cause the Great Recession) and the toxic effects of George W. Bush’s Mideast wars. Get ready for those tax and deregulatory policies to be enacted again. More high-end tax cuts coming, although the national debt calls for tax increases to pay for the services and infrastructure that the public is always demanding! More magical thinking….

Wall Street donors, many of whom can be relied upon not to fear looking cynical and utterly selfish, are warming to the idea of another Trump term, with upper-end tax cuts and deregulation of the financial sector to be served up on silver platters. They’ll party like it’s 2006.

Battling Early-Onset Cancer

I’ve been watching a physician/healthcare executive friend, George Beauregard, prepare a book, yet to be published, titled Reservation for 9, that’s both a memoir and a medical saga, most of it set in Greater Boston.

The book tells how he and his son Patrick developed different advanced-stage early-onset cancers (early onset defined as cancers diagnosed in patients under 50), creating seismic changes in their lives, and those of their whole colorful nuclear family of six, that accompanied their illnesses. It’s a story about a complex family history, fear, grief, and hope, along with the science and institutions of medicine, and it provides much insight for others battling the disease.

There has been an alarming global increase in the incidence of cancer affecting younger adults. Patrick’s colorectal cancer was diagnosed when he was 29, and it killed him at 32, but not before he became an inspiring national spokesman for other victims. Dr. Beauregard, for his part, was diagnosed with bladder cancer at age 49 but is now apparently cured.

Patrick’s story continues to be cited in national news media, including recently in The Wall Street Journal.

Appearing as a guest on the Today Show on March 10, 2020, he said:

“In a situation like this, your mind can either liberate you or essentially incarcerate you...and you choose what to make of it.’’

“I don’t see the point in being negative in this. Negativity is only going to bring on more negativity. I choose to have a positive outlook and always have hope, and I don’t see why you would ever decide not to.”

Early Lessons

I love this quote from the acerbic American writer Gore Vidal (1925-2012):

"The only advantage for a child in having an alcoholic parent is that you acquire, prematurely, quite a bit of valuable data.’’

Yes, useful (as long as you don’t let the data imprison you in anxiety) in learning to accept the uncertainty of all human relations and in developing a deep skepticism when listening to people in authority.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.

Whitcomb: Pontoon Bridge Needed? Making a Marsh; the Choice They Wanted; Early-Onset Cancer

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Whitcomb: Pontoon Bridge Needed? Making a Marsh; the Choice They Wanted; Early-Onset Cancer

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