"A Civil War statue on Martha’s Vineyard has sparked a controversy on that island" by Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff, May 3, 2019
OAK BLUFFS — Its iron-cast base contains a 1925 plaque that honors the Confederate enemy, a surprising tribute for a summer getaway long known for its vibrant black community.
The tablet, placed on a Union monument built in 1891 by a former Confederate officer who had moved to Oak Bluffs, was meant as a gesture of reconciliation with the South and for years attracted little notice, but nearly a century after its dedication, the plaque has suddenly turned divisive, with the island’s NAACP chapter leading calls for its removal. The NAACP also wants a marker that mentions the Confederate tribute removed from the ground in front of the statue.
“We do not honor treason or those who fought to continue the institution of slavery,” Gretchen Tucker Underwood, a leader of the Martha’s Vineyard NAACP, told the Board of Selectmen at a contentious meeting last week, but for many residents, including the island’s veterans agent, removing the plaque is tantamount to rewriting the historical record. The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a national organization, also opposes its removal.
I haven't heard anyone complain about all the good old Southern boys who have died in all the wars since!
“I just hate taking from history just because someone doesn’t like it,” said Jo Ann Murphy, the Dukes County veterans agent and American Legion commander in Vineyard Haven. “This is a monument we dedicated to those who fought in the war, and they were all Americans.”
In the two years since white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., monuments to the Confederacy have been toppled or removed from Baltimore to New Orleans amid a polarizing debate over race and history.
Now, that dispute has found its way north to this picturesque island. Some historians believe the Oak Bluffs plaque is one of only a few in the North — perhaps the only one not on a Civil War battlefield in the region — that honors Confederate soldiers. A tablet in Boston Harbor honoring Confederate POWs who died on Georges Island was ordered removed by the state in 2017.
The Oak Bluffs statue was erected by Charles Strahan, a former Confederate lieutenant who was wounded in battle, moved to the island after the war, and bought a newspaper he renamed the Martha’s Vineyard Herald.
Three sides of the monument contain Union inscriptions, and the plaque wasn’t added to the fourth side for 34 years. Aging and frail at the time, Strahan finally realized his hope that the remaining Union veterans would recognize an old foe with something other than enmity, but now, the tablet reminds its critics of the Confederacy’s fight to preserve slavery.
Wasn't only about that, and they have distorted history. Lincoln was going to allow slavery to be grandfathered in the places where it existed; he only wanted any future states to be "free states,"and the South objected because it would have upended the balance of power in the Senate -- forever!
The timing of any decision is uncertain.
Selectmen last week scheduled a public forum on the issue for May 21. That meeting will occur weeks before most black summertime residents arrive, and seasonal resident Clennon King assailed the move as exclusionary.
“This whole thing is about race at the end of the day,” said King, a documentary filmmaker from Roxbury.
YUP!
His remarks drew an angry comment from across the crowded room.
“We’re not prejudiced here!” someone said.
That confirms that you are!
The exchange prompted Gail Barmakian, the board’s chairwoman, to call a timeout.
“If this continues, I’m going to shut everything down,” Barmakian said.
The tempest has surprised many residents here, where the plaque avoided controversy for decades.
That's because it was ancient history until being revived for the agenda-pushing and divisive agenda of the jew$papers.
“I don't recall there ever being a discussion of it being problematic,” said Anthony Bowdoin Van Riper, research librarian at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. “What happened in Charlottesville probably lit the fuse on it and got more people conscious of monuments that in some way celebrated the Confederacy.”
Although the plaque is not viewed as a “celebration” of the Confederacy, its Southern ties are well known. Indeed, for years, the statue was thought by many islanders and tour-bus drivers to be a Confederate soldier.
Van Riper believes the town-owned statue, which sits dozens of yards from the police station, was part of Strahan’s long-running struggle to win over Union veterans and their friends.
The town’s police chief is white and president of the NAACP chapter.
“This is a guy who really, really wants his neighbors to like him and not treat him like dirt just because he was on the other side,” Van Riper said. “He’s like the most unpopular kid on the block who throws a big party and invites all the cool kids.”
Strahan, a Baltimore native who fought with the Army of Northern Virginia, needed to do something.
His newspaper announced plans for a Memorial Day event, but Union veterans threatened to boycott the celebration if he showed up. Instead, Strahan stayed away and sent a reporter, who wrote effusively of the bravery and honor of the Grand Army of the Republic, the postwar organization of Union veterans.
Then came the statue. At its dedication 26 years after the war, Strahan spoke of his affection for the restored Union and his gratitude that slavery had been abolished.
Who cares if today's debate has been framed in a distorted way and turned upside-down and inside-out, just tear it down!
Later, paraphrasing the dying words of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Strahan expressed hope that Union veterans might place on the statue “a token of respect to their old foes in the field, who have passed over to the other side of the river and are resting under the trees,” but to some, that “token of respect” glorifies the cause for which they fought.
“This is your welcome to Martha’s Vineyard,” said Underwood, glancing at the statue rising above her. She suggested that the plaque be donated to the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
“It’s a nice statue, but . . . ” Underwood said, her words trailing off. “Someone has to stand up and remove these incendiary symbols. I don’t think there’s ever a wrong time for righteousness.”
So SELF-righteous, too!
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Related: Oak Bluffs plaque honoring Confederate soldiers to be moved to Martha’s Vineyard Museum
Before I began blogging, I never realized how I had been raised in a cultural that aggrandizes Yankee supremacy and prejudice.
Teach your children well, folks:
"At Tufts, Nancy Pelosi focuses on affordable child care" by Victoria McGrane Globe Staff, May 3, 2019
MEDFORD — It was a scene that might have boggled the mind not too long ago: The speaker of the House talking about the prospects for impeaching the president while snuggling a pajama-clad baby, but this is 2019, Nancy Pelosi is speaker, a mother of five, and grandmother of nine, who presides over a caucus that comprises a historic number of women, including far more mothers of young children than ever before.
So while Democrats’ takeover of the House this year has pushed talk of impeachment to the center of the national debate, it also has led to a heightened focus on issues affecting mothers, working families, and children.
“Elections are about the future,” Pelosi said Friday during an event at Tufts University focused on affordable child care. “When people ask me what are the three most important issues facing the Congress, I always say the same thing: our children, our children, our children.”
Friday’s event, hosted by Representative Katherine Clark of Melrose, a member of Pelosi’s leadership team, was the first in a series of events Pelosi has planned across the country, launched after Democrats completed their first 100 days’ agenda. The panel discussion with Pelosi, Clark, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Boston, and Representative Lori Trahan of Lowell, followed a tour of Tuft’s Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, during which the lawmakers saw kindergartners learning about robotics and bio-engineering.
Trahan is a liar and cheat, but that's okay if you are a Democrat.
The subject matter reflected not only the fresh prominence that Democrats are giving family issues, but also how party leaders are increasingly emphasizing how these problems connect to other policy areas, such as economic growth, housing, and infrastructure.
Related: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Who said that?
“If we’re going to keep these women in the workforce — the way we’ve been boasting about more women in the economy, more women in the Congress, more women in boardrooms — we actually have to solve the problem of early child care so that they’re not making tradeoffs about working and engaging in our economy and staying home. . . because it’s their only option,” Trahan said.
Clark, a member of the Appropriations Committee, recently announced she had helped secure close to $4 billion in additional funding in a House spending bill for the Head Start early childhood education program and the Child Development Block Grant, a federal-state program aimed at helping low-income families pay for child care so they can work or go to school.
At the forum, she said she is working on a new bill that would target student loan repayment to early childhood educators. “We know that investment of public dollars is one of the very best that we can make,” she said.
Massachusetts, on average, is one of the most expensive states in the country for child care.
Pelosi highlighted legislation introduced by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Bobby Scott, Democrat of Virginia, the Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap the amount that working families pay for child care to 7 percent of their household income, for those earning less than 150 percent of their state’s median income. She also said she had told Trump in a meeting this week at the White House on infrastructure that Congress needs to better fund programs for children with a range of disabilities, and she noted that the mothers in the House had formed a “baby caucus” to focus on policy affecting very young children.
Yeah, wave them at us.
Attention to family issues extends beyond Congress to the crowded Democratic presidential primary field, which also boasts an unprecedented number of female candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren in February unveiled a sweeping universal child care plan that she says would provide all families with access to affordable care, paid for by a tax on the “ultra wealthy.” Others emphasized support for paid family leave, universal prekindergarten, and equal pay for women.
Yet Friday’s event also underscored the difficulty that Democrats face in keeping attention focused on their push on this policy and others. Most of the questions that reporters asked following the event focused on President Trump and the ongoing drama his administration has brought to Washington.
Pelosi reiterated her view that the time is not right to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president, as some Democrats have urged, given what was in the Mueller report.
“Impeachment is one of the most divisive and dividing paths that you can take, and if you go down that path you have to have a prospect for success, and I do think that the path of investigation and getting more information — and you never know that one thing can lead to another,” said Pelosi. “Impeachment is never off the table, but should you start there? I don’t agree with that.”
Pressley, who has called for Trump to be impeached, said that focus on the disagreement among Democrats as to whether to now pursue impeachment undercuts the caucuses’ broader unity on seeking truth for the American people.
As if they were interested in finding the truth.
“We might have different ideas about how to get there, sequentially, tactically, but we all want the same thing,” she said. “This is bigger than Donald Trump. This is no partisan witch hunt; this is about the institution and the office of the presidency.”
Why don't you investigate the Clinton campaign and the Obama infiltration and spying effort then?
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Related: Nancy Pelosi held a baby at Tufts. Then she answered a question on impeachment
Also see:
"For anyone receiving a college degree, a diploma means a lot, but for many of these students, the success was sweeter because their journey has been more difficult. Several first-generation students talked Friday evening about how hard it was to adjust to a campus of white, upper-class students, many of whom knew each other from prep school or would leave campus every summer for an expensive summer vacation. The ceremony on Friday celebrated that difference....."
I have “culture shock” from the nonstop agenda-pushing!
"East Boston school changes security after woman enters and films Arab heritage display" by Travis Andersen Globe Staff, May 3, 2019
An East Boston charter school has changed its security procedures after video surfaced online of a woman entering the school and criticizing an Arab American Heritage Month display in the lobby.
In a statement Wednesday, Excel Academy, a consortium of four charter schools that includes Excel Academy Charter High School where the incident occurred, said the school recently “became aware” of the woman’s video.
“This incident led us to reexamine and make changes to our security protocols for allowing visitors into the building,” the statement said. “We are investing in locks for our secondary interior front doors, so that all visitors will need permission to enter the building and will only be allowed to pass through the second set of doors once they have been cleared by our front office staff.”
And the march toward the Pri$on $tate continues as the acclimate, inculcate, and indoctrinate the kids in it.
Meanwhile in a joint statement Thursday, City Councilor Lydia Edwards, State Senator Joseph Boncore and State Representative Adrian Madaro, all of whom represent East Boston, voiced support for Excel.
“Boston’s schools prepare students of our diverse city to be members of a global and welcoming society,” the statement said. “Arab-Americans are celebrated members of our communities, whose contributions have enriched our neighborhoods. We applaud Excel Academy for honoring Arab-American Heritage Month during the month of April.”
In the woman’s video clip, she says shortly before entering the school that she wants to film “something that really bothered me.” The woman enters Excel and identifies herself to a school employee as a “concerned grandparent” who wants to film the display for someone else, adding, “I pay taxes.”
The employee replies, “Just so long as you don’t film students.”
The woman says, “Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not,” and then starts documenting the display, which says “Celebrate Arab Heritage Month” and includes photos of public figures of Arab descent, including the late Steve Jobs and US Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who’s the daughter of Palestinian immigrants.
The woman who shot the video didn’t name herself in the clip, but a Facebook user who identified herself as Stiletto claimed in a posting earlier this week that she shot the footage.
“I’m amazed to see the hate towards me for trying to make a point about a school having a picture of Rasheida [sic] Talieb [sic] in a public school,” Stiletto wrote. “I feel they shouldn’t teach our youth to glorify a person who threatens to impeach a sitting president. I have nothing but love & respect for people, but when I see the indoctrination of our schools happening for years . . . I felt it inappropriate during Easter month & also feel they are ripping statues & history down in order to erase history. This is the United States. I have every right to my freedom of speech. I never attacked or spread hate the way it’s coming toward me.”
I wouldn't be too sure of that, and thanks for helping the cause (blog editor rolls eyes skyward)!!
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Phone is ringing, and it is time for a drink:
"Most anything we do these days comes with a drink" by Dugan Arnett Globe Staff, May 10, 2019
For the past few years, Kristen Ciccolini has watched as some of her favorite events and activities increasingly transformed into opportunities to drink.
It was subtle, at first — a yoga class held at a brewery, a cooking course where students sipped wine as they worked. All activities, she reasoned, in which alcohol didn’t seem entirely out of place, but when she arrived not long ago for a spin class to find it paired with a post-workout tequila tasting, it felt like a bridge too far.
“I’m not a teetotaler — I like a glass of wine, I like to have a good cocktail,” says Ciccolini, a 31-year-old nutritionist from Boston. “But the fact that it has to be involved in every single activity is really frustrating.”
It’s also the new normal, part of a cultural moment in which any event — from poetry readings to workout classes to road races — can serve as an excuse to imbibe.
Poets and Pints. Drinking and Drawing. Treadmill and Tequila. Attend most any kind of activity in the city these days, and there’s a good chance it features a drinking component.
“You can’t get your hair cut without a drink,” says Ayelet Hines, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, noting the growing practice of barbershops and salons providing patrons with a pre-haircut beer.
I cut my own.
Experts attribute the phenomenon to a variety of factors, from the desire among younger generations for more experiential (read: Instagrammable) activities to a general loosening of the collar when it comes to views on alcohol.
But they are all bunged up over the far less toxic recreational pot!
“I think it’s all about evolving cultural norms,” says Jeff Fromm, a partner at Kansas City-headquartered marketing firm Barkley and author of the book “Marketing to Millennials.” “Consumers accept that as long as you’re not drunk, and you’re not driving, that alcohol is acceptable everywhere from [fast-casual] restaurants to movie theaters to yoga studios.”
This shift is no accident, says David Jernigan, professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Rather, he says, it’s the result of an alcohol industry that has worked tirelessly to break down social restrictions on drinking, annually pouring billions of dollars into marketing.
It's ubiquitous in our $ociety.
The marketing toward women has been particularly intense, Jernigan notes, with wine being branded almost as a health food, complete with terms like “Mommy Juice” and “Mommy’s Little Helper.”
OMFG!
Just what we need in this age of #MeToo, a bunch of crocked and blacked out women stumbling around.
Oh, right, the access to alcohol and cosmetics is called liberation!
“The point of alcohol marketing is to integrate the product into every aspect of people’s lives, and that’s what you’re seeing — it’s an alcohol marketer’s dream,” Jernigan says. “So they’re doing their job; the message that’s getting lost here is the public health cost.”
There’s no doubting the demand for such events.
When Jenna Hill, a local yoga teacher, began hosting classes at a collection of area breweries a few years back, she immediately realized she’d tapped into something promising.
“The events just started selling out,” she says.
These days, the practice has grown so common that hosting an event without drinks can leave participants grumbling.
I'm glad to see Bo$ton is a city of alcoholics and drunk millennials.
Proponents of the booze-inclusive events argue that alcohol adds a social component to activities like yoga, encouraging class participants to interact, and if the promise of a post-class drink compels someone to take a workout class they otherwise wouldn’t, all the better.
Yeah, nothing like counteracting all that hard work by tossing down a few!
“It gives you another reason to go somewhere,” says Marika McCoola, part of the management team at Porter Square Books, which this summer will host a Grown Up Book Fair in which attendees can sip beer while browsing summer reads. “There’s two things enticing you instead of one.”
???????????????
The city must really suck then!
Some, though, have been less enthralled with the booze-ification of everyday events.
In March, when Whole Foods sought permission from the Sudbury Board of Selectmen to serve beer and wine to customers, Selectman Leonard A. Simon quickly took issue with the idea, later adding that he was “appalled at Whole Foods’ chutzpah.”
“This is a suburban supermarket with kids in it,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”
Critics also wonder whether we’re growing too comfortable with alcohol, forgetting its well-documented harms when abused.
HUH?
Research shows that, as is the case with any drug, greater access to alcohol will lead to greater consumption, Jernigan says, noting that the declining stigma surrounding alcohol has quietly coincided with some troubling statistics.
Cha-Ching!!
From 2007 to 2017, Jernigan says, death rates from alcohol increased 43 percent. From 2006 to 2014, alcohol-related emergency room visits increased by more than 60 percent, and while drunken driving deaths have fallen dramatically over the past quarter-century, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving national president Helen Witty, the past five years have seen a 9 percent increase.
“If, as a society, we’re going to become more lax,” Witty says, “then we need to understand what comes along with that.”
Even as she bemoans the ubiquitousness of alcohol, however, Ciccolini admits that it might be too late to put the spilled wine — and beer and vodka and tequila — back in the bottle.
Yeah, just GIVE UP!
The coming summer months are sure to bring more booze-themed events, and having seen firsthand the popularity of such events, Maggie Walsh Deaver, cofounder and CEO of Yoga Around Town, has come to the following conclusion: Nixing her class’s post-workout social hour would almost certainly result in a decline in interest.
As she puts it, “It’s the norm now.”
Time to pray to the porcelain God!
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Ready for your (hiccup) workout!?
