Chris Powell: Asking the able-bodied to work in exchange for state help is reasonable
Official portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 by famed painter John Singer Sargent.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Theodore Roosevelt, who in his time was often considered good liberal authority, noted that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Only then, Roosevelt said, can a citizen's surplus strength be of use to society.
So it is strange that so many people who consider themselves liberals are horrified by the new federal law that sharply limits food subsidies for able-bodied single adults who aren't working. The liberals shriek that new rule may eliminate food subsidies for as many 36,000 people in Connecticut unless they can show they are working at least 80 hours per month.
What's the big deal about that? Eighty hours per month is not even 20 hours per week. Any able-bodied single adult who can't work 20 hours per week to support himself and thereby earn his government food subsidy needs a lot more motivation to stop being a burden on society and to start pulling his own weight.
But government in Connecticut is not in a good position to scold people for shiftlessness when it long has been running up the cost of living -- even putting hidden taxes on residential electricity -- and thereby discouraging those who already may be down on their luck, demoralized, or lacking job skills, as many socially promoted graduates of Connecticut's high schools lack them.
Indeed, as the state's rising cost of living pushes many people toward poverty and even homelessness, state government should be providing the destitute with more than food -- but in exchange for work. State government should be providing them with emergency, barracks-type housing and jobs with which they can begin to earn their benefits until they can live on their own -- an arrangement like the town farms of old.
The key would be to push people toward self-sufficiency and away from the demoralization that welfare causes and the irresponsibility that leads to welfare dependence.
Such a system would not solve the problems of the many homeless people who are chronically mentally ill. But at least enough barracks-type housing would allow them to get off the street during cold weather, to bathe and use a toilet, and have a little privacy, a prerequisite of sanity.
As a matter of fairness only state government can take responsibility for those who aren't taking or can't take responsibility for themselves. Municipalities and churches don't have adequate resources for this.
New Haven particularly is overwhelmed by homeless people, many mentally ill, who, along with their advocates, are pressing city government to open more shelters, which will draw still more homeless and mentally ill people to the city.
One of those advocates was quoted last week as saying it's “immoral" that New Haven “doesn't have a plan to ensure that everyone has a guaranteed right to shelter throughout the winter." Mayor Justin Elicker replied that the city does more for the homeless than any other municipality in the state -- that the city maintains seven shelters and spends $1.5 million per year on the homeless.
The mayor might have asked: When did New Haven and its taxpayers become responsible for all the region's homeless and mentally ill?
While a homeless man died overnight on the New Haven Green this month, at almost the same time two homeless people died outdoors in Stamford. This is a statewide problem -- an estimated 800 people in Connecticut are living outdoors and 3,000 in shelters, and more than 130 homeless people have died while living outdoors in the state this year. Now that it's cold, shelters usually have to turn people away because they are full.
The homeless and uninstitutionalized mentally ill constitute an emergency. Connecticut needs a government agency to take them all in hand -- to ensure not just that they can get state medical insurance and food but also that they can have a cot in a safe barracks, and that they are required to do some work to cover their expense and accept their responsibility to pull their own weight.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Linda Gasparello: Holiday postcard from the mighty Queen Mary 2: Fantastical food and agile ancients
The gigantic Queen Mary 2. Except for image above, photos are by Linda Gasparello
My husband, Llewellyn King, and I chose a Christmas-to-New Year’s cruise on the Queen Mary 2, titled Caribbean Celebration, because there were so many days at sea. We love the feelings of lethargy, languor and disengagement that fill us on those days.
But the sea days — and there were three since we left New York on Dec. 22 — were an irritant to the few children on board who couldn’t wait to get to our first port of call, Charlotte Amalie, on St. Thomas, the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands. I think that the prospect of visiting Blackbeard’s Castle on the island was beating out the visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.
There has been no shortage of sugarplums on the QM2, both edible and inedible. For this cruise, the pastry pros in the galley have rolled out some inspired creations.
Gingerbread housing development.
On Deck 3, as you walk to the Britannia, the main dining room, there is a corridor-long gingerbread village. Look but don’t pinch off a piece of the white icing-covered picket fence, passengers are gently asked.
At lunch in the King’s Court Buffet on Christmas Day, passengers’ eyes popped at the festive dough decorations and ice sculptures, and shirt buttons popped after eating many helpings of the desserts. They piled plates high with thick slices of cakes — including Black Forest and Bûche de Noel.
I stopped an English lady before she tried to cut into a square cake frosted with royal icing. It was part of one of the buffet decorations.
“That is a fake cake,” I said.
“I saw a German cake, a French cake, but no Christmas cake,” she sighed.
I love that traditional British cake, too. It is packed with dried fruit and plied with brandy or rum for weeks, then covered with a layer of marzipan and royal icing.
I sighed for a second, then I spied mountains of colored marshmallows on a nearby table. I hoped that there would be piles of Turkish delight, for which I have a passion. Sigh, no. In consolation, I snagged a couple of Quality Street toffee pennies.
The galley chefs have accommodated passengers’ varied tastes and dietary restrictions admirably. But in keeping with The Cunard Line’s British heritage, every day they have offered a full English breakfast (fried eggs, back bacon, Cumberland sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes, black pudding and toast — sigh by some, no fried bread. At lunch, there has been a carvery table with two kinds of roasts, a meat or vegetable stew, various curries, battered cod and chips, even Cornish pasties and small beef and mushroom pies. Sigh by my husband, no beef and kidney pies.
On Dec. 26, Boxing Day, Llewellyn and I met the ship’s chef de cuisine, Willy Guilot. He is a Filipino and has worked on the Queen Mary 2 since she entered service, in 2004. We complimented him on the quality of the meals. He said that the work had been “crazy” in the galley over Christmas, but he high-beamed at our recognition of it.
For Christmas Day dinner in the Britannia, I chose the traditional turkey with chestnut stuffing and Mrs. Beeton’s Christmas Plum Pudding. I think that Isabella Beeton, the Victorian journalist and author of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which is more commonly known today as Mrs. Beeton’s Cookbook, would have ordered it. She might even have licked what was left of the pudding and the custard sauce on the plate.
On my way out of the dining room, I passed by a table where the English lady I had met at lunch was sitting. She smiled at me and pointed to her dessert plate, on which there was a crumb of pudding and a drop of custard sauce.
*****
Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet superstar, said, “You live as long as you dance.” Judging from the median age on the elegant Queen’s Room dance floor every night at 9, he got that right.
Agile ancients having a fine old time.
Last night, the QM2 band played swing music and the floor was alive with pairs of agile ancients dancing all the styles, including the Lindy Hop and the Jive. They had all the moves and the clothes, especially the ladies: They wore full, flowing skirts for twirling.
As they walked off the floor, my husband and I thought that they would return to their seats and order a belt. But no, they did about-faces when the band leader said, “You may not want to take your seats, because we’re going to play Benny Goodman’s ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ ”
We saw a Chinese couple from Toronto, who we have watched dance on other nights in the Queen’s Room, and have gotten to know, return to the floor.
At lunch today, the 86-year-old husband told us that he and his wife have taken ballroom dancing for 14 years with a Russian teacher. His wife said, “She is very strict.”
Six months ago, they both had a fall, but they were determined to dance aboard the QM2 this Christmas and New Year’s. So they danced gently for rehabilitation, but were told not to waltz.
I saw them waltzing one night and assured them, “What happens on the Queen’s Room dance floor, stays on it.”
He said, “My grandmother said, ‘When you are 60 you live in terms of years. When you are 70, in months. And when you are 80, in days.”
I added, “When you are 100, in minutes.” They laughed, a little.
They said they want to dance their 80s away — and next Christmas and New Year’s on the same cruise.
Quite unlike cruises we have taken on other lines, the many Chinese couples, young and old, on the QM2 are on the dance floor but not at the gaming tables. Every night, they are in heaven, whether dancing cheek to cheek or in the mood to jitterbug.
Linda Gasparello is producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. She’s based in Rhode Island.
Playful or ominous?
“Quack and Other Feelings,’’ by Fanny Brodar, at Morrison Gallery, Kent, Conn.
Arrogant ignoramuses
Lewis Wharf, the first home of The Provincetown Players, in 1915.
“From those who have never sailed come the quickest and harshest judgments on bad seamanship.’’
—Susan Gaspell (1876-1948), American playwright, novelist and actress. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the revoluti0nary Provincetown Players.
‘We are Nipmuc’
Photo by Scott Strong Hawk Foster, in the show “Ways of My Ancestors: We are Nipmuc, We are the freshwater people,’’ at the Springfield (Mass.) Museums, through Jan. 4.
The museum explains that Scott Strong Hawk Foster is a Black-Native American photographer whose roots include Nipmuc, Mohegan, Blackfoot, and Cherokee lineage. “Scott’s images tell a story. They enable the viewer to feel the atmosphere, mood, and emotions of his subject in that moment. He endeavors to share his artistry and experiences through the lens of his camera.’’
Also part of the show is Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., a citizen of the Nipmuc people. “He serves as a cultural steward for his tribe, and is a father, public speaker, traditional dancer, activist for indigenous rights, carpenter and educator. Andre’s work focuses on bringing traditional knowledge back to indigenous peoples.’’
Territories of southern New England Native American tribes in the 17th Century.
Llewellyn King: In 2026, 70 percent effort should be enough
An ice sculpture for First Night in Boston
A remarkable autobiography by Anthony Inglis, the English conductor and musicologist, is titled, Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms About! Quite so.
This admonition occurred while Inglis was conducting a musical. Someone sitting in the front row tapped him on the shoulder and told him to sit down and stop waving his arms about.
My admonition to you for the new year is to sit down and stop stressing yourself.
We are plagued with the idea of stress, and yet we start the new year with resolutions. We order a raft of these stress-making endeavors.
Want a stress-free new year? Stop your New Year's resolutions right now.
Do you need to tell yourself that you will stay on your diet? No. You won't anyway.
Do you need to set a goal of going to the gym five times a week? No. You won't get to Planet Fitness more than once or twice, in the whole year.
So, your desk looks like a dump, leave it alone. You will promise yourself that for the first time ever you will get organized in 2026. You won't. So why get stressed about it?
You have promised yourself that this year you are going to improve your mind and read 20 great books. You won't. Best case, you will flip through a James Patterson thriller or a Danielle Steel romance. Maybe the detective novel you purchased at an airport will make it to your nightstand, alongside the classic you plan to read when you get around to it. That is never, so get rid of that reproving volume. Give it to charity. You will shed stress and feel good at the same time by doing that.
Sloth clothed as virtue is so, so stress-relieving.
Put aside the stress of resolutions in the new year and relax into a year of self-indulgence.
If a work colleague comes over to you and starts talking about productivity, cross your arms, sit down and, if your system allows, break wind.
Approach work as a card-carrying slough-off. In the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “workers' paradise,” workers used to say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Good on them.
If striving is pointless, stop striving. Give it a rest.
I suggest that there is a terrible national lack of malaise. At every turn, we are urged to learn more, work harder and innovate, innovate, innovate. You don't need innovation to have a second helping, open a beer or take the day off.
You may need to be a little innovative, explaining why you aren't at work. But that isn't so hard: Claim a mental-health day. Particularly if you are well and fit enough to enjoy it at the beach, at a movie theater or snuggled down into your bed.
If people are telling you to “lean in” and “try harder or the Chinese will get ahead,” go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and wonder at the number of dishes which can be prepared almost instantly — none of which you would cook. Then conclude that the Chinese have already won and stop stressing.
Think back to when we stressed mightily about the Japanese and the Germans beating us at everything. Then enjoy a suffusing, warm gladness when you realize that all that leaning in and trying harder hasn't helped them beat us. Maybe we should have a national academy for failing upward.
Lloyd Kelly, a fine artist and a friend, teaches Tai Chi in Louisville, Ky., particularly in one of the city's hospitals. He advises his students — some of whom are in wheelchairs — to stay within their comfort level, “to give just 70 percent.”
There is something beautiful about that admonishment at a time when people are stressed out and society is mindlessly urging you to struggle, to achieve, to conquer.
Here, then, is a resolution you can keep: I am only going to give a 70 percent effort. That way, perchance, you will have a great new year by default.
On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.
‘Never seem to leave’ (with video)
“Maine Headland, Winter” by Rockwell Kent (1882-1971)
“Maine winters creep in like a python on little cat feet, take years to squeeze the life out of you, and never seem to leave.”
— Robert Karl Skoglund (1936-2024) (aka “The Humble Farmer’’), Maine-based humorist, columnist, radio personality and musician. He was born in St. George, Maine, and died there, too.
Seal of the town of St. George, Maine
Everybody on board!
“The Raft (after Gericault)" (walnut ink and acrylic on paper), by Nancy Hall Brooks, in the show “Plus One: Bromfield Artists Plus Their Invited Guest Artists,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Feb. 4-March 1.
We can try
“Defying Gravity’’ (oil stick on board), by Kate Nelson, at Cross Rip Gallery, Harwich, Mass.
The holidays in Boston through the centuries
Photo montage of the L Street (in South Boston) Brownies published in The Boston Globe in 1913 under “Swimming Races for Brownies' Christmas Day"
From The Boston Guardian (except for image above):
(New England Diary’s editor/publisher, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Guardian.
On Jan. 1, 1701, Samuel Sewall, a prominent Boston jurist and Beacon Hill resident, distributed an ode to the new year and sent trumpeters to the Boston Common to herald the arrival of the hours-old 18 th Century.
Though festivities were often muted in colonial times, New Year’s 2021 will continue the celebration of a holiday that has been commemorated in Boston for hundreds of years.
In 17th Century New England, Christmas traditions were frowned upon, which caused some Bostonians to restrain their celebration until the new year.
Although Massachusetts operated on the Julian calendar, which put New Year’s on March 25th, many residents still commemorated the holiday on Jan. 1.
“It was illegal to celebrate Christmas during the Puritan ascendancy,” Peter Drummey, the Massachusetts Historical Society’s librarian, told The Guardian. “In some respects, they had New Year’s in lieu of the Christmas holidays.”
Still, New Year’s celebrations were minor in the colonies until the 19th Century, when droves of new immigrants arrived on American shores. Scots Irish newcomers brought with them a poem by Robert Burns called “Auld Lang Syne,’’ which they sang as the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31.
In 1863, amidst the devastation of the Civil War, thousands filled the Boston Music Hall and Tremont Temple to await the news from Washington, where President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which would free enslaved people living in Confederate states, was scheduled to go into effect.
Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison attended musical performances while a string of citizens stood between the concert halls and the telegraph office, ready to conduct the announcement to the anxious crowds.
“People who were ardent in the abolitionist cause had to see the news to really believe that it had happened; they had to have the proof,” Drummey said. “This was the only time that Boston had historically celebrated on a scale that we associate with New Year’s [today], but for reasons completely apart from the holiday.”
In the following decades, immigrants continued to arrive and change the annual traditions. Many were fleeing famine, revolution, or persecution.
“These people were bringing new traditions, new thoughts, and new beliefs,” Anthony Sammarco, a Boston historian, told The Guardian. “[Many] were looking to the new year to be better than the old one.”
In the 20th Century, other traditions developed, such as the annual polar plunge in Dorchester and ice skating at the Frog Pond. Immigrants from Latin American countries brought the practice of eating a dozen grapes at midnight. In 1976, artist Clara Mack Wainwright reinvigorated the city’s holiday by establishing First Night, a celebration that gathered musicians, artists, and revelers.
“Parkas and hiking boots on the Common…rocking saxophones in the frigid night air, thrumming guitars in the warmth of a Catholic church, champagne on Beacon Street, beer at Park Street Station, and vice versa,” reported The Boston Globe the following day. First Night grew each year, and by 1990 over a million people were attending the celebration, according to The Globe.
Emily Greene-Colozzi: There’s a lack of evidence that tech stops school shootings
Memorial flowers outside the Brown engineering complex, where the shootings happened.
Via The Conversation, except for the image above.
Emily Greene-Colozzi is an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. She receives funding from the National Institute of Justice.
A group of college students braved the frigid New England weather on Dec. 13, 2025, to attend a late- afternoon review session at Brown University, in Providence. Eleven of those students were struck by gunfire when a shooter entered the lecture hall. Two didn’t survive.
Shortly after, a petition circulated calling for better security for Brown students, including ID-card entry to campus buildings and improved surveillance cameras. As often happens in the aftermath of tragedy, the conversation turned to lessons for the future, especially in terms of school security.
There has been rapid growth of the nation’s now $4 billion school security industry. Schools have many options, from traditional metal detectors and cameras to gunshot detection systems and weaponized drones. There are also purveyors of artificial-intelligence-assisted surveillance systems that promise prevention: The gun will be detected before any shots are fired, and the shooting will never happen.
They appeal to institutions struggling to protect their communities, and are marketed aggressively as the future of school shooting prevention.
I’m a criminologist who studies mass shootings and school violence. In my research, I’ve found that there’s a lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of these technological interventions.
Grasping for a solution
Implementation has not lagged. A survey from Campus Safety Magazine found that about 24% of K-12 schools report video-assisted weapons detection systems, and 14% use gunshot detection systems, like ShotSpotter.
Gunshot detection uses acoustic sensors placed within an area to detect gunfire and alert police. Research has shown that gunshot detection may help police respond faster to gun crimes, but it has little to no role in preventing gun violence.
Still, schools may be warming to the idea of gunshot detection to address the threat of a campus shooter. In 2022, the school board in Manchester, N.H., voted to implement ShotSpotter in the district’s schools after a series of active-shooter threats.
Other companies claim their technologies provide real-time visual weapons detection. Evolv is an AI screening system for detecting concealed weapons, which has been implemented in more than 400 school buildings since 2021. ZeroEyes and Omnilert are AI-assisted security camera systems that detect firearms and promise to notify authorities within seconds or minutes of a gun being detected.
These systems analyze surveillance video with AI programs trained to recognize a range of visual cues, including different types of guns and behavioral indicators of aggression. Upon recognizing a threat, the system notifies a human verification team, which can then activate a prescribed response plan
.
But even these highly sophisticated systems can fail to detect a real threat, leading to questions about the utility of security technology. Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, was equipped with Omnilert’s gun detection technology in January 2025 when a student walked inside the school building with a gun and shot several classmates, one fatally, before killing himself.
School security technology firm ZeroEyes uses this greenscreen lab to test and train artificial intelligence to spot visible guns. AP Photo/Matt Slocum
Lack of evidence
This demonstrates an enduring problem with the school security technology industry: Most of these technologies are untested, and their effect on safety is unproven. Even gunshot-detection systems have not been studied in the context of school and mass shootings outside of simulation studies. School shooting research has very little to offer in terms of assessing the value of these tools, because there are no studies out there.
This lack is partly due to the low incidence of mass and school shootings. Even with a broad definition of school shootings – any gunfire on school grounds resulting in injury – the annual rate across America is approximately 24 incidents per year. That’s 24 more than anyone would want, but it’s a small sample size for research. And there are few, if any, ethically and empirically sound ways to test whether a campus fortified with ShotSpotter or the newest AI surveillance cameras is less likely to experience an active shooter incident because the probability of that school being victimized is already so low.
Existing research provides a useful overview of the school safety technology landscape, but it offers little evidence of how well this technology actually prevents violence. The National Institute of Justice last published its Comprehensive Report on School Safety Technology in 2016, but its finding that the adoption of biometrics, “smart” cameras and weapons detection systems was outpacing research on the efficacy of the technology is still true today. The Rand Corporation and the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention have produced similar findings that demonstrate limited or no evidence that these new technologies improve school safety and reduce risks.
While researchers can study some aspects of how the environment and security affect mass shooting outcomes, many of these technologies are too new to be included in studies, or too sparsely implemented to show any meaningful impact on outcomes.
My research on active and mass shootings has suggested that the security features with the most lifesaving potential are not part of highly technical systems: They are simple procedures such as lockdowns during shootings.
The tech keeps coming
Nevertheless, technological innovations continue to drive the school-safety industry. Campus Guardian Angel, launched out of Texas in 2023, promises a rapid drone response to an active school shooter. Founder Justin Marston compared the drone system to “having a SEAL team in the parking lot.” At $15,000 per box of six drones, and an additional monthly service charge per student, the drones are equipped with nonlethal weaponry, including flash-bangs and pepper spray guns.
In late 2025, three Florida school districts announced their participation in Campus Guardian Angel’s pilot programs.
Three school districts in Florida are part of a pilot program to test drones that respond to school shootings.
There is no shortage of proposed technologies. A presentation from the 2023 International Conference on Computer and Applications described a cutting-edge architectural design system that integrates artificial intelligence and biometrics to bolster school security. And yet, the language used to describe the outcomes of this system leaned away from prevention, instead offering to “mitigate the potential” for a mass shooting to be carried out effectively.
While the difference is subtle, prevention and mitigation reflect two different things. Prevention is stopping something avoidable. Mitigation is consequence management: reducing the harm of an unavoidable hazard.
Response versus prevention
This is another of the enduring limitations of most emerging technologies being advertised as mas-s shooting prevention: They don’t prevent shootings. They may streamline a response to a crisis and speed up the resolution of the incident. With most active shooter incidents lasting fewer than 10 minutes, time saved could have critical lifesaving implications.
But by the time ShotSpotter has detected gunshots on a college campus, or Campus Guardian Angel has been activated in the hallways of a high school, the window for preventing the shooting has long since passed.
‘How ideas reassemble’
“Fragments” (paper, steel, ceramic, thread), by Virginia Mahoney, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Feb. 5-March 1.
The gallery says:
“Virginia Mahoney deepens her exploration of memory, materiality, and the personal archaeology of her creative life. This exhibition emerges from her long- term impulse to save parts of old work, remnants of past processes, and fragments that still hold potential meaning. The pieces in ‘Fragments’ extend her ongoing reflection on how ideas evolve, break apart, and reassemble over time.’’
Llewellyn King: Trump gave us a year of fear: And 2026?
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Of all the things that happened in 2025 — a year dominated by the presidency of Donald Trump — not the least is that great fear came to America.
It's reminiscent of the fear that African-Americans knew in the days of the lynch mob, or that Jews have felt from time to time, or that Hollywood felt during the blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fear that people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, who were mostly U.S. citizens, felt when they were rounded up and interred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
For some, it is a low-grade fear of reprisals, financial ruin and humiliation. And for some, it is a fear of ruin by litigation. But for others, it is fear of faceless arrest, the jail cell and plastic handcuffs.
All of this has made us a nation in fear and removed our faith in our laws, our Constitution, and our plain decency.
This is a new kind of fear that is acute in places, such as immigrant communities, but more universal than in the past.
It isn't the fear of a foreign power or an alien ideology or a disease, but a fear generated domestically — generated by our own government. Fear in our workplaces, our schools, our movie studios, our newsrooms and our universities.
For the first time, this year we saw troops on the streets of cities when there was no civil unrest — as there was, for example, during the riots of 1968, which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
We saw troops deployed in cities where they weren't wanted, opposed by the local government and local people. But those cities got the troops courtesy of an assertion by the president that troops can manage law enforcement better than the local police. Or was there some more sinister purpose?
For the first time, we saw arrests without charge or evidence, carried out by masked ICE agents, of people simply suspected of being here illegally.
Often the suspicion is no more than the color of the arrestee's skin, their dress and their demeanor. No crime needs to be proved by this army of the state, dressed to intimidate. To the ICE men and women, appearance is tantamount to conviction.
Nightly on television we watched agents drag away men, women and children without due process; they would been held and deported without charge, trial or having any avenue of appeal. Justice denied, nonoperational. Often deportees go to countries that are alien or different from their homelands.
Fear has come home.
Immigrants are frightened even if they are citizens. If you have olive-toned skin, you can be dragged and held incommunicado. No appeal, no trial, no court appearance, no access to help. Habeas corpus suspended.
Pinch yourself and ask: Is this the America we cherish for its freedom, its justice and its generosity of spirit?
The fear isn't confined to those who might be swept up in the mindless cruelty of ICE but extends throughout society. People with stature fear that if they speak out, if they do what at other times they might have seen as their civic duty, they will endanger themselves and their families. All the government has to do is to start an investigation or threaten one and the damage is done, the first level of punishment is delivered.
Investigations can target anything from how you filled out a mortgage application to whether you wrote something that may be viewed as objectionable, and the punishment begins.
Fear stalks the schools where teachers and professors can be punished for what they say or teach, and where the institutions of higher learning are subject to political scrutiny. Politics has become the law, capricious and savage.
There is fear in business, where so many companies rely on government loan guarantees or tax credits for their growth. There is fear that if they say anything that can be construed as disloyal, they will be punished.
Political opponents fear that their mortgage applications may be deemed to be irregular and they are to be censured or prosecuted. Political prosecution is now a government tool.
Others just fear that Trump will ridicule them in public with his schoolyard denigrations, particularly members of Congress. They fear they will be reprimanded and marked for defeat in the polls.
There is an awful completeness about the Trump rampage: his systematic ignoring of norms, shredding of the rights of the individual, destroying families and bringing about untold misery.
A question for all America: How is the spreading of fear — sometimes an acute fear and sometimes low-grade fear — throughout society beneficial and to whom?
We, the people, deserve to know.
X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.
Religion embraces science
“Einstein & the Jealous Monk (after Bob Dylan)” (acrylic on canvas), by English painter Chris Gollon (1953-2017), in the permanent collection of Huddersfield Art Gallery, alongside works by Francis Bacon, Walter Sickert and Henry Moore.
Gerald FitzGerald: My exotic adventures on a dairy farm
I stood on green mash loaded on the wagon floor next to a pony-tailed, skinny day laborer, both of us pitching the silage with big steel forks, until the pain blitzed through my right calf straight to my brain. Looking down, I saw two tines embedded in my leg. His hands were no longer holding his pitchfork but it stayed perpendicular to my leg, steady and straight as an erection. The kid looked stupefied; hands to his face, eyes glaring as if I were suddenly headless.
I cannot recall who pulled out the fork but I do remember thinking how often I’d used those forks to finish off a load of dry manure in the small dump truck for delivery to customers of the farm, in Concord, Mass. Holly and I had spent all our savings backpacking for two years pretty much ‘round the world and her Aunt Betty was kind to offer a minimum wage job on her dairy farm and use of the old trailer to live in back by the bullpen. The trailer kept us dry and the heating usually worked.
Then Holly had a brilliant idea: fresh paint the long side of the trailer, not so much with a color as with a vision. She’d loved our adventures in East Africa. So Holly invited family and friends to join us in creating a mural of savannah on the outside of the trailer to include acacia trees, monkeys, a rhino, water buffalo, giraffe and Holly’s lion.
Best of all, we had a real vegetable garden growing just outside our door so we needn’t pick its sweet corn until the water was boiling.
Farm life was good, with warm bread, bacon and black coffee to begin each workday morning at 6:15 in Betty’s kitchen. A herdsman milked twice daily, which was fine by me since cows take no holidays at all. I never counted the cows, but I want to say that there were at least 30 or so milkers in the barn, each one an Ayrshire. Ayrshires are Scottish with white and red to brown markings. They don’t give as much milk as, say, a Holstein, but they give more cream. I bedded each cow in its stall twice a day by scraping out and replacing the wet soiled wood shavings. Also, I checked each one’s steel bowl to keep it free of all but water made to flow by the bovine depressing a small circular float with its muzzle. I also added grain to a mix of hay and silage placed twice daily within easy eating range.
Gutters ran through the floor beneath the back ends of the stalls. They contained metal sweepers activated to push the waste along to a steel conveyor belt that carried it all up to the deep end of a dump truck. When the truck was full it was driven to a field and dumped out to dry. Some manure was loaded into a spreader for a springtime cover of the acreage. Depending on the need and the season I plowed fields, seeded crops, spread manure, baled hay and filled the lofts, patched barn roofs, stored new loads of shavings, turned the cows out to pasture to graze or called them home again, cleaned the milk pipes, mucked the stalls or delivered product to residential and commercial customers. Once I watched a dead cow being dragged out of the barn with a rope pulled by a tractor, I think to be chain-sawed to pieces for disposal. Twice, I watched the herdsman try to jump-start a pickup only to have the battery explode nearly in his face. Twice.
When calves were born, I taught them to drink from a bucket by submerging my hand in the formula and coaxing them to suck my two fingers like a teat. Female calves were eventually taken to the heifer barn; the young males were soon sold for veal. The farm only needed one bull, and I suspect that he was generally happy, though possibly less so when the eldest son used rubber-gloved hands to extract bull semen back in the day when A.I. meant artificial insemination.
One sunny autumn day I got to wade thigh-deep in fresh garbage at the Concord landfill. I collected trash weekly from the farm and its workers’ homes. Arriving at one house I found the plastic bags piled in the trash corner of the garage. Atop the bags lay a wreath made of brown growth and pine cones. Its presence gave me pause. I knocked on the side door loudly. Nobody was home. To me the wreath looked like something found in an Amish store in Ohio. And, to me, there it would stay.
But crafts are tricky; you know, “one man’s treasure, etc.” But here it lay squarely piled with the trash without a warning note or sign and nobody home in these days before cell phones. I carted it off with the rest. I was wrong. I received a message sternly summarizing the frantic concerns of the wife who’d made the object, along with a directive to return to the landfill to make close inspection until I found the wreath. It took a messy while but I did.
The farm had its own gasoline pump. Arguably, the stupidest act I ever committed on the farm was to leave my burning cigarette in the ashtray of a dump truck while I stepped out to fill its tank situated behind and below the driver’s door. I removed the cap from the short fuel filler neck, filled the tank, replaced the handle on the pump and climbed back inside. Then I saw my cigarette. With my right hand I took one last drag as I pulled away, while cranking down the window with my left. I tossed the lit butt out the window. A millisecond later, horror filled my head. I had not replaced the gas cap. I faced the side mirror in time to see the glowing tip of the cigarette wobbly balancing on the rim of the open fuel neck before falling… to the dirt. I leapt from the truck and crushed the butt with my foot, then walked the few steps back to the gas cap and replaced it. A few years earlier in Vietnam I had been struck by an artillery round that landed in my foxhole but failed to explode. Not a day has passed since without me seeing that shell, over and over again.
Not so often, but occasionally, I still see that glowing cigarette vertically wobbling on the rim of the fuel pipe.
I had never done well in school, but I stuck with it, mostly from Holly’s encouragement. So, after moving to the farm, I found a nearby state college and signed up for night classes. This was the sixth college I attended. At registration I waited in one long line and noticed a shorter one moving in a different direction. I eavesdropped on some chatting girls and discovered that they were in line to register for a path that provided college credit for “life experience” – if you could demonstrate valuable knowledge derived outside of the classroom. I switched to that line and was accepted. About 17 months after joining the farm I was but one course shy of a college degree and had scored successfully in taking the law boards.
At the farm, we sold manure both dried and wet. The wet was less expensive but more difficult to handle. I drove an order of three cubic yards, wet, over to a home in a particularly upscale neighborhood of Lexington, just a Minuteman’s march from Concord. It was a lovely stone-fronted home with a long driveway and curved flagstone walk to the front door, flanked by landscaped cedar gardens. A woman came out to greet me and even asked my name before giving directions as to how the load should be divided. I explained to her that the dump truck was not a precise machine, particularly when dropping a wet (i.e., almost liquid) load of fresh manure.
“Nothing drops until the truck bed reaches the tipping point,” I told her. “I’ll flip the lever immediately and hope that sends the bed back down in time but to tell you the truth, ma’am, once that load starts to slip its momentum has a mind of its own.”
“Well, you know me, Jerry, “ she replied, “I cannot bear a mess.” First, I did not know her. I’d never met her before. Second, she’s the one who ordered the cheap stuff. I kept my hand on the hoist-control lever of that truck and worked it hard at the first suggestion of load movement, but in the end nothing on God’s earth was going to keep that heavy slop from emancipation once it started to slide. She jumped away from the emptying dump and watched open-mouthed as the three cubic yards groaned to earth in one loud, filthy blast. It covered the width of the driveway, then the strip of lawn, then seeped down the flagstone path. She began to scream. I jumped back into the cab and swung the truck around while mumbling apologies.
Exiting the driveway, I glanced in the rearview and saw that she was still screaming while standing in the brown river holding her head with both hands.
The farm was where Williams Road met the Old Road to Nine Acre Corner, and its fields back then began at every point of that junction. Soon, I was awarded the job of stringing double strands of barbed wire to fence every field in sight. Why? Because the President of the United States was coming to Concord Bridge to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the battles that opened America’s War of Independence. Gerald Ford was to speak at the bridge on April 19, 1975. Exuberant town fathers expected so many visitors that they had extended the official overflow parking much of the way down Old Road to Nine Acre Corner, at least three miles, or more, distant from the bridge. The farmers doubted that visitors would stick to the macadam of that narrow road but, more likely, would drive onto the moist fields to park. The spring thaw then would guarantee that we’d be hitching a tractor to one mud-stuck vehicle after another. It took two full days working alone to stake and string the barbed wire.
Despite the thickest work gloves I could find, my hands and fingers bled like Padre Pio. April 19th came and went with not a single vehicle parking in the overflow area. It took me two more days to take down all the pickets and roll up all that wire.
After that, life moved smoothly until I woke up one morning to discover that I could breathe only if I lay in one position. Holly drove me to Emerson Hospital, a mile or so up the road, the same place I went following the pitchfork stabbing. Only now it wasn’t just a trip to the ER. I was admitted to 10 days of intensive care. Most of the first week was spent trying to identify what was trying to kill me. Dr. Henry Childs, M.D., a distinguished young physician from neighboring Stow, Mass., worked diligently to find the culprit: Farmers Lung Disease. The spores from mold that can grow in damp hay penetrate the lining of the lungs and seriously constrict breathing. I and others had been breaking down a giant round hay bale to horse bales in a mostly closed barn just a few days earlier, without face masks. The others did not become ill.
What I recall most from my last few days in ICU is the parade of students from Boston/Cambridge medical schools who traveled out to Concord to observe and to question the bearer of a somewhat rare disease.
I just read online that a patient’s average life span after suffering Farmers Lung is about eight years. Thus far, it’s been fifty for me.
Gerald FitzGerald is a former newspaper reporter, managing editor, assistant district attorney and trial lawyer.
But don’t get depressed
“Field at Dusk” (oil on canvas, circa 1900), by Bruce Crane, at the Westerly (R.I.) Museum of American Impressionism.
Chris Powell: Don’t ask state employees if Connecticut should raise taxes
Hedge-fund mogul Ray Dalio, one of several billionaires living in Greenwich, Conn., long a home for very rich people.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
According to state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, Connecticut shouldn’t be afraid of taxing the wealthy more.
In a newspaper essay the other week Hochadel cited a study done last year by something called A Better Connecticut Institute. The study, the senator wrote, contended that “income taxes play almost no role in where high-earning individuals choose to live," and that “when states raise taxes on top earners, the number of wealthy residents who actually leave is statistically insignificant," only around 2 percent.
“Wealthy people, like everyone else, care about more than their tax bill," Hochadel wrote -- they also care about schools, public services, public safety, economic opportunities, and such.
Well, of course. But no one says that the wealthy care only about taxes and not about those other things. They care about many things, including taxes. It is a matter of judgment and degree.
Besides, who exactly should be considered wealthy for tax purposes?
The senator writes of “millionaires," but when retirement savings are added, housing-price inflation has made millionaires of tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who are not close to being plutocrats but still pay a lot in taxes. Millionaires are not as rich as they used to be.
Maybe certain billionaires don’t care about Connecticut's income tax, but then why have so many state residents who are not billionaires been moving to Florida and other low-tax states as they near retirement and even before? Why are states that don't tax their residents as much as Connecticut does growing economically and in population even as Connecticut's economy is stagnant and its population might be decreasing if not for the illegal immigration state government encourages?
As Connecticut's illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean suggests, migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters. Those illegal immigrants see more money for themselves where there are colder winters. Contrary to Hochadel's suggestion, money and people still tend to go where they are treated best.
Liberal Democratic state legislators such as Hochadel have two reasons for framing their desire to increase state government spending as a matter of raising taxes only on the wealthy.
First is that these legislators can’t make a good case for spending more on the merits of the spending itself, a case that would persuade the less than wealthy. For decades these legislators have been bleating about poverty in Connecticut and appropriating more to alleviate it without reducing poverty at all. Some state government policies plainly perpetuate poverty. No state government seeking to reduce poverty would subsidize childbearing outside marriage and run schools by social promotion as Connecticut does. But ministering to poverty and making it generational provides much political patronage for Democrats.
Second is that while state government still neglects much human need, liberal Democratic legislators, being the tools of the government-employee unions, don't dare to examine the mismanagement, waste, fraud, and general excess in government, where much money could be saved. Reports in this regard by news organizations and the state auditors almost always pass without comment from liberal Democratic legislators. Most look away even from federal prosecutions of corruption in state government.
Now that Connecticut has become a one-party state, Democrats have become the party of government for its own sake -- not the party of efficient and effective government. Hochadel's essay revealed her as an embodiment of this problem.
The organization whose study the senator cited in her essay, A Better Connecticut Institute, consists mainly of government employee unions, and Hochadel herself is an officer of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.
That is, the institute represents mostly state and municipal government employees, who just happen to be the recipients of most state and municipal government tax revenue.
Just as you shouldn't ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn't seek advice from government employee unions about whether taxes should be raised so more money can be spent on their members. Bettering Connecticut requires much more than making government employees happy.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).