Volume 264 | No. 21

Ominous Clouds Are Gathering

by

No more excuses! Forced into isolation by the pandemic, we now have the time and space to “to think what we are doing,” as Hannah Arendt long ago urged. Arendt, perhaps the foremost political philosopher of the 20th century, observed that in the past we didn’t have to think: “tradition, religion, and authority told us how to behave and defined our moral options of right and wrong, the mass of humanity did not need to think for themselves…” However, nowadays, she wrote, its a free-for-all, with no guard rails on how we should act. “Adrift in a world in which everything and anything is possible, …

Read more

Going Slow on Testing

by

To the Editor: In Tulsa on June 20, President Trump announced that he had asked “his people” to go slow on virus testing, explaining that if you do more tests, you have more cases (which would be embarrassing). Spokespersons said the next day that Trump had spoken “tongue in cheek.” This was after doctors standing next to the President at numerous press conferences had explained repeatedly that testing is essential to controlling an epidemic, as it allows directing of efforts, quarantining and contact tracing. It avoids having contagious staff infect nursing home residents, and young people bring the virus to their grandparents. At those conferences, …

Read more

Override That Veto!

by

To the Editor: COVID-19 slashed household and town income in N.H. and across the country. Senator Martha Fuller Clark’s June 24th “My Turn” [column in the Concord Monitor] highlights a bipartisan solution to save money for towns and citizens: expand net metering (renewable energy sharing). Make it more accessible in our state. Last year net metering bill HB365 passed the Senate and House with bipartisan support. Governor Sununu vetoed this bill; the vote to override failed. A similar fate met net metering SB446 in 2018. HB365 would have saved N.H. businesses and communities $2-$2.5 million annually, just on electricity generated with hydropower. Tax- and rate-payers …

Read more

As American as Apple Pie

by

For much of my adult life, I have taught high school English and history, most recently including eighteen years at the Haverford School for Boys in suburban Philadelphia, retiring in June 2019 at the age of 70. In my U.S. History course, I always teach a unit I call “Race in America,” which begins with the first shipload of Africans arriving in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, and goes right up to Rosa Parks and the modern Civil Rights Movement. I sugarcoat nothing. We cover slave life on the plantation with its whippings and brandings and castrations and amputations, the almost infinitely repeated rape of female …

Read more

Flotsam & Jetsam

by

“The execution of Fred Hampton was the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration.” – Noam Chomsky, quoted in The Assassination of Fred Hampton, by Jeffrey Haas –=≈=– “As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.” – Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979) –=≈=– “Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve …

Read more

Mindi Messmer– Good Choice for Executive Councilor

by

To the Editor: It is my pleasure to endorse Mindi Messmer for New Hampshire’s Executive Council. Anyone who has been following the environmental issues on the Seacoast has often heard the name Mindi Messmer. Her work on the Pediatric Cancer Cluster task-force and her involvement with drinking water contamination, backed up by her professional expertise, has made her a voice to be listened to. Additionally, she has been a voice for enhancing the radioactive monitoring capabilities of the State of N.H. to bring more public transparency to the residents in the towns surrounding the Seabrook nuclear plant. As a fellow scientist who currently serves on …

Read more