By Shawn Dell Joyce

If everyone in America spent just ten percent of their disposable incomes on locally-produced goods and services, it would generate millions of dollars in local economic impact in spite of the recession. Lowcountry Local First, a South Carolina business association, tried the ten percent shift as a local stimulus plan. The organization asked all citizens, local businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits to spend ten percent of their annual budget at local, independent businesses.

Lowcountry Local First estimates that if everyone in the region does the ten percent shift, it could generate $140 million dollars in new economic activity, which includes 50 million in new wages, and generates more than 1000 new jobs. Imagine what that kind of money could do in your community.

Making the shift requires planning your spending so that one out of ten stores you visit is a “small-mart,” a term coined by author Michael Shuman in his book; “Small-Mart Revolution.” Shuman suggests:

– Walk or bicycle instead of drive, grow your own food, avoid impulse purchasing, and you reduce the strain on the environment. Can you fix that t.v. at the local repair shop instead of buying a new one? Always ask if you are paying the true cost of this item, or is it heavily subsidized by tax dollars? Skip things like tobacco for example because the real cost is hidden, in terms of health care, quality of life, and subsidies paid to big corporations with tax dollars.

– Buy from a locally-owned stores, preferably selling locally-made goods, using locally-found inputs. For example, buy pies from a farm stand where they grow the apples that go in the pies, rather than a chain store pie that you’re not sure where the apples came from. For buying local to really impact the community, the dollars need to flow through other local businesses in the form of suppliers, banks, advertising, employees, etc.

– Buy closer to home if you have to shop non-local, then it’s better to buy regional, or state. If you can’t buy fruit from a local farm, buy fruit grown in your state instead. It is far better for you than fruit grown overseas and shipped here.
– If you really want Alpaca wool and can’t find it locally, ask your knitting friends to form a buyer’s club and purchase in bulk from a small producer in Canada or Peru. That Alpaca farmer gets four times more money they normally would, yet you pay usually half the retail price you normally would.

– The global equivalent to buying local is buying fairly traded. A Fair Trade seal means the workers who produced this item were paid a living wage in humane conditions. Some items to look for are coffee, cocoa, and clothing.

Shawn can be reached at   Shawn@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman

A report issued last month by the New York State Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) says that Jews were the top targets for hate crimes in the state last year, followed by blacks, gay men, and Hispanics. The report analyzed crime data submitted by police agencies in all of the state’s 62 counties.

Of 596 cases statewide identified as hate crimes, Jews were targets of 36%, blacks 25%, gay men 11%, and Hispanics 4%. Like many other Jews, my first reaction to the news was, “So what else is new?” The virulent anti-Semitism that sparks hate crimes against Jewish people has been around for millennia. I remember reading a magazine article a few years by a Holocaust survivor from an area in Eastern Europe where the entire Jewish population had been eradicated. Upon returning to the home town of his youth he was shocked to see anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on walls, and to hear anti-Semitic slurs uttered by local citizens. The hatred had persisted long after there were any Jews there to hate.

Anti-Semitism also tends to spike in times of economic hardship, as was the case in pre-Nazi Germany. The old stereotypes about Jews and money die hard, especially when names like “Goldman-Sachs” appear in the news in connection with the Wall Street meltdown and the dubious bailout that followed at the expense of the American taxpayers. It doesn’t matter that most of the big banks in the U.S. and worldwide are not headed by Jews. No one hears names like J.P. Morgan, Chase, or Barclay, and thinks, “Those damn WASPS!”

Nevertheless, on reflection I think the state report is flawed. I don’t doubt that we Jews account for more than a fair share of the hate crimes committed in New York State and, for that matter, across the United States. But I question the statistical findings when the only data used in the analysis were provided by police sources. There is a tendency on the part of police officials, who are most often white, to dismiss the suggestion that a crime committed against a nonwhite person is a hate crime. Sometimes they don’t even consider it a crime at all. This is especially true when the police themselves are the perpetrators. Remember: the four white cops who put 41 rounds into the defenseless Amidou Diallo in February 1999 were simply doing their duty.

And what are we to make of that 4% figure for Hispanics? Assaults on undocumented immigrants awaiting work as day laborers were commonplace in some communities in the state last year. Were they reported as hate crimes? Were they even reported at all or were the victims too afraid of deportation or indefinite incarceration at some hellhole of a detention facility to file charges or testify? You want to see hate crimes? Take a look at the cruel treatment afforded the detainees—women and men, many with young children—who came here in search of a better life only to be demonized as “illegal aliens.”

Elie Wiesel, the writer, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Holocaust survivor, said it all: “You who are so-called illegal aliens must know that no human being is ‘illegal,’” he declared “That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong. But illegal? How can a human being be illegal?” Not long after he made this statement he was assaulted and dragged out of a hotel elevator in San Francisco. His assailant, Eric Hunt, a 23-year-old anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, is from nearby Sussex County, NJ. He was eventually convicted of a hate-crime felony and two misdemeanor charges of battery and elder abuse.  

Of the 564 incidents reported as hate crimes by local police officials in New York State last year, only 10 resulted in convictions for hate crimes. (Fifty-four resulted in convictions on other charges.) Janine Kava, a spokesperson for the DCJS, cautioned against drawing any sweeping conclusions about the conviction statistics. “It would really be inappropriate to speculate on that,” she said, explaining that prosecution is a local function. “Each case could have had its own fact pattern, its own reasons for the disposition.” One need not speculate to know there is entirely too much hate in our midst regardless of who tops the list of victims of hate crimes.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Michael Kaufman
 
Jewish-Americans of a certain age have a tendency to view things in terms of whether they are “good (or bad) for the Jews.” For example, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was good for the Jews. Abe Reles and his infamous pals in Murder Inc. were bad. Sandy Koufax: good. David (Son of Sam) Berkowitz: bad. You get the idea.
 
I was in Quebec City on vacation with my first wife in August 1977 when I saw the news that “Son of Sam” had been captured and arrested. He had terrorized New Yorkers, especially women, for more than a year with a murder spree that claimed the lives of six people and wounded seven others. During that time he wrote bizarre, boastful letters to the police and to Jimmy Breslin, the great newspaper columnist, taunting the authorities and hinting at his next crime. Breslin marveled at the killer’s skillful use of semicolons even as he urged him to turn himself in.
 
Inside a small candy store in Quebec City that sold out-of-town newspapers, my eye was drawn to the one-word headline that screamed from the front page of the New York Post: “CAUGHT!” I picked up the newspaper…and winced when I saw the name under the picture of the alleged killer. “This,” I thought, “is bad for the Jews.”
 
No sooner did I finish the thought than a middle-aged woman came into the store, saw the headline, and excitedly asked, “They caught him? Can I see?” She didn’t have to tell me she was from New York. I could tell by the accent. And when she gasped and said, “OH, MY GOD!” I knew she too was Jewish. She looked at me and shook her head sadly. “Berkowitz,” she whispered. She read on. “Wait!” she said hopefully. “He’s not Jewish. It says his last name was Falco when he was born. He must be Italian!”
 
“No one who sees the name David Berkowitz is going to think this guy is Italian,” I replied.
 
Some 10 years later I was delighted to receive a piece of junk mail from an Evangelical minister who proudly claimed that Berkowitz had become a born-again Christian in prison. The mailing included a copy of a handwritten letter from the killer that, alas, was devoid of semicolons. Much of the letter’s contents can be found online at the church-run “Official Website of David Berkowitz.” Yes, there is such a thing. You can find it at http://www.ariseandshine.org/index.html. Like Harry Golden used to say, “Only in America.”
 
And only in America can a book be published like “Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie and Me” by Sheryl Weinstein, former chief financial officer for the charitable women’s group Hadassah. Weinstein, 60, says she had an 18-month affair with the disgraced financier who lost billions of dollars in investors’ money, including her family’s fortune. She says the affair, which took place 16 years ago, was preceded by a five-year buildup in which Madoff pursued her from the moment they met.
 
I have not read the book but according to the Associated Press it includes her description of Madoff as “not well endowed.” She says she found it important to put that in the book because it is the key to understanding his personality. One is left to wonder what might have been if Madoff had invested just a few of his ill-gained dollars in penile enlargement. Perhaps he would not have felt the need to become such a big-time swindler. This guy isn’t just bad for the Jews, he is a catastrophe. I hope he meets up with Berkowitz in prison. Maybe the Evangelicals will take him off our hands too.
 
Meanwhile, Weinstein told the Associated Press that Madoff, despite his shortcoming, was “surprisingly exciting” as a sexual partner. “When we made love,” she added, “I was on fire.” Oy vay! What kind of a way is that for a Hadassah lady to talk? Doesn’t she see this is bad for the Jews?
 
Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.

By Beth Quinn

Apparently school is starting up again. I know this because I see mothers arguing with their teenagers at the mall about the relative merits of exposing their belly buttons (in the case of the girls) or their butt cracks (boys).

I also know this because I’m teaching a couple of night classes at OCCC, something I’ve done for the past quarter century or so. I love teaching college freshmen, but I find that I often must repeat the same rules every semester, such as, “You need paper.”

I suspect every teacher in the land has a litany of back-to-school rules that they’ve been repeating since the Ice Age. So do parents. And, speaking on behalf of taxpayers and the general citizenry, there are also a few rules we’d like to suggest.

To that end, I hereby offer a brief course that I call “Back To School 101: A Primer on How to Reduce Everyone’s Irritation With You.”

The highlights are as follows:

The fact that it is your birthday does NOT mean you don’t have to go to school.

When you get off the bus, yes, look both ways twice before crossing. But then could you move your rear end a little faster to get to the other side? I’ve been stuck behind your bus for an hour now.

Better yet, walk to school. If you’re old enough to cross the street by yourself and you live within three miles, walk. It’s good for you, it will help you lose weight, and it gives you times to switch from home-brain to school-brain.

You’re weird, too. Really. So don’t make fun of the weird kids.

If you’re assigned to write a 500-word essay, the length is a requirement, not a suggestion. Don’t write 300 words, don’t write 1,000. Just follow directions.

In fact, following directions is the secret to life, really. Most directions aren’t complicated, and they aren’t meant to trick you. Following them doesn’t mean you’re part of the herd, even though you are. (Just look at how you’re dressed and compare that to how everyone else your age is dressed.)

Speaking of clothes, buy off the sales rack. Your parents are broker than they were last year.

While you’re at it, buy clothes that are a) comfortable and b) won’t get you sent home to change into something decent.

Spelling counts.

So do apostrophes.

Piercing your tongue interferes with diction. If you don’t know what diction is, look it up. You can find the word diction in the diction-ary.

Don’t crack your gum, don’t roll your eyes at your teacher, bring a pen, take notes, pick up your feet when you walk, don’t blame someone else, smile, sit up straight, raise your hand before you talk, don’t run in the hall, consider the carrot sticks instead of the chips.

AND TURN OFF THAT CELL PHONE!

OK, that’s almost it. This is a short list because you’re still in your summer torpor (look it up), and I don’t want to give you brain shock.

But there is one further bit of advice I’d like to pass on. It’s something that my old health/gym teacher, Harriet Borg, instructed my health class when I was in 9th grade at Washingtonville High School. I must confess it stunned me when I heard her say these words out loud:

Leave yourself plenty of time in the morning for a bowel movement.

It’s true that I failed to appreciate Miss Borg’s wisdom when I was 14. But now, at the age of 60, I consider it among the most sensible and sound pieces of advice I’ve ever been offered.

I realize that today’s teenagers might well be inclined to ignore me just as I ignored Miss Borg, but I suspect it would vastly improve the atmosphere in the building if everyone took a crap before going to school in the morning.

Beth can be reached at beth@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Advisory: You will find the word “Woodstock” in this paragraph and the one that follows, but rest assured this is not more Woodstock nostalgia.

In the new movie “Taking Woodstock” there’s a close-up of The Times Herald-Record and under one of the headlines are the words “By Charlie Crist.”

For 60 years, starting in 1933, Charlie was a reporter for radio stations and weekly papers in the Mid-Hudson, as well as for The Times Herald-Record, which is where I met him. I was hired in 1972 for the Sullivan County Bureau where Charlie once had been the boss. Now he was working mostly out of Middletown though he’d often return to the bureau to use the phone or the teletype.

But first he’d push his glasses to the top of his head, loosen his bowtie, light a cigarette and ask, “And what have you fellers been up to?” Never “fellows,” always “fellers.”

Charlie worked hard. Mornings he would be in the newsroom in Middletown. Then he’d drive back to Monticello, where he lived, to have lunch with his wife Gladys. He’d usually have coffee with us at the bureau, bounce around Sullivan, Orange and Ulster looking for stories, have dinner with Gladys and head out again to meetings. His work was his recreation.

Every small town needs its local paper, and every paper needs a Charlie Crist, a guy who can walk into a bar, or a diner, or a VFW hall, or a church, or a hunting camp, or a meeting of volunteer firefighters, and know everybody in the room. These were the places he found the “real people,” as he called them, that he spent a career writing about. I think he knew every cop in three counties.

Charlie loved to gab with anyone who loved to gab. He and I talked a lot about hunting. “A feller’s got to eat,” Charlie said, and I agreed. I just never understood hunting for sport. “You’d deprive people of the hunt?” Charlie said incredulously. I said a sportsman should hunt a bear on the bear’s terms – wrestle it. Winner gets to eat the loser. “Jeffrey, my friend, that is dumbest thing I ever heard from you,” he said, and would remind me that my “problem” was that I grew up in Queens, not Pine Bush.

Everybody knew him. People would stop by the bureau just wanting to say hello to their man Crist. The firefighters may have loved him more than anyone else for his coverage of the creation of the Firefighters Burn Treatment Fund.

I don’t think he ever slept. Once, I got a call in the middle of the night from the Liberty supervisor, Francis “Stretch” Hanofee, telling me that there was a bad fire at a school for emotionally disturbed kids. I raced over. And there was Charlie. “Thought you’d never get here,” he said.

Another time, it was Charlie calling before dawn with something about a derailment just across the Delaware from Barryville. But we don’t cover Pennsylvania, I said.

“Oh, put your pants on. I’ll pick you up in 15 minutes,” he said.

Charlie was one of the Record reporters who covered the big show at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969. Five years later he summed it up.

“Half a million naked kids and some music,” he said. Charlie wasn’t cool, just salt of the earth, a man from an earlier time.

I don’t think Charlie would understand what’s happening to newspapers today. What would he say about papers being run by people with no background in news, or by venture capitalists who sink some money in, take a lot more out and walk away, letting the papers wither and die?

Charlie, who died in 1993 at 78, had his share of lame brained managers, such as some alleged geniuses at The Times Herald-Record who strongly hinted in 1978 that it was time for him to pack it in. What did he do? He went back to the weeklies and beat The Record on a regular basis with stories about firefighters and veterans, hunters and cops and other “real people.”

Then he’d drop into the Record bureau, push his glasses up, take a cup of coffee, and ask “And what have you fellers been up to?”

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Want to see this painting of Zoe the Wonder Dog, in real life? Visit the Wallkill River School Gallery, on Route 17K  in Montgomery, during September. Carrie Jacobson, who’s writing the tale of Zoe the Wonder Dog, is showing her paintings, with the marvelously talented George Hayes of Warwick. The show is on now; the artists’ reception is Saturday, Sept. 12, from 5-7 p.m., and all are invited! Check  out the Wallkill River School website, to the right on this page, for more information.

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 12

The story so far: Zoe, a little, blind lhasa apso, was left at the Pike County shelter when her owner lost his job and had to move in with his wife’s mother, who’s allergic to dogs. He left her at the shelter in the middle of the night, and Kaja, a big red dog, came and took her away. They have made their way through the woods, and crossed the Delaware on a rickety bridge. In Barryville, at the very edge of the river, Samantha and Ashton Morrone are building a fort that’s also a raft. The Morrones own a small hotel on the bank of the river. The kids have brought the dogs inside and begged to keep them both. Angie, their mom, would like agree. Pete, their dad, has said no. The dogs can  stay for the night, but that’s all.

That night, the dogs sleep in a little hallway at the front  of the house. Kaja can’t remember the last time she slept inside a real building. In the winter, she found an abandoned shed where she stayed on a series of frigid, snowing nights. It was half falling down, and missing most of its roof, but it was shelter from the wind. Kaja would curl into a tight ball, her nose deep in her thick, red coat. She was grateful for the shelter. If she’d had something like this, though, she’d have stayed all winter.

Zoe snuggles into Kaja’s warm side, and the big dog’s smooth breathing lulls her. She loves the smell of this dog’s red fur, and she loves how strong and muscled her body is beneath. Kaja is warm, too, and little Zoe is tired and drained and cold, and the warmth feels fine on this cool September night.

In the morning, Angie comes downstairs first. She looks through window of the hallway door, sees the dogs sleeping together there on the cool floor. The big dog is looking at her, a question in her eyes. The little dog is fast asleep, and as Angie watches, the big dog puts her head down again and snuggles around her friend.

Angie puts the coffee on and starts a pan of oatmeal. It’s September, and it’s cold enough this morning for oatmeal. Another fall, another year, another summer vanished into a poorly remembered patch of rain and heat and sun. This year, she’d promised herself in the spring, this year I will spend my days outdoors. I’ll sit on the deck in the long summer twilights, and I’ll pay attention to the birds and the woods and the river. I’ll live outside, like I did when I was  a kid, like my kids do now, and I will savor each moment of sun and heat, each single drop of summer.

But somehow, all those promises had drained away in the bustle of work and visitors that is summer in a hotel in the Catskills. Now the air has the bite of fall, the kids start school next week, and their hotel has its first vacancies since May. Summer is over, and somehow, Angie is surprised. And a little sad, too.

“Pete,” she says when he comes downstairs, “I want to keep the dogs.”

“Oh, Ange, we can’t keep them, honey. I mean, I’d like to keep them, too, but we just can’t. You know that.”

“No, I don’t know that. I don’t know when having a hotel meant you couldn’t have a life. Couldn’t have a dog.”

“Two dogs,” he said.

“But you and I both had dogs growing up. I think it’s important for the kids.”

“Angie, you know that you would end up taking care of any dog we had. The kids won’t do it, not after the first couple weeks, you know that.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do know that. And you know what? That’s fine. I guess I say it’s for the kids, but really, I miss having a dog. I really do. And look at them,” she says, pointing through the window. “Look at them.”

Pete looks. He sees two dirty, scruffy dogs. One is old and blind. The other looks like she could bite your leg off, and might, given half a chance. He looks at the dogs and he sees veterinarian bills, and grooming bills, and arguments with the state health department. He sees cars full of dog hair and rugs full of muddy footprints. He sees poop in the yard and vacations either changed by bringing a dog or made more expensive by leaving it. And then he looks at his wife’s face and sees a kind of longing he hasn’t seen since before the children were born.

“One,” he says. “I’ll agree to keep one.”

“But Pete, look at them! We can’t split them up.”

“Honey, it’s just too much. If we didn’t have the hotel, I’d say keep them both and get five more. But we just can’t. You know that.”

She does.

But she also knows that these dogs need to be together. So after Pete leaves for work, and before the kids wake up, she feeds the dogs, using most  of the small bag of food she bought last night, and tossing in some left-over turkey, too. She pets them both, buries her nose deep in the coat of the big red dog, picks the little blind dog up and hugs her close, and then opens the side door.

“Go on,” she says, and finds tears stinging her eyes, spilling over onto her face. “Go on, you two. Wherever you’re headed, I know you’re going together. Go on, now, and be safe.”

And she wipes her tears and smiles, watching the two friends trot away, following the river south.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com