Jessica Garcia: Insurance ‘bluelining’ for the vulnerable as they face disasters spawned by global warming

Flooding in Montpelier, Vt. on July11, 2023.

Via OtherWords.org

In an era of climate disasters, Americans in vulnerable regions will need to rely more than ever on their home insurance. But as floods, wildfires and severe storms become more common, a troubling practice known as “bluelining” threatens to leave many communities unable to afford insurance — or obtain it at any price.

Bluelining is an insidious practice with similarities to redlining — the notorious past government-sanctioned practice of financial institutions denying mortgages and credit to Black and brown communities, which were often marked by red lines on map.

These days, financial institutions are now drawing “blue lines” around many of these same communities, restricting such services as insurance based on environmental risks. Even worse, many of those same institutions are bankrolling those risks by funding and insuring the fossil fuel industry.

Originally, bluelining referred to blue-water flood risks, but it now includes such other climate-related disasters as wildfires, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms, all of which are driving private-sector decisions. (Severe thunderstorms, in fact, were responsible for about 61 percent of insured natural catastrophe losses in 2023.)

In the case of property insurance, we’re already seeing insurers pull out of entire states, such as California and Florida. The financial impacts of these decisions are considerable for everyone they affect — and often fall hardest on those in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities.

A Redfin study from 2021 illustrated that areas previously affected by redlining are now also those prone to flooding and higher temperatures, a problem compounded by poor infrastructure that fails to mitigate these risks. This overlap is not a coincidence but a further consequence of systemic discrimination and disinvestment.

This financial problem exists no matter where you live. In 2024, the national average home-insurance cost has risen about 23 percent above the cost of similar coverage last year. Homeowners across more and more states are left grappling with soaring premiums or no insurance options at all. And the lack of federal oversight means there is little uniformity or coordination in addressing these retreats.

This situation will demand a radical rethink of how we approach investing in our communities based on climate risks. For one thing, financial institutions must pivot from funding fossil fuel expansion to investing in renewable energy, natural climate solutions, and climate resilience, including infrastructure upgrades.

What about communities in especially vulnerable areas?

One strategy is community-driven relocation and managed retreat. By relocating communities to low-risk areas, we not only safeguard them against immediate physical dangers but also against ensuing financial hardships. Additionally, preventing development in known high-risk areas can significantly decrease financial instability and economic losses from future disasters.

As part of this strategic shift, financial policies must be realigned. We need regulations that compel financial institutions to manage and mitigate financial risk to the system and to consumers. We also need them to invest in affordable housing development that is energy-efficient, climate-resilient, and located in areas less susceptible to climate change in the mid- to long-term.

Meanwhile, green infrastructure and stricter energy efficiency and other resilience-related building codes can serve as bulwarks against extreme temperatures and weather events.

The challenge of bluelining offers us an opportunity to forge a path towards a more resilient and equitable society. We owe it to the future generations to do more than just adapt to climate change. We also need to confront and overhaul the systems that harm our climate. The communities most exposed to climate change deserve no less.

Jessica Garcia is a senior policy analyst for climate finance at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund.

Island skeletons

‘‘Tumblehome,’’ by Peter Ralston, a Rockport, Maine-based photographer and gallery owner.

“It was the first time I had walked that end of the island {Matinicus} and I was deeply moved by the old fishing camps up there. No cellar holes, just decaying remnants of what was once a thriving little seasonal community. 

“The place reeked of the past and I wandered in a reverie, surrounded by the evidence of so many lives lived and, now, gone.

“I beheld this particular juxtaposition of buildings and that was that.’’

Matinicus Isle Harbor in about 1908. The island is about 20 miles off the mainland. With an official population of 53, it’s the farthest out inhabited land off the U.S. East Coast, and is both a year-round community and a summer colony.

Trying to identify New England’s oldest golf clubs

The imposing clubhouse of the Newport Country Club

Excerpted text from aNew England Historical Society article.

“In 1728, Royal Governor William Dummer arrived in Massachusetts with nine ‘goffe clubs,’ but it would be another 150 years before golf clubs formed in New England.

“But to name the oldest golf clubs in New England is to invite controversy. Can a golf club claim to be the oldest if it started out as a boat or a tennis club and later added a golf course?

“We relied on the U.S. Golf Association’s list of the oldest golf clubs in America. However, we chose the oldest golf clubs in each state according to the year the golf course was built.’’

Here’s the whole article.

Turbulent world

“Cyano-Collage 191,’’ (collaged cyanotypes and Xuan paper with acrylic gel and acrylic, mounted on aluminum board), by Wu Chi-Tsung, at the Worcester Art Museum

Bancroft Tower Castle, in Worcester

— Photo by Anatoli Lvov

Chris Powell: Hartford’s new archbishop eyes the poverty factory

Archbishop Christopher J. Coyne

Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Hartford
— Photo by Sage Ross

MANCHESTER, Conn.

When he was installed two weeks ago, Hartford’s new Catholic archbishop, Christopher J. Coyne, said he has several big objectives, though he conceded that with two of them he may be dreaming.

Coyne’s most practical objective is simply restoring the local church and regaining parishioners. "In recent years," Coyne said, "we have given folks no shortage of causes to walk away from the faith -- parish closings, the abuse scandal and associated betrayals by leaders who should have known and done better, and pastoral approaches that at times have done more to judge people than serve them."

The archbishop can’t undo those scandals but he can be candid about them and make sure that the wrath of God quickly falls -- publicly -- on any agents of the archdiocese who betray their trust. 

As for unhappy judgments on people, archbishops are stuck with church doctrines that many think contradict modernity, such as the refusal to ordain women or sanction same-sex relationships. Given the conservative bent of the places where the church is growing, those doctrines are unlikely to be changed soon.

Not that modernity is always right. Indeed, the basic Catholic morality of old is less primitive than today’s morality of anything goes. It wasn’t entirely because of religious doctrine, but Connecticut was better before state government started pushing gambling and marijuana on the public and pretending that men can be women and vice-versa.

Sad as Catholic parish closings are, ripping roots out of the community and leaving empty buildings as stark monuments to a vanished era, the decline in church membership requires closings and it has not been caused primarily by the scandals. While spirituality is not dead in the developed world, religious dogma is losing adherents fast. Perceptions of the divine today are much broader. 

Fortunately the church has much to offer beyond dogma, starting with the Sermon on the Mount, and evangelical and non-denominational churches are growing. Catholic leaders might study their appeal.

In his inaugural remarks, the new archbishop noted that parish and school closings have left the church with many buildings that might be converted to inexpensive housing, of which Connecticut is desperately short. Of course this is easier said than done. While nearly everyone purports to want the state to have more housing, nearly everyone wants it built somewhere else. The fear of the underclass is real and often justified, as indicated by violent crime and terrible school performance in the cities.

The new archbishop has an idea about his new city, Hartford, a poverty factory where two high school students were shot to death the other day. His dreamiest objective is to restore Catholic schools in the city -- there are none left -- and make them tuition-free. 

The excellence of Catholic schools is generally acknowledged. The schools have behavioral discipline and academic standards, which now are virtually prohibited in public schools. Unlike public schools, church schools can choose their students, but they use this freedom not to exclude but to pursue the most motivated students and parents. 

Thus church schools can offer students an escape from the demoralization of city life, and with their better environment they can retain good staff while paying less than public schools. 

Regional public "magnet" schools offer some escape as well but are still somewhat impaired in discipline and academic standards. They also impose more transportation burdens on students and parents than neighborhood schools.

In any case, as indicated by the litigation of the past quarter century over school segregation in Hartford, the city and other cities in Connecticut can use much more school choice. The return of Catholic schools could help provide it, but avoiding tuition would require money from somewhere. 

A scholarship program from state government might provide it and educate students better and less expensively than government’s own system, but the teacher unions would never consent, and they run government in Connecticut. They have no interest in improving student performance, reducing poverty, and saving money. Only dreamers care about such stuff. Good for the new archbishop for being one.]

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net). 

Elemental mountains

“Bond Cliff’ (color woodblock print), on Mt.. Bond in the White Mountains, by Fremont, N.H.-based artist Rick Garber, at New Leaf Gallery, Lyme, N.H.

Above the timber line on Mt. Bond.

Main Street in Fremont, N.H., in 1909.

Cheryl Platzman Weinstock: New federal approach being developed to address sometimes lethal maternal depression

From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (KFF Health News)

BRIDGEPORT, Conn.

Milagros Aquino was trying to find a new place to live and had been struggling to get used to new foods after she moved to Bridgeport from Peru with her husband and young son in 2023.

When Aquino, now 31, got pregnant in May 2023, “instantly everything got so much worse than before,” she said. “I was so sad and lying in bed all day. I was really lost and just surviving.”

Aquino has lots of company.

Perinatal depression affects as many as 20% of women in the United States during pregnancy, the postpartum period, or both, according to studies. In some states, anxiety or depression afflicts nearly a quarter of new mothers or pregnant women.

Many women in the U.S. go untreated because there is no widely deployed system to screen for mental illness in mothers, despite widespread recommendations to do so. Experts say the lack of screening has driven higher rates of mental illness, suicide, and drug overdoses that are now the leading causes of death in the first year after a woman gives birth.

“This is a systemic issue, a medical issue, and a human rights issue,” said Lindsay R. Standeven, a perinatal psychiatrist and the clinical and education director of the Johns Hopkins Reproductive Mental Health Center.

Standeven said the root causes of the problem include racial and socioeconomic disparities in maternal care and a lack of support systems for new mothers. She also pointed a finger at a shortage of mental-health professionals, insufficient maternal mental-health training for providers, and insufficient reimbursement for mental health services. Finally, Standeven said, the problem is exacerbated by the absence of national maternity leave policies, and the access to weapons.

Those factors helped drive a 105% increase in postpartum depression from 2010 to 2021, according to the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

For Aquino, it wasn’t until the last weeks of her pregnancy, when she signed up for acupuncture to relieve her stress, that a social worker helped her get care through the Emme Coalition, which connects girls and women with financial help, mental health counseling services, and other resources.

Mothers diagnosed with perinatal depression or anxiety during or after pregnancy are at about three times the risk of suicidal behavior and six times the risk of suicide compared with mothers without a mood disorder, according to recent U.S. and international studies in JAMA Network Open and The BMJ.

The toll of the maternal mental-health crisis is particularly acute in rural communities that have become maternity care deserts, as small hospitals close their labor and delivery units because of plummeting birth rates, or because of financial or staffing issues.

The Maternal Mental Health Task Force — co-led by the Office on Women’s Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and formed in September to respond to the problem — recommended creating maternity care centers that could serve as hubs of integrated care and birthing facilities by building upon the services and personnel already in communities.

The task force will soon determine what portions of the plan will require congressional action and funding to implement and what will be “low-hanging fruit,” said Joy Burkhard, a member of the task force and the executive director of the nonprofit Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.

Burkhard said equitable access to care is essential. The task force recommended that federal officials identify areas where maternity centers should be placed based on data identifying the underserved. “Rural America,” she said, “is first and foremost.”

There are shortages of care in “unlikely areas,” including Los Angeles County, where some maternity wards have recently closed, said Burkhard. Urban areas that are underserved would also be eligible to get the new centers.

“All that mothers are asking for is maternity care that makes sense. Right now, none of that exists,” she said.

Several pilot programs are designed to help struggling mothers by training and equipping midwives and doulas, people who provide guidance and support to the mothers of newborns.

In Montana, rates of maternal depression before, during, and after pregnancy are higher than the national average. From 2017 to 2020, approximately 15% of mothers experienced postpartum depression and 27% experienced perinatal depression, according to the Montana Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. The state had the sixth-highest maternal mortality rate in the country in 2019, when it received a federal grant to begin training doulas.

To date, the program has trained 108 doulas, many of whom are Native American. Native Americans make up 6.6% of Montana’s population. Indigenous people, particularly those in rural areas, have twice the national rate of severe maternal morbidity and mortality compared with white women, according to a study in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Stephanie Fitch, grant manager at Montana Obstetrics & Maternal Support at Billings Clinic, said training doulas “has the potential to counter systemic barriers that disproportionately impact our tribal communities and improve overall community health.”

Twelve states and Washington, D.C., have Medicaid coverage for doula care, according to the National Health Law Program. They are California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Medicaid pays for about 41% of births in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jacqueline Carrizo, a doula assigned to Aquino through the Emme Coalition, played an important role in Aquino’s recovery. Aquino said she couldn’t have imagined going through such a “dark time alone.” With Carrizo’s support, “I could make it,” she said.

Genetic and environmental factors, or a past mental health disorder, can increase the risk of depression or anxiety during pregnancy. But mood disorders can happen to anyone.

Teresa Martinez, 30, of Price, Utah, had struggled with anxiety and infertility for years before she conceived her first child. The joy and relief of giving birth to her son in 2012 were short-lived.

Without warning, “a dark cloud came over me,” she said.

Martinez was afraid to tell her husband. “As a woman, you feel so much pressure and you don’t want that stigma of not being a good mom,” she said.

In recent years, programs around the country have started to help doctors recognize mothers’ mood disorders and learn how to help them before any harm is done.

One of the most successful is the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, which began a decade ago and has since spread to 29 states. The program, supported by federal and state funding, provides tools and training for physicians and other providers to screen and identify disorders, triage patients, and offer treatment options.

But the expansion of maternal mental health programs is taking place amid sparse resources in much of rural America. Many programs across the country have run out of money.

The federal task force proposed that Congress fund and create consultation programs similar to the one in Massachusetts, but not to replace the ones already in place, said Burkhard.

In April, Missouri became the latest state to adopt the Massachusetts model. Women on Medicaid in Missouri are 10 times as likely to die within one year of pregnancy as those with private insurance. From 2018 through 2020, an average of 70 Missouri women died each year while pregnant or within one year of giving birth, according to state government statistics.

Wendy Ell, executive director of the Maternal Health Access Project in Missouri, called her service a “lifesaving resource” that is free and easy to access for any health care provider in the state who sees patients in the perinatal period.

About 50 health care providers have signed up for Ell’s program since it began. Within 30 minutes of a request, the providers can consult over the phone with one of three perinatal psychiatrists. But while the doctors can get help from the psychiatrists, mental health resources for patients are not as readily available.

The task force called for federal funding to train more mental health providers and place them in high-need areas like Missouri. The task force also recommended training and certifying a more diverse workforce of community mental health workers, patient navigators, doulas, and peer support specialists in areas where they are most needed.

A new voluntary curriculum in reproductive psychiatry is designed to help psychiatry residents, fellows, and mental health practitioners who may have little or no training or education about the management of psychiatric illness in the perinatal period. A small study found that the curriculum significantly improved psychiatrists’ ability to treat perinatal women with mental illness, said Standeven, who contributed to the training program and is one of the study’s authors.

Nancy Byatt, a perinatal psychiatrist at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine who led the launch of the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms in 2014, said there is still a lot of work to do.

“I think that the most important thing is that we have made a lot of progress and, in that sense, I am kind of hopeful,” Byatt said.

Cheryl Platzman Weinstock reports for KFF Health News. Her work is supported by a grant from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation.

@CherylWeinstock

Llewellyn King: Three out-of-step environmental groups

Rachel Carson researching with Robert Hines on the New England coast in 1952. Her book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.

It has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.

At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts, and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.

Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, to disturb the permafrost and to drain the wetlands, but he has gotten it wrong.

Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.

Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws, but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.

This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, in 1962.

Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.

Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me that the important thing to know about the energy-versus-environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists; that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates. 

“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.

Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front-and-center.

This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal, or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.

The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that, they asserted, proved that coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy-versus-climate-and-environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.

Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often the very shape of the industries that Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified-natural-gas at terminals, making us a net exporter not importer. 

The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.

Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.

As the climate crisis has evolved so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.

Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king, and oil was emperor.

These groups are:

The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.

The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the environmental failures of the Biden administration — in particular, it feels that the administration has been soft on natural gas.

Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization. 

Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.

As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.

whchronicle.com

Looking for solace

“A Tear for October 7” (marble on burned wood), by Newton, Mass.-based sculptor Memy Ish-Shalom, in his show “Searching for Hope in Dark Times,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 6-30. He’s a native of Israel.

 He says:

“In the past two years, we have all experienced and lived through devastating historical events. Such events have a significant impact on me as a human being and as an artist. I found myself compelled to respond to these tragic events through my art. In this show, I reflect on the atrocities and the collective trauma my friends and family in Israel experienced on October 7.

“These are, indeed, dark times. On troubled, sleepless nights, I find myself looking up at the sky, gazing at the moon, the stars, and the clouds, or looking down at the stones and rocks on the ground, in search for some solace in their enduring beauty. On other occasions, I take a deep look at people. Whenever I encounter people with courageous and optimistic spirits, I feel inspired and more hopeful.”

Revolutionary coverings

“Lil Glory’’ (fabric, polyester fill, fringe), by Natalie Baxter, in the show “Stiching the Revolution: Quilts as Agents of Change,’’ at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Conn., opening May 19.

The show presents about 30 quilts from the museum’s collection, and loans from other New England institutions and contemporary artists. The exhibition pairs historic and modern quilts spanning over 200 years of production viewed as pivotal mediums that express potent beliefs and inspire important change.

Waterbury skyline from the west, with Union Station clock tower at left. The city was once known as the brass and clock / watch capital of America. New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, lived near Waterbury in 1962-66 and remembers the many factories still open, the toxic pollution of the Naugatuck River, which flowed through the city, and the necessity of walking up and down steep hills.

Daniel Case, Grossus

The multiplying uses of seaweed

In a kelp forest

Photo by FASTILY (TALK)

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

When I was a kid living along Massachusetts Bay, we often saw seaweed (various species of marine macroalgae – kelp, etc.) as somewhat irritating. It could get in the way of fishing lines, and it would pile up on beaches in rank rows.

But seaweed, which, blessedly, grows rapidly, is looking better and better. It absorbs carbon dioxide, absorption that directly fights global warming, and it offsets a bit of ocean acidification caused by carbon dioxide from our fossil-fuel burning; it slows coastal erosion by weakening the force of waves in storms that have worsened as sea levels rise, and provides shelter for innumerable marine creatures. It’s used to make food, fertilizer, medicines, bioplastics, biofuel and animal feed.

(I’m sure that many readers have tried the seaweed salad in ethnic Asian restaurants.)

And now researchers are investigating its use as a source of minerals, such as platinum and rhodium,  as well as “rare-earth” elements (which actually aren’t that rare), that are crucial in the renewable-energy sector and in other technological applications, too. Seaweed sucks up these minerals.

Much more research needs to be done to demonstrate all possible uses of seaweed, but the potential for seaweed aquaculture seems enormous. I can see many profitable new seaweed farms being developed off the southern New England coast. There’s already a large kelp-farming sector in the Gulf of Maine, benefiting from the size of available waters, and the industry is growing along the Rhode Island and Connecticut shoreline, too.

It’s heartening to see scientists working on all-natural ways to address global warming. Of course, in some places there will be fights over which sites to take over for seaweed farming; I hope that the broad public interest will usually win over, say, the demands of summer yachtsmen. Certainly, these farm sites should be chosen carefully, with guidance from the likes of the Marine Biological Laboratory, in the village of Woods Hole in Falmouth, Mass.

Hit these links and this one (video).

Llewellyn King: New graduates should learn how to manage rejection

Then-Vice President Biden giving commencement speech at Yale University in 2015.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

As so many commencement addresses aren’t being delivered this year, I thought I would share what I would have said to graduates if I had been invited by a college or university to be a speaker.

“The first thing to know is that you are graduating at a propitious time in human history — for example, think of how artificial intelligence is enabling medical breakthroughs.

“A vast world of possibilities awaits you because you are lucky enough to be living in a liberal democracy. It happens to be America, but the same could be true of any of the democratic countries.

“Look at the world, and you will see that the countries with democracy are also prosperous places where individuals can follow their passion. Doubly or triply so in America.

“Despite all the disputes, unfairness and politics, the United States is foremost among places to live and work — where the future is especially tempting. I say this having lived and worked on three continents and traveled to more than 180 countries. Just think of the tens of millions who would live here if they could.

“In a society that is politically and commercially free, as it is in the United States, the limits we encounter are the limits we place on ourselves.

“That is what I want to tell you: Don’t fence yourself in.

“But do work always to keep that freedom, your freedom, especially now.

“Seldom mentioned, but the greatest perverters of careers, stunters of ambition and all-around enfeeblers you will contend with aren’t the government, a foreign power, shortages or market conditions, but how you manage rejection.

“Fear of rejection is, I believe, the great inhibitor. It shapes lives, hinders careers and is ever-present, from young love to scientific creation.

“The creative is always vulnerable to the forces of no, to rejection.

“No matter what you do, at some point you will face rejection — in love, in business, in work or in your own family.

“But if you want to break out of the pack and leave a mark, you must face rejection over and over again.

“Those in the fine and performing arts and writers know rejection; it is an expected but nonetheless painful part of the tradition of their craft. If you plan to be an artist of some sort or a writer, prepare to face the dragon of rejection and fight it all the days of your career.

“All other creative people face rejection. Architects, engineers and scientists face it frequently. Many great entrepreneurial ideas have faced early rejection and near defeat.

“If you want to do something better, differently or disruptively, you will face rejection.

“To deal with this world where so many are ready to say no, you must know who you are. Remember that: Know who you are.

“But you can’t know who you are until you have found out who you are.

“Your view of yourself may change over time, but I adjure you always to judge yourself by your bests, your zeniths. That is who you are. Make past success your default setting in assessing your worth when you go forth to slay the dragons of rejection.

“There are two classes of people you will encounter again and again in your lives. The yes people and the no people.

“Seek out and cherish those who say yes. Anyone can say no. The people who have changed the world, who have made it a better place, are the people who have said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Let’s try.’

“Those are people you need in life, and that is what you should aim to be: a yes person. Think of it historically: Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Steve Jobs were all yes people, undaunted by frequent rejection.

“Try to be open to ideas, to different voices and to contrarian voices. That way, you will not only prosper in what you seek to do, but you will also become someone who, in turn, will help others succeed.

“You enter a world of great opportunities in the arts, sciences and technology but with attendant challenges. The obvious ones are climate, injustice, war and peace.

“Think of yourselves as engineers, working around those who reject you, building for others, and having a lot of fun doing it.

“Avoid being a no person. No is neither a building block for you nor for those who may look to you. Good luck!”

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island.
White House Chronicle

‘Too much my own’

A mayfly

.

“Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own.…’’

— From “Mayflies,’’ by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), mostly Massachusetts-based poet

Here’s the whole poem.

The beauty of work

“Rigger's Shop, Provincetown,’’ (oil on canvas), by Childe Hassam (1859-1902), in the show “Impressionist New England: Four Seasons of Color and Light,’’ through Oct. 20, at Heritage Museums and Gardens, Sandwich, Mass.

This is from the collection of New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Lawrence Pond

Dictator of the social climbers

Newport picnic supervised by Ward McAllister.

"Snobbish Society's Schoolmaster” —Caricature of Ward McAllister as an ass telling Uncle Sam he must imitate "an English snob of the 19th Century" or he "will nevah be a gentleman".

Text excerpted from a New England Historical Society article by Emily Parrow

“In Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island, an invitation to one of Ward McAllister’s summer picnics could make or break a hopeful social climber.

“One contemporary aptly described this era as ‘an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of dazzling wealth, restless endeavor, and rivalry.’ American ideas about class were changing, especially in cities. Old and new money mixed like oil and water. The increase in American fortunes necessitated stricter guidelines for social acceptance. Enter McAllister, a controversial figure who coached this evolving class of insecure millionaires in Old World aristocratic customs.’’

Here’s the whole article.

Troubling origin stories

“The invisible enemy should not exist – Seated Nude Male Figure, Wearing Belt Around Waist” (Middle Eastern packaging, newspapers, glue and cardboard), by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, in the show “Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections,’’ at the Fleming Museum of Art, at University of Vermont, Burlington, through May 18.

— Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Wien Gallery.

The museum says the show is a traveling exhibition that reflects on “the birth of modern collections, the art institutions that sustain them, and their contingent origin stories to reveal a universe of erasures, violence, and fortuity. Considering how institutional collections organize our lives, “Never Spoken Again” brings together artists whose works open up a critique of material culture, iconography and political ecologies.

“In turn, each of the works sheds light on myths, simulations, fake currencies, war games, and the slow violence of systematic racism that historically underpin collecting practices. Together, they invite inquiry into how our collective histories are presented, curated, fabricated, or all of the above. With wit, curiosity, and compassion, “Never Spoken Again” asks the question most museum visitors dare not: How did these objects and artworks get to a gallery in Vermont anyway? And why?

Burlington's Union Station was built in 1916 by the Central Vermont Railway and the Rutland Railroad.

‘Metaphor for living’

“Dropkick into Primordial Soup” (mixed media), by Cambridge, Mass.-based artist Alexandra Sheldon, in her show “Piece by Piece,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through June 2.

She says:

“Collage is a process of piecing together papers. When I began with the collages in this show, I gathered painted papers for a background. Then I would hunt for shapes to go into the backgrounds. Often the work got too busy, and then I’d try to simplify it by reintroducing backgrounds. This led to shifting surfaces and a back and forth feel which felt good to me.

“Collage is, for me, a metaphor for living. It is difficult to live: to figure out how to balance work with family with body with money with time with everything. In the studio I am searching for combinations of energies. I want to fit in movement, color, shape, line, texture, light, feel, everything. I want suspense, sorrow, enthusiasm, inertia, joy, fear, exploration, everything.

“If in real life I can hardly figure out how to live, at least in the studio I can attempt to jam in everything and explore everything. This is how I find myself: by spending long hours in the studio listening to music and trying to put papers together. Collage leads me and frustrates me, entices me and overjoys me.’’

“And in the end, perhaps it’s those fleeting moments of fun and play in the studio which I love most. Just like in my life.’’

Chris Powell: Don't leave looted Conn. hospitals' fate to a big game of chicken

“The Worship of Mammon,’’ by Evelyn De Morgan (1909).

MANCHESTER, Conn.

A big game of chicken may determine what becomes of Waterbury (Conn.) Hospital, Manchester (Conn.) Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital, in Vernon, Conn.

Yale New Haven Health, which two years ago agreed to buy the three struggling hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings for $435 million, now is suing Prospect to nullify the agreement. Yale New Haven Health contends that Prospect has substantially impaired the hospitals by mismanagement since the agreement was made. 

Prospect's Connecticut hospitals were already in terrible financial condition, most of their equity having been stripped from them and liquidated by their parent company, Leonard Green and Partners, a private-equity investment firm based in California. The Prospect hospitals no longer own their own real estate but must pay rent to a real-estate company. 

Connecticut law never should have allowed nonprofit hospitals, which Waterbury, Manchester and Rockville were, to be acquired by investment companies like Prospect. The state now has a big interest in keeping the hospitals operating, restoring their solvency, and returning them to nonprofit status.

But Yale New Haven Health has a big interest in not overpaying for an operation that may be on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy. After all, Yale New Haven Health runs four hospitals in Connecticut, all nonprofits, and they could be critically weakened if their parent company pays too much for the Prospect hospitals. 

As the condition of the Prospect hospitals deteriorated after Yale New Haven Health agreed to acquire them, Yale New Haven Health asked state government to subsidize its purchase by $80 million. Gov. Ned Lamont didn't want to do that and urged the two sides to keep negotiating. But with the acquisition unfulfilled after two years and the lawsuit charging bad faith, negotiations have failed and seem unlikely to resume soon. The Prospect hospitals are far behind in paying bills and state and municipal taxes. They may not have any net worth left at all.

But the Prospect hospitals serve large communities and their closure would be a disaster for Connecticut. Other hospitals are not prepared to take up the displaced patient load, and even if they could handle it, many patients of the failing hospitals and the doctors who treat them would have far to travel. The disruption to medical care in the state would be immense. Despite Prospect's awful ownership and top management, its hospitals employ hundreds of dedicated professionals striving to provide excellent care under worsening financial stress.

State government's financial intervention in support of an acquisition by Yale New Haven Health strikes many as the obvious solution.

But a state subsidy for the purchase will ratify Prospect's looting of its three hospitals and the real-estate company's purchase of the hospitals' property. The real-estate company now may think it has decisive leverage over whoever acquires the hospitals and intends to keep them operating. But if the hospitals fail and go out of business, their buildings probably would lose much of their value, since they have practical use only as hospitals.

The best mechanism for saving the hospitals may be to let them fail and go into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is exclusively a federal court process but with the court's approval state government could become a party to the case and assist the financial reorganization of the hospitals from the moment of their bankruptcy filing. Bankruptcy could relieve the hospitals of their burdensome property rental obligations.

In any case state government should do more than what it long has been doing about this problem -- just hoping that Yale New Haven Health and Prospect will work things out eventually before the Prospect hospitals collapse and close. Hope is not a strategy or plan. 

So the governor should assemble a team ready to assist a bankruptcy proceeding, the General Assembly should make millions of dollars in an emergency loan available to a new owner of the hospitals, and the legislature and governor should give Connecticut a law to prevent nonprofit hospitals from falling into the hands of predators ever again, and thus to prevent the theft of decades of community charity that state government's negligence allowed here.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).  

Augmented reality in Medfield

“Agent 57’’ (detail from Alpha augmented reality), by Michael Lewy, in the group show “Augmented Reality — The evolution of a small town,’’ at the Zullo Gallery Center for the Arts, Medfield, Mass., May 11-June 23.

The gallery says the show’s works focus on the past, present and future of the town of Medfield, which was once best known for its big state mental hospital.

The Boston origins of Mother’s Day

Julia Ward Howe

Text excerpted from The Boston Guardian

(Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)

Mother’s Day got its start on Beacon Street in Boston’s Back Bay celebrating not only mothers but peace.

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), who lived most of her life at 241 Beacon Street, began advocating a “Mother’s Day” in the 1870s.

The ancient Greeks held spring ceremonies for Rhea, mother of gods, and in the 1600s the English had a “Mothering Day”, where servants were given the fourth Sunday of Lent off to bring cakes to their mothers.

America’s Mother’s Day, however, started with Howe.

Howe was not an average mother.

She was an activist, an abolitionist, a women’s suffrage advocate and a writer who clashed with her prominent transcendentalist husband Samuel Gridley Howe over his wish that she shun public life. According to her diary, he beat her. She considered divorcing him on various occasions but never did.

Here’s the whole article.

1915 Mother’s Day card. Of course, some may have more nuanced views of their mothers.