Returning to the blog

Pamplemousse, a French-themed kitchen shop in the middle of Downtown Salem.

After a long time, in Internet terms, I talked myself into blogging again.

When I posted my last blog entry, after my dear friend Charlie Reardon passed away, I was well and truly burned out.  I've always been a pessimist about the city I live in, always cynical.  As a "Masshole" (and proud of it!), I have always been obsessed with local politics.  That is both very good, and very bad.

I still sit on the Commission on Disabilities;  in fact, David Martel and I are presently the most senior members, having been appointed 10 years ago this summer.

I've been on Facebook in the interim--I still am, in fact--but I've found that I miss posting photos and events, and not all of my friends are on Facebook.

I also found new activities to take up, which I want to share here.
I don't intend to change the blog very much.  I still hate talking about national politics, now even more so.  I do talk about local politics, when it interests me.  (Despite what one would think, I have always been politically involved, voting since 1984. )

I'll talk about disability issues, Salem photos, some local politics, and whatever new thing I have found this week.

À bientot! (See you soon!)

Charlie Reardon has passed on

Essex Street Fair 2007 012 BW, originally uploaded by dmoisan.

The Salem Con Disabilities is sad to announce that one of our long-time members has passed away.

Charlie Reardon is no longer with us.

When I first started filming disability meetings, Charlie was one of the first people I met. He and I would go to various city meetings in one of his vehicles so I could record them. He was on a lot of shoots with me.

He also ferried around my blind colleague Andy quite a lot--Andy's late guide dog, Elliot, adored Charlie!

We both lived in Ward 2 and we shared the same "opinions" on the Salem Common Neighborhood Association that I have long aired here.

We will miss Charlie.

Is My Councilor Better Than His Voters Because He Served?

Dedication of the James Ayube Memorial Riverway, September 30th, 2011

A few days ago, I was reading the threads on Salemweb, and ran into Lloyd’s political commentary mixed amongst his Christmas best wishes.  (Christmas is not my favorite holiday, but I hope everybody had good festivities nonetheless.)

I don’t pay a lot of attention;  most of the threads on that board rehash old arguments that would never be settled even if Kim Driscoll were hit by a meteorite in bed tonight.

And why would I take issue with best wishes anyway, even if they’re satirical?  But Lloyd, in this thread, said something that has bothered me enough to stick my head out on a topic I never felt safe to bring up before.

Lloyd:

To Mike Sosnowski - Many thanks for your hard work in the face of dealing with individuals who have little or no appreciation for your service to your country, or your dedication to the ward you live in. Semper Fi.

I’m sure Lloyd didn’t mean anything negative in particular, except for criticizing those who don’t agree with Mike.

Or who don’t appreciate Mike’s service to his country as a Marine.

I respect his service.  But I have disagreed with Mike on many occasions.  I don’t approve of his performance.  I don’t like how he toadies to the Common and the Federal Street associations.  I was livid when he let someone from Northfields tell me what I should have or not have in my neighborhood.

But he’s a veteran.  I should not speak.

Right?

One of Mark Twain’s best short works, “The War Prayer”, goes right to the heart of my unease.  He describes the great swell of patriotism surrounding the Phillipine-American War, which he hated.

In a church, a fervent pastor is leading his flock in excited, vigorous prayer, praying for their young men, soon to go into battle, and for their total victory over their enemy.

In the middle of the prayer, a wild man walks in, and explains:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

If you pray for our victory, Twain says, you are praying for some mother’s son to die, for someone’s home to be bombed, for some child to die in fire.  (It’s worth going back to read the whole piece;  I do it no credit.)

I’m no pacifist.  I’ve grown up all my life knowing a military and veterans and armed forces and I don’t see that going away.  But war, as Sherman put it, is hell, and I hate sentimentalizing it or romanticizing it.

More to the point of my councilor, when I am told to support my councilor because he served,  I hear these unspoken things:

• “I served and I’m a better citizen than you!”
• “You can’t tell me what to do.  I served and you didn’t!”
• “You’d act better if  I sent you to boot camp, wouldn’t you?!”
• “Yes, I can tell you what to do!  Say Sir, Yes Sir!”
• “You didn’t serve.  You’re not really a citizen.  Or a person.”

This last point is inordinately cruel:  Though I did register for Selective Service and had no qualms or fears of the unlikely possibility that I would be called up, I would have never been able to pass the physical in any event;  my early eye history and my hearing loss would have certainly disqualified me.

If my councilor is superior to me because he served, and if I could not serve, I would have to think I’m an untermenschen.   (Societies that thought they had untermenschen they needed to deal with have all been stable and happy societies that have never made war within their nations or outside of it.  Right.  Sure.)

Mind you, I don’t think Mike himself thinks this of me.  He might hate what I wrote.  He could even yell at me as if he were my DI—and he’d be perfectly entitled to do so, given our disagreements!

But I’ve heard comments like Lloyd’s from so many people in the past few years.  Several years ago on Salemweb, I had made a comment on Eisenhower (whom I admire) and how I would not necessarily vote for a veteran because none of them were like our former General and President.

I got an extended lecture on the Greatest Generation.

I suspect the person who gave me that lecture, which has become a catechism over the years, did not serve.  Many people who are gung-ho about our military, who love our military above all else, the Fighting Keyboard types who would bomb Iran tomorrow, did not themselves serve.

To too many Americans, our soldiers are totems.  We worship them.  We use them to make ourselves feel better.  We can stand next to the lowest Army private and be his or her friend and be better because we are associated with a soldier.

To hear people tell it, the late James Ayube died for our sins.  I attended the dedication ceremony that named the bypass road for him, and I was dismayed about how my state rep, John Keenan, and my mayor Driscoll, just waved away the facts of Ayube’s death as if they were just a force of Nature.  I am left thinking that ceremony was not so much for Ayube’s family but for ourselves.

I don’t expect a ceremony like that to be a discourse on our foreign policies, but we, the people, are responsible for the well-being, the safety and most importantly the prudent use of our forces, with our  young people that we have asked to fight for us on our behalf.

We can’t take his death for granted, nor romanticize it, nor sentimentalize it.  But I’ve given up on our politicians realizing that because they of all people benefit the most from standing next to a soldier.

Getting back to my point, I’ve heard from a lot of people over the past few years, and not a few of my Facebook friends, who love the idea of a military government, even though it’s against our Constitution.

The military will just make things work!  In a military government, Lloyd can have me sent away for treason.  The Army can kill all them liberals!  Shoot illegal aliens all day, all night, with dogs and choppers and night vision, everywhere! 

I have to think if I am going to toady up to my councilor just because he served, I am helping to insure that the military takeover that we have always criticized other nations for doing, that could never happen because we loved Freedom more than anyone else, will easily happen right here at home.  To hear some tell it, we’re well on our way to welcoming our new Army overlords.

I won’t do it.

Mike can show up at my door anytime and give me General Patton’s method of discipline.  I understand it.  I’ll take it.

But I won’t kiss his ass just because he served and I didn’t.

My years of futility in Salem transit, part 2

Following up on my last post, I’m wondering why we just can’t get things done to improve our public transit and make our streets safer for pedestrians and people with disabilities.

I’m signed up with the MBTA to get service alerts for bus routes I regularly use, which would be the 450, 451, 455, 456, 459 and 465.  I just got an alert now:

Routes 455 & 459 are experiencing 15-20 minute delays due to traffic.

10/17/2011 4:07 PM

This has been a regular occurrence.  Normally, I’m not concerned about delays here and there because buses run in traffic and are susceptible to the same delays that affect motorists trying to go down 1A and 107 on their way to and from Salem.

But there’s been a disturbing increase in traffic congestion that has happened in all months at most times of the day in the North Shore.

The MBTA schedules have been severely affected;  looking at Route 456, the frequency of service is now 80 minutes.  That means 1 hour and 20 minutes between buses.  This route once ran hourly when it was established in 2002.  (The 456 is a busy route that serves Central Square by way of Highland Ave., and the many Lynn residents who shop and use the medical offices in Salem.)

The 450 has been affected as well.  In fact, during weekdays, none of the MBTA routes out of Salem Depot run hourly.  The 465 that serves the Peabody-Danvers shopping area runs about every 1 hour and 10 minutes (70 minutes).

Even on weekends, the 455W, Salem to Wonderland, no longer runs hourly, but also slips 5 minutes here and there throughout the day.

This single bus route is the most frequent, and busiest, of all of the MBTA’s Salem routes.  Before the 455 was split into the 455 and 459 routes (the latter going to Logan Airport and South Station on weekdays), it ran every 30 minutes, as does the 455W weekend service to Wonderland.

I have taken that route many times and I can tell you it is crowded.  If you come home from Boston and elect to get off the Blue Line at Revere Beach (one stop short of Wonderland), you will not get a seat on the bus.  (The bus shelter at Revere Beach is much nicer than the one at Wonderland so I board there any time I can.)

Remember also that the MBTA runs many, many other routes to and through Lynn, and to Swampscott and Marblehead.

Here is an exercise for those who doubt this:  Drive down either Route 1A (the Lynnway) or Route 107 (Western Ave.) and pull into a lot somewhere before Revere.  There are a number of Dunks around so pull in with a medium regular and your choice of donut.  Normal business hours are fine, day or evening.

Find an MBTA bus that is marked for service on its LED sign (other than “NOT IN SERVICE” or “NO STOPS”).  Count how many people are onboard;  you don’t need to be exact.

Count the buses and count the people.

You’ll probably find a lot more buses and a lot more riders than you think.  These people are heading to and from work, to and from doctor appointments, daycare, shopping and even church.

Critics of transit spending like to say that you can’t make demand by spending on big capital projects like, say, the Blue Line extension to Lynn.

But the people are already here!  They’ve been here for a long time.  They come whenever the latest condos get built on Highland Ave.

And those who don’t take the bus, drive.  Yes, I know I am in the minority of people who do not drive and yes I am lazy, didn’t overcome my disabilities, and so forth.  I know all that.

But I know, too, that in any urban area, when the density of people gets above a certain point, it’s time to consider investing in public transit, simply because the road networks will strangle the very communities that depend on them.

That time’s now.  It’s been “now” for years.

No public official will say this, because the scariest thing they could imagine is to have Barbara Anderson and the Tea Party at their door screaming “NO NEW TAXES!”  I’ve heard that before, I’ve heard it for years and years and years.

And, certainly, Salem is wealthy enough in the short term that the Tea Party platforms could “work”.

For a short while, anyway.

Will the shiny, happy, good, new (and rich) residents of Salem tolerate not being able to leave their driveway, not only in October, but year-round?  The traffic jams of Halloween in Salem are legendary, but the dirty truth is that they happen just as readily on a cold twilight afternoon in January.

I fear something even worse:  The Massachusetts Senate has approved a casino gaming bill.   In the bill, which still has to go to a conference committee to be finalized, there would be three destination casinos in the state.  One of them would be near Suffolk Downs.

The owners of Suffolk Downs have long looked to slot machines to provide the revenue they need to keep the horse track running;  horse racing as a sport has been on a long slow decline for decades and the track was once known as “Sufferin’ Downs” for good reason.

The owners recently bought Wonderland, the defunct dog track near the Blue Line that was closed after Mass. voters approved a referenda to ban greyhound racing.  Wonderland is where most people think a slot parlor may go on the North Shore.

It’s the northern end of the Blue Line.  And it is the worst migraine headache for me and all of us on the North Shore.  And it will happen.   There’s too much money being tossed around in executive suites and the State House to think otherwise.

Both my mayor and my rep, Driscoll and Keenan, are supporting casinos.  They’re doing so, I suspect, because of the hope of increased state revenue for cities and towns, the selling point most used by our state lottery, and they are hoping for infrastructure (roads & transit) improvements.

I’m not going to guess on the revenue, but I will guess that the casino operators won’t invest as much in the infrastructure as we would like.  They don’t need to.

They don’t need a Blue Line extension;  most of their customers will drive, and the few who don’t can be served by leasing a few dozen shuttle buses.  We’ll see them everywhere once the casino opens.  (They will also become the default recreational option for senior centers, but that is another matter.)

They won’t need to invest in anything else;  the casinos of Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun are, like most, self-contained so the visitor doesn’t need to go anywhere else.  Nowhere else but there to spend money!

Mayor Driscoll is deluding herself if she thinks this won’t ripple into Salem’s tourist revenue.

What casinos will surely do is clog up the roads and make it impossible for anyone in buses or cars to get around.

Unless, of course, you are going to the casino yourself.  That will be easy.

Otherwise, not so much.  The decay of the T will continue and no one will care.  What have I been doing for 4 years, again?  Will it matter?

My years of futility in Salem transit, part 1

In my last post, I updated the status of Salem Depot and its endless revisions and delays.  A little further south of downtown, there’s another situation that I am reminded of again and again.

I’ve long wrote about the Market Basket bus stop and the problems navigating to it in the winter.  Around this time of year, most of us are shopping for new winter boots and hoping against hope that the upcoming winter will be mild, or at least with little snow.

This picture outside Pep Boys showed that this was not to be, early in 2011.  In 2010, the Commission hoped that the MBTA would route buses through Market Basket to eliminate the problem.

That was also not to be;  the MBTA declined the idea.  The Market Basket plaza was never designed for buses, the routes would be delayed going through there, but most importantly, the abutter to Market Basket—the adjacent shopping complex with Shaws and TJ Maxx, objected.

There will be no new bus stop in the winter of 2011-2012 and, I fear, there may never be.

Since I’ve started this blog, I have heard regularly from a gentleman, a former city councilor, who’s been upset over the bus stop and its snowbanks.

Like clockwork, I’ll hear from him when Mayor Driscoll announces funding for some new project (“She can spend $XXXXX for something but not on the bus stop!”)

Repeatedly.

He’s made me even more cynical than I am already.  I have seen and known enough about government to know that the fact of Mayor Driscoll seeking to start some project or another is totally orthogonal and unrelated to that bus stop.  I didn’t even vote for her but I have expressed my thoughts on transit to her and other elected officials regularly.

Most people who’ve been outraged over this issue have cars and don’t need to wait in the snow for the bus!

I use that bus stop regularly. If I get run over standing next to a snowbank one gray chilly day, isn’t that poetic justice?  Given what the Tea Parties say about government and those who work for it, I wouldn’t expect an ounce of sympathy from anyone if that happened!  I don’t know the politics of my correspondent, but I do know a lot of people his age who parrot  the “hard work and personal responsibility” trope of the Tea Parties so often that it is just screaming noise.  (Obviously, I didn’t work hard enough to overcome my vision problems so I could drive!)

And my correspondent is an ex-city councilor!  I feel that if you are a current city official or even a former city official, you have an obligation to answer when someone asks, “What did you do to make Salem better when you served?”

I’d like to ask my correspondent what he did when he had the reins.

I know that in 4 years and 1-1/3rd terms into my service on the Commission on Disabilities, I have to ask myself that question every time I get up in the morning and every time I sit in our conference room at SATV every third Tuesday.

I’m beginning to wonder if I can really answer that.  Thoughts in my next post. 

Salem Depot Update

Two updates on Salem Depot:  Several of us from the Salem Commission on Disabilities met here at Salem Depot with representatives from the Salem and MBTA Police to discuss handicapped parking problems at the station.  The Salem News wrote about this in some detail.

There wasn’t much that the police could do at the moment, since there is no continual monitoring of the area, by video or otherwise, but the T placed a message board, seen in in the image, for the interim.  October and Halloween represent the biggest month that this station sees in car and foot traffic, so this sign is not or should not be an unexpected expense for the T.

I never read the Salem News comment section, but there was one comment to that article I want to address:  The commenter believes that, instead of enforcing HP parking, that people with disabilities should use the T’s paratransit service, The Ride.

Um, they could.  But as I’ve written before, that service is very expensive to provide.   Using The Ride for direct service from, say, North Salem to Boston is just nuts if one can make the commuter rail.  And using The Ride as a shuttle to the station itself is practically a non-starter with Salem’s downtown traffic as bad as it is.

It turns out to be much cheaper, in the long run, for the MBTA to make their regular service accessible to people with disabilities.  The current management at the T seems to realize this, only after decades of neglect—and lawsuits.

My second update is more disturbing.  There was a robbery at the station one night last month.  A student was robbed of his laptop and iPod to the tune of $1,400, while waiting for a ride around 9 PM.

On reading this in the News, I can imagine the good people of Federal Street locking their doors in unison.  It’s not safe at 9 PM, after all.

I have been at the Depot late at night getting off a train.  It’s not at all unusual to call for a ride or a taxi.  9 PM is not a “wrong” time to be on the T.

My Mom told me stories of the old Salem Depot, not the famous headhouse that was demolished 50 years ago, but the two that sat under the south end of Riley Plaza.

A platform that was virtually invisible from the street. 

There were crimes and assaults on that platform up until it was closed in 1987 when the current station opened.

It is not acceptable to have someone minding their business at the station, waiting for their ride home, and being robbed. 

It’s intolerable that we should be taking these events  for granted, but many do.  I know, we’re in a recession, government is ineffective, and can’t we just wait for better days?  We’ll build a better Salem Depot to the shrine of Sammy McIntyre someday soon!

I’m coming to think that nobody in Salem wants a new train station, not the politicians, not the Salem News 101st Keyboard Brigade, not the neighborhood groups, or the “government-is-bad” people, nobody.

More on my next post.

Salem’s ADA Day, 2011

Monday marked the 21st anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Seen here are David Tracht, Salem Commission on Disabilities co-chair, Mayor Kim Driscoll, David Martel, Salem Commission on Disabilities and Mary Margaret Moor, Independent Living Center of the North Shore and Cape Ann.

Salem Schools Looking For a Home—and Accessibility

As reported by the Salem News, the new charter school, Salem Community Charter School is looking for space.  Museum Place is one possibility they’re looking at;  the former Saint Joseph’s Rectory is another.

As well, the Saltonstall School is being renovated and Salem is scrambling to find space for their students, and for a special-needs program at the Collins.

The rectory will need a year’s worth of work before it is useable as a school.  The Boston diocese did not offer their other properties such as St. John’s School and one official has speculated it is due to ADA issues.

A regular member of the commentariat at the Salem News weighed in on both stories with a refrain I am too familiar with as a member of the disability community in Salem.  To paraphrase:  “Why do we have to serve a small minority of students.  Forget that touchy-feely stuff of [disabled kids].  It’s an emergency—use the parochial schools!”

(It’s an emergency;  does that mean emergency no-bid contracting?  The member of the commentariat is a Tea Partier and I presume for less government and taxation and against the charming “emergency” measures that have often concealed thefts of the public purse.  I’m getting off the point here.)

Here’s a scenario the hardest-bitten conservative can relate to:

John Jones is a decorated veteran.  A wounded veteran who came home from Afghanistan or perhaps Iraq.  There’s no way he’s gonna get up and down stairs unless he rolls.  Downhill, possibly not under his own control.

He has kids.  He has a daughter, a true daddy’s girl that goes to the Saltonstall, or perhaps the new charter school or the Academy charter school.

His girl isn’t one of these special-needs snowflakes;  she’s a normal active girl.  Except that she’s an athlete and a ball player and there was that unseen posthole in the outfield one day when she was running out a grounder.

She’ll be hopping around for some time.

Now, Dad is deciding on schools, perhaps his family’s moved to Salem or his girl is making a change.  Remember choice?  That’s what the charter schools were supposed to be about.  Choice, choice, choice!

You will tell Dad the vet, wounded for our sins (“freedom isn’t free”, mind?), that he and his daughter cannot participate as parent and child in their own school system?

Good luck with that.

While many people use patriotism to worship respect our soldiers, few of them realize something I’ve thought of.

If you count all the veterans still living from all wars, and those that are wounded and disabled, I suspect they don’t make up a large number.

In Salem, I have heard estimates that 20% of Salemmites have a disability.  Not all of them are of school age, of course.

I am certain that the 20% is not all made up of veterans.

Yet if I suggested that  veterans should not get help because their numbers are so few, I’m certain I would be assaulted in an alleyway.  (Freedom isn’t free…)

I have no animosity towards veterans—I’m too young to have ever spat upon a Vietnam veteran, and have never said a word of disrespect to them (perhaps, I have done this to the politicians who task them, but…)   Salem’s veteran groups are natural allies of the Commission on Disabilities and always will be.

I have to wonder why the diocese of Boston is not aggressive with its surplus properties.  Despite what Rand Paul would have you believe, in Massachusetts, any given building does not have to be made ADA accessible to current codes merely as if the authorities waved a pixie wand and made it so.

The requirement to make a building ADA compliant per current code very much depends on the use of the building, the age of the building and the intended use of the building.  There were several revisions to Massachusetts building codes for handicapped access and by the current law, a building constructed say, in 1978, only has to meet accessibility requirements for 1978.  I have several large (and large-print) binders with all the laws to date.

If a building is used for general business purposes, it may or may not need to be brought up to ADA access.  Often in Salem, buildings have been repurposed and have never been made accessible because there were very few if any renovations performed.

A benchmark the Commission often discusses is the “one-third rule” or “30% rule” or “hitting 30%”.  That refers  to the current value of the building.  If any proposed renovations exceed 30% of this value, the building must be brought fully up to ADA and Massachusetts code.

Even then, developers and architects have considerable wiggle room.  The law does not say absolute accommodations, merely reasonable accommodations.  The Mass. Architectural Access Board (MAAB) will grant variances if the regulations are burdensome or do not benefit.

A few years ago, the state renovated a home in North Salem to use as a group home.  By the letter of the law it would have needed an expensive elevator.  The developer convinced the MAAB that the only space that the public would access was the ground floor.  The ground floor of the building was brought up to code with HP parking and no steps, but there didn’t need to be an elevator.  

I’ve been in St. John’s School before, and is not so much a charming old fashioned parochial school as it is a dump, no disrespect to Catholics meant.  There are stairs everywhere.  It could be impossible to get variances for this or any of the other school buildings involved.

Don’t forget, too, that the staff and teachers have to use the space as well.  People get old and infirm, or have a negative encounter with an icy front step.  If you think there’s controversy over accommodating students, just wait until it’s a teacher with a grievance!

I have to wonder if the diocese fears that the values of their properties have fallen so much that any renovations at all to them would require them to be fully up to code.  After all, it isn’t only handicapped access at stake but also electrical, plumbing, fire safety and communications cabling that need to be upgraded as well.

Whatever the case, this is something you can’t blame on the special-needs snowflakes, “those people” or the ADA activists.  Salem schools are indeed in a pickle.  But they would be anyway even if you deported all the disabled to Lynn.

Four Years Blogging

As is my tradition, I pay tribute to my late Mom and mark the anniversary of my blog.  As is also my tradition, I am tardy with it.  By at least two weeks!

Before I explain the picture, I want to give my belated welcome to Keep It Klassy, Salem, a relatively new blog that has been around for several years.  I don’t agree with the blogger on many things but I am delighted that someone is following Salem politics after the demise of the old Salem Politics blog.  His blog is in my blogroll now, as is the new Salem Patch, which has flashes of excellence and could be the future of news media on the North Shore, at least if AOL lets it.

Now, the picture.  As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I came from a foster home, and Jeannette Moisan was my foster mom and for all purposes my defacto Mom.  On the left is Pauline, Jeannette’s biological daughter.  If we were related by blood we would be brother and sister.  But she wasn’t my foster sister;  we had many girl foster children but none of them was ever, or ever could be, a “sister”.  So Pauline was also my defacto sister.

The cute little toddler with her is Monique.  Mom looked after many kids like her, but she was one of the sweetest.  She would turn on the charm and be manipulative as only a toddler could.  We had a dozen Monique stories, such as when she learned to say my sister’s name—and then kept her up all night saying “PAU-LYLINE!”  Or the time Pauline was in a fruit stand in Peabody and Monique yelled “DA-DA” (her name for me.)  Pauline tells her, “Da-da’s not here!”  Unknown to her I had, for whatever reason, walked down from Varney St. to find Pauline and walk into that same fruit stand…

What a sweet kid she was.  It was hard to see her go back to her Mom.  I hope she’s doing well today.

One last picture with Jeannette:

Back after an absence

Essex Street Mall 2011-05-26 007, originally uploaded by dmoisan.

Via Flickr:
Nature finally turned a switch to "Summer" today, as these folks are realizing.

And I've turned a switch, too.

I haven’t posted in almost six months.  I’m dispirited.

Last winter, my building had the bedbug hysteria that has affected many households in recent years.  Dealing with bedbugs has combined the worst aspects of moving and losing your house to fire or flood.  The Salem News covered the story in my building and it brought out the worst aspect of pest infestations—the moral opprobrium that comes when your betters can look down on you for being “dirty” and “unclean”, even though bedbugs, roaches and mice are blissfully unaware of class distinctions.  

In a building with a shared laundry space, like I have, I’ll never know how I got bedbugs and I just don’t care who or what “gave” them to me.  I just know that pest infestations don’t make me or my neighbors “immoral” or “unclean” or “lazy”, but that was on the minds of many of the Salem News commentariat.

There’s more, too.  Last spring I had quite a screaming match with my ward councilor Mike Sosnowski over a parking proposal at the Jail.

What I learned from that affair is that it doesn’t matter what neighborhood I live in, or what stake I have in anything, if someone more important than me thinks different.  At that meeting, a person from the Northfields neighborhood association asserted that me and my neighbors did not want commercial use at the Jail no matter what.

It doesn’t matter that that Northfields guy probably doesn’t even have a view of the Jail from his house.  And he never cared before about the apartment complex I live in.

As far as I can see, Mike Sosnowski has more or less aided and abetted groups like Northfields.  If you live in cheap rental housing, you will not get representation in Salem.

You will not get it.

Better that you show Mike your mortgage statement—or proof of McIntyre architecture—before coming to him with a problem.

I was at a meeting this past Saturday of the Alliance of Salem Neighborhood Associations.  It was held at the function room of Beverly Cooperative Bank, which is where the Downtown group meets.

I had my own problems with that group, and didn’t want to attend this meeting, except that I made a verbal commitment on recorded video and had to go. 

(I know the camera is on during our Commission meetings.  If I make a gaffe or a curse, then I do.  I don’t try to walk back what I said.  I said it and it’s on tape and that is that.)

Several people in the Alliance complained about being “outsiders”.  I wanted to say to them:  “Where’s Lucy [Corchado, head of  the Point association]?  Where are they?  The Point is a neighborhood, isn’t it?”

Those people have their own advisory board at the highest level of city government.  They have Jason Silva’s [Mayor Driscoll’s chief-of-staff] private number on speed-dial.  I have no doubt that someone like Michael Coleman can have Mike Sosnowski swing into action at 3 AM on a Sunday if he so commands it.  If Teasie Goggin wanted to repeat Mike Bencal’s Al Haig moment (“I’m in control here”, after the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981) when he tried to take charge of City Hall when the mayor was away a few years ago, she has more than enough social capital to do so!

They have that advisory commission in addition to the Alliance!  Tell me they are outsiders again?

As it happened, the meeting was a waste of time for me and and my colleagues on the Commission on Disabilities, since it was supposed to pertain to the MBTA parking garage, but was instead an unfocused rambling about pedestrian access and getting traffic usage stats, only to find out the state had already done that but nobody from the Alliance even read the report.  The Commission probably could have used that, but the person presenting that report didn’t bother to tell us where we could find the data from the state website.

(I’d filmed video of the meeting.  It would have been nice of them to tell us when the MBTA part of the meeting would get under way so I wouldn’t have to guess how long the batteries in my camera would last.  Not long enough as it turned out.)

If I can’t be involved in the workings of my own city, the one that I have spent 47 years in, I think, why am I bothering to blog?

I’ve asked myself that question over and over during the past six months.

The only thing keeping me going is the Commission—whose purpose I believe in with all my heart and soul—and Salem Access Television, where I have been applying my IT talents for 11 years.

I’m very proud, in fact, that SATV now has much of its local programming available over the Net.  Public meetings—including the Commission’s—are now available through our Government page.

I worked very hard with Sal Russo and the staff over the past year to make this possible and I am inordinately prideful.  I’ve been delighted to flip the figurative “bird” to a few former board members who thought this was a “fad” or “something for Dave and Sal to spend money on”.  (In fact, video-on-demand has been a roaring success at SATV.)

There are many other thoughts, ideas and initiatives at SATV and the Commission to make fodder for many more years of blog posts, which is why I’m continuing to blog.

But I will never, ever, let myself believe that I have a stake and a say with what happens in Salem.

I don’t.  And I won’t.

Political Violence Should Be Scary

[Creative Commons photo by cjbrenchly]

Nelson Benton, editor of the Salem News, is scared of the Second Amendment advocates of violence:

One of the more disturbing aspects of all the back-and-forth about the tragedy in Tucson is that there exists an element | and it may be growing | that views the right to bear arms as an essential adjunct to their right to overthrow the government by violent means.

Nelson, you’re right to be scared.  The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords of Arizona, and the deaths of a federal judge, and a nine-year old girl, is intended to scare us all.  It was an act of terrorism no less in its emotional impact than Oklahoma City or 9/11.

You’d be wrong to assume that this has happened out of nowhere.  And you’d be wrong to assume your own paper didn’t have at least a small role in the violent rhetoric.

This goes back at least 30 years. 

When I was in college in the early 1980’s, Massachusetts government was in bad shape.  We had, and still have, a legacy of corruption, patronage and just plain incompetence.  Our state buildings were constructed, and fell down, on the take, while numerous connected contractors had their hands out.

It was, and is, shameful.  The anti-tax activist Barbara Anderson made her bones during that era. 

So too did talk radio.  I, and numerous other Salemmites and Bostonians, listened to the triumvirate:  Jerry Williams, Gene Burns and David Brudnoy.  They were all libertarians.

And they all preached that government was bad, private sector was good and the best government was the least government.  That philosophy influenced me almost to this day.

We’ve heard the narrative against public employees, politicians and government for so long we take it for granted, and take it as truth.  We’ve taken these beliefs as faith for 30 years.

Second Amendment advocates have been promoting the right to bear arms for just as long;  indeed, libertarians have often been natural allies in their fight.

Now, Nelson, you’re surprised and alarmed by the violence? 

In recent years, your newspaper has been an unpleasant one to read.  Barbara Anderson has written op-eds for the News for years, and they are not of the mild-mannered housewife I often heard with Jerry Williams, but of a harder, almost insane tenor.  She started going off the rails with her 9/11 column, but her most recent column on the Tucson shooting is just nuts.

Another of your op-ed writers, Taylor Armerding, was once a fiscal conservative, though a hard one.  Nowadays I’m afraid that he has a carry permit and will make headlines like Jared Loughner did.

And that says nothing of the cesspool that is the comments section of the Salem News web site. 

I fear, Nelson, that your paper has done its part to further today’s political violence and that your paper’s owners are OK with this just as Roger Ailes and Fox News are fine with Glenn Beck.

Nelson, don’t look to Tucson for the Second Amendment Brigade.  Look to Arlington, and perhaps, even Salem.

Merry Christmas!

bewitchedtree, originally uploaded by dmoisan.

Salem City Hall Elevator Dedication

Salem City Hall finally has an elevator!  We saw the elevator under construction when the Commission attended Mayor Driscoll’s proclamation of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act this past summer.

Here is the ceremony:

And here is a walkthrough of the new elevator. Notice that there are two elevator doors, as you sometimes see in hospitals; one door covers the ground floor from the sidewalk while the other is at the level of the existing ground floor at City Hall.

This is "The Whirlybird", the old chairlift on the front staircase into the Council Chambers:

Beth Rennard, our city solicitor, used this lift every day.

She won’t miss it.

Haunted Happenings Grand Parade Tonight!

It’s our yearly ritual, and mine, the 2010 Haunted Happenings Parade.  Once again, I will be working at SATV to broadcast and webcast the parade.  I will be posting pictures as we set up for the day.

Charlie Baker, Moral Auditor

A few months ago, Charlie Baker, the Republican candidate for Governor, proposed his “Baker’s Dozen” for cutting costs.  I’d read about it in Blue Mass Group when he first proposed these measures but initially I didn’t take them seriously;  candidates say things or are reported to say things all the time that turn out to have too little context to reasonably comment on.  Besides, most day to day political coverage is noise.

I reread the post on BMG that first caught my attention, Charlie Baker proposes new government bureaucracy to approve lifestyles. 

Charlie Baker’s Dozen ideas to eliminate government waste is still on his campaign’s website so I’m going to assume it is on his ongoing platform.

Point 8:

8. Conduct forensic financial analysis for benefits eligibility – Between $10M to $20M in savings
State agencies need to consider more than just tax returns when determining individuals’ eligibility for public benefits and services. A lifestyle analysis quantifies the living expenses of individuals - such as credit card bills, recreation activities, auto loans, grocery bills - and compares the expenses to known sources of income. If the money spent during the period analyzed exceeds the known funding sources, it is quite possible that there is another source of income. The state should conduct this analysis on a pilot basis for a few services – such as public defendants and public housing - before individuals are deemed eligible for the benefits.

Baker’s idea came from, amongst others, Dan Winslow, former legal counsel to former governor Mitt Romney in an article for Commonwealth Magazine.  Beyond Red and Blue wrote about this in 2008:

For state entitlement eligibility, a simple LAF checklist can consider discretionary spending such as whether persons or households seeking free or discounted state services own property, have credit cards, hold bank accounts, or own a new car, multiple cars or a boat. The checklist could also consider whether an individual purchases cable television, Internet service, or premium cell phone service and whether they buy airline tickets, possess illegal drugs, or smoke a pack of cigarettes daily.

On the face of it, Baker’s proposal seems to be just a financial audit, like the ones Social Security does on SSI recipients.  But Winslow’s association with the Romney administration makes me recall Eric Kriss’ infamous “Givers and Takers” speech of a few years back.

With that history I don’t think this provision is a financial audit.

It is a moral audit, and Baker wants to be our moral auditor.

Many, many people in the disability community, and outside it, get public housing, health insurance and food benefits.  There are people who may get any of the three without ever having set foot in a welfare or Social Security office.

There are working people who live in Pioneer Terrace, a much-maligned housing project near Salem State.

Many will be affected.  Charlie Baker, in his ads, brags about firing 5,000 state employees if he’s elected.  How many people would we need to staff his new moral auditing division?  How many of the 5,000 would need to seek public assistance?

David, of BMG, makes the point that “lifestyle analysis” requires expertise and not cheap at that, based on how the IRS goes after people with yachts.  I think he’s wrong on this point, though. 

The Baker administration, if elected, wouldn’t go to that length;  It would outsource the new agency to one of the Indian or Chinese shops to which most of our customer support calls end up.  The outsourcers would get a directive to flag as many people as possible for fraud for the cheapest possible price, working through their backlog as fast as they can, however they can.

Someone in public housing would get a thick envelope and a threatening letter, and a request to account for all the spending they made over the past five years, say, all in longhand with a 10 day filing deadline.  A representative would follow up with questions, all along the lines of:  “Why did you get that?”,  “Why do you need a computer—can’t you go to the library?”, “Why did your son pay for dinner out?”, “Why aren’t you getting a better job?”, “Why are you still in public housing?”

And then the eviction notice would come.  Maybe there’ll be an appeal process.  If it’s funded.

I think Winslow’s, and Baker’s mindsets are such that they would not stop at a merely fiscal audit, even if they might not say it out loud.  Certainly, Romney only disavowed Kriss because he made his own reputation look bad;  Romney hired him, as he did Baker and Winslow, and he damned well knew what they were all about.

It’s a “small government” nanny state and it will demean many people in the disability community.  Many of them already fear they are somewhat “less worthy” than an able-bodied person.

If we vote for Baker, we may be telling them, as well, that because they are often on the wrong end of the economic scale, they should not be allowed to manage their own lives either.

There will be the stories that come out with this, like the little old lady who gets audited (“But I voted Republican!”  “Oops, our bad!”)  or the disabled war veteran (“Say, son, you sound like you’re old enough to enlist.  Don’t you love your country?  Why aren’t you in the service?”  “Um, ah, err…”  I’d love to hear that one.)

But first, the dignity of the state’s disabled community will be degraded.  And a lot of money will be spent.  Baker won’t care, as long as he’s spending it.

Restaurant at Jail to open next week

Reported at Salem Patch, the restaurant at the Jail, The Great Escape, will open Monday.

When I saw this in the open house, I had wondered if this would be the restaurant.  I seem to have guessed right.

Despite the guy from Northfields and the associated controversy over the green space, a restaurant operator came through after all. 

I’m not sure how they’ll do long-term, and I don’t know if I’ll afford to eat there myself, but I wish them luck.  Hats off to New Boston for their tenacity in seeing this through.

Not Remembering 9/11

As we mark the ninth anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on September 11th, I’m proud of this artwork.  I produced it for my friend Leo Jodoin and his TV show, Salem Now, which I have been a crewmember for the 13 years it’s been produced.  It features the improvised, informal, but now established, 9/11 memorial at Market Basket.

I’m proud of my art.

But I’m not proud of what has become the fetish of worship and hysteria that now defines September 11th.

Over a very long summer, we have been hearing about the imam who plans to build a Muslim cultural center a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center.  His plans have gone through and before a large number of boards and commissions in Manhattan, as any other project would.

In Salem, I know this process well, and the Commission on Disabilities is one of the participants in the rituals that developers go through to get things built.

The imam’s project has gone through all the hoops and hurdles in Manhattan.  But a lawsuit from one of the relatives of a 9/11 victim is reportedly pending.

To say what I think of this, I need to go back to last spring, when the developers of the Salem Jail wanted to turn the greenspace fronting Bridge St. into a parking lot as a condition for a restaurant on the premises.  There was a heavily attended meeting about this that saw nearly all of the neighborhood groups come to testify.

I wrote about what happened in that meeting but I’ll repeat it:  A guy from Northfields spoke out against the proposed lot.  But more than that, he went into a long speech about what kinds of development would be suitable in the neighborhood.

My neighborhood.

And he told us that the elderly complex—my building—would not be in favor of commercial development.

I was livid.   Beyond mad.  Angry.   Pissed.

The Northfields guy was telling me and my neighbors what was right for us.  I can’t even speak for my neighbors!   We have, in fact, been living next to a commercial office building for many years.

Now, how am I going to tell that imam that he cannot build his center because I believe Muslims brought me pain on 9/11?   I don’t consider myself to have any standing;  as of now, it’s not even clear if the courts will give standing to any relative of a 9/11 victim to bring suit against the organization that plans to build there (a former clothing store that is not even within sight of the WTC block.)

I didn’t like that guy from Northfields presuming to speak for me or my neighbors, so why should I have a position on that cultural center?

There is no rule of law that could enable me to go to Manhattan and stop this.  It’s gone through all the permitting down there and that should be that.  The First Amendment has no asterisks saying “except some religions we don’t approve of”.  (Catholics who oppose the cultural center might want to look at their own history in America first.)

In the next town over, there is a political activist, famous for her anti-tax, limited-government advocacy.  She writes for the local daily, whose editorial board shares her opinions.  She has spoken out against the cultural center (it is not a mosque.)

Does she really think that is in her limited-government bailiwick, to just reach out and tell a municipality in another state even that they must deny a project just because she doesn’t like it?  That is by no means small, limited government!

If she were consistent with her desire for small government and private-sector development (and the imam runs a private organization), she’d advocate for someone like the Koch brothers to buy the Ground Zero site, an enormous parcel of land that much of Salem would fit into, and turn it into a martyr’s center to the sacred 9/11.  (Newt Gingrich also wants to “federalize” the site to create such a memorial.)

There is already a 9/11 church at the site, and their pastor has the hate for Muslims. 

And that is the other reason I feel shamed this day.

For some years now, the Republican party has become more radical and more religious, throwing many moderate conservatives, particularly those in the Northeast, out the door.

They have all but encouraged Christian fundamentalism.   This atheist does not see a lot of distinctions between Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic Islamism, and what Christianism is said to be by many fundamentalist pastors.

Pat Robertson said that “9/11 happened because America looked away from God”.  Was God rooting for Islam that day?

A few years ago when Janet Jackson “performed” at the Superbowl, one columnist from a Seattle paper said that “Al Qaeda had a point!”  We fear jihad, but we now have our own “prayer warriors” in Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, Fist of the North Star.

We all were happy to see the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their theocratic government, brought down.  But I’ve come to think that, to prominent Republicans and Christians, amplified by Fox News, the only sin that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have committed is, is doing terrorism in Allah’s name rather than in Jesus’.

I have recalled General Boykin’s words:

.' Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

And that man was a high-ranking officer in our Army.

We even have our own apocalyptic movement in America.  Osama Bin Laden had to inherit his wealth, but Tim and Beverly LaHaye, authors of the “Left Behind” series, have made their millions convincing people that God will take his own people and leave the world to rot for Satan—and that a good Christian should wish for it!

Afraid of violent Islamism?  From what rhetoric I’ve seen over the past few years, we have more to worry about from our own people.  The Tea Party, whose copies of the Constitution only seem to have the Second Amendment in them, loves its armaments.  Prayer warriors, backed up by Browning, Smith and Wesson.  Someone flew a plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas.

If Tim McVeigh bombed the Murrah Building in OKC today, rather than in 1995, I am certain people would be excusing what he did.  “It’s too bad about that dead baby but her mommy shouldn’t have worked for the government!”  McVeigh himself would be a prisoner of conscience.  Not only would the Tea Partiers call for his freedom but also not a few editorial boards, perhaps even our activist next door.

All because Bin Laden happens to be a Muslim instead of a Christian.  I wonder if he’s for limited government in that world caliphate he wants to build?  If anyone is concerned about the moral state of the world, he certainly is!  He could convert to Christianity tomorrow—as extremely unlikely it may be—and he’d fit right in with some!

That’s why I don’t want to “commemorate” or “remember” or “memorialize” this day.  We put Japanese-Americans in camps in the name of December 7th, Pearl Harbor and we were wrong—and we knew it.  I don’t want to see what we’ll do against Allah—or for Jesus—in the name of 9/11.

UPDATE:  I haven’t read Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, or heard of it before this week, but Andrew Sullivan reviewed it for Powells a few years back.  I’d still like to find it at the library and read it, but from what I read from this review, and other blogs I’ve seen online about D’Souza on his most recent book, he’s virtually shaken hands with Bin Laden, and he recommends his ideological peers in the Republican party do the same.  That has only reinforced my commentary.

Salem State University

I got this postcard in the mail over the weekend.  Governor Patrick signed the legislation Wednesday that made Salem State a university.  The bill had passed a week before the signing so there was enough time to get the cards out.

Changes at the Commission

Mayor Driscoll with the Commission on Disabilities, with our former chairpersons, Jack Harris,  and Andy LaPointe, and new chairperson David Tracht (back turned to camera), in front of the new elevator at City Hall.  Also here were David Martel (behind Mayor Driscoll), Jean Harrison and Charlie Reardon (in red.)

The Commission on Disabilities is going through our summer break, and meeting again in September with a different organization.

Jack Harris, after being on the Commission for over 20 years, is hanging it up at the end of the year when his term expires.  He announced his decision in June and called for an election of two co-chairs at our July meeting.

Here are his comments, from the meeting video:

I've known Jack for a very long time.  His two little girls have virtually adopted me!  Like many people who have served long terms in a job, it is inconceivable to think of his leaving.

But 20 years is a long time and I don't begrudge him.

Jack represents 20 years of very hard work to make the Commission as successful as it has been.   This is a position more for duty and love, than it is for prestige.

I've often wondered how I would fare as chair.  It's something I have to think about as I start my second term on the board.

I didn't nominate myself in the vote as I didn't feel I had enough seniority or experience, but as time  goes on, if I continue in the job, I have to prepare for that possibility, and prepare to step up in his position someday.

This is what I said to Jack when he announced his decision:

Our new co-chairs are David Tracht and Debra Lobsitz.  I and my colleagues will do our best to support them both.

Mayor's Proclamation of ADA Day

 

PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS:  July 26th, 2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); and

WHEREAS: The ADA set regulations that have made it easier for people with disabilities to work, shop, go to school and enjoy recreational activities with their neighbors; and

WHEREAS:  Community leaders, businesses and government officials should celebrate the contributions that people with disabilities have made and continue to make to our community; and

WHEREAS:  We should acknowledge the rights of all persons with disabilities under the ADA and their daily activities, struggles and triumphs; and

WHEREAS:  The City of Salem is commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

NOW, THEREFORE, pursuant to the authority vested in me as Mayor of Salem, I, Kimberly Driscoll, do hereby proclaim Monday, July 26th, 2010 to be:

SPIRIT OF THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT (ADA) DAY

In the City of Salem, and urge all of the citizens of Salem to commemorate this anniversary by renewing our commitment to uphold the nondiscrimination principles of the ADA and to support them in their efforts to become as independent as possible.

Signed,

Mayor Kimberly Driscoll

July 26th, 2010