Photography by Rich Gigli
Peggy's Cove
Peggy’s Cove is a small rural community located on the eastern shore of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia. Known as the idyllic fishing village, Peggy’s Cove is one of Canada’s most popular attraction and an artist’s paradise.
By Jeffrey Page
Allen Ginsberg was the greatest American poet. You could argue with me on that.
But if we sat in a room and read aloud from “Howl” about “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,” maybe I could convince you of his greatness.
Or we could read “Kaddish,” Ginsberg’s heartbreaking elegy to his mother: “She’d had a stroke – Too thin, shrunk on her bones – age come to Naomi – now broken into white hair – loose dress on her skeleton – face sunk, old! withered – cheek of crone – One hand stiff – heaviness of forties & menopause reduced by one heart stroke, lame now – wrinkles – a scar on her head, the lobotomy – ruin, the hand dripping downwards to death.” Could I convince you with that?
Recently, after seeing the movie “Howl,” I recalled that in 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning was constitutionally protected speech, an editor at The Record in Hackensack, where I was a reporter, asked me to get a comment from Ginsberg. I didn’t get a comment; I got a poem.
I reached him at his apartment on the Lower East Side. He asked me if I could type fast. I said I could. He dictated four stanzas. Citing space limitations, the editors chopped the last three, which included his reference to the Roman poet Juvenal’s observation that great nations often reduce themselves to longing for nothing more than bread and circuses. Also cut was a line in the first stanza because it contained a factual error: Patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels was not old American wisdom but from Samuel Johnson.
You may have read “Howl” and “Kaddish,” “Mind Breaths” and “Father Death Blues,” but you’ve never read Ginsberg’s furious response in full to the question of the phony politics of the flag-burning issue. Here it is:
“Old American wisdom: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. These vicious persons, including President Bush, are attacking the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, attempting to deface the laws of freedom that are America’s pride for the cheapest vulgarest political slobbish un-American motive since the Ku Klux Klan put on white sheets and burned crosses to scare black soul in America.
“Ayatollah went hysterical over blasphemy of his symbols. The president and his Republicans are sharing the degraded mentality of Deng Xiaoping and the mullahs in trying to suppress symbolic dissent by destroying the constitutional foundations of this republic.
“They should all be impeached and be thrown out of congress for their vile chauvinism, which only detracts from their own murderous behavior and narcotics smuggling in Central America. It’s a flag waving distraction from the fact that they’re doing nothing to stop the ecological destruction of the planet. Bread and circuses, indeed. If they taint the Bill of Rights and claim monopoly on the flag, maybe I’ll be the first to burn it because it isn’t theirs. It’s mine.
“My opinions will survive when they’re eating rotten worms in the grave. If they want to protect something, protect the oceans, the air, and the earth.”
He asked me to read it back to him.
“That’s not half bad,” he said and asked that we send him a copy.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Sunflowers, Tuscany
By Carrie Jacobson
I went to sleep last night, and everything felt OK.
I got up this morning, and after I’d been working for a while, I realized that my back hurt, just under the shoulder blade on my left side.
I started painting professionally and posting paintings to my own blog, The Accidental Artist, a couple years ago.
I was doing something on my blog the other day, and looked at a screen and learned that I’d made 500 blog postings.
(That also means 500 paintings… in fact, it means well more than 500 paintings, as they are not all posted).
I woke up just a while ago, and it was springtime.
Now, it’s the last day of November.
How life happens while we are engaged in living!
***
Sunflowers, Tuscany: Oil on canvas, 30×40.
Please email me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and shipping/delivery information.
Photography by Rich Gigli
Devil's Tower
Devils Tower is a sacred place for Native Americans. According to the National Park Service, more than 20 tribes have potential cultural affiliation with Devils Tower National Monument. The Devils Tower is a 1,267-foot tall volcanic rock formation in the Black Hills region of Wyoming. The formation was first discovered by explorers in 1875 during a geological survey of the area. The surveyors took one of its many Indian names, “Bad God’s Tower” and interpreted it as “The Devil’s Tower.”
By Michael Kaufman
One day last week my wife went to Akin’s Pharmacy in Warwick to have a prescription filled. Akin’s has been our family’s pharmacy since we moved to this area some 10 years ago. We appreciate the attentive personal service offered by the pharmacists, Robert Newhard and his sister Jean, and their associates and support staff. In the last few years we have shunned the insistent urgings of our respective employers’ health insurance companies to use their mail-order services to have our prescriptions filled. Their hard-sell approach includes discount offers and other incentives designed to convince us of the advantages of abandoning our home-town pharmacy in favor of an impersonal, far away post-office box.
As she awaited her turn to be served, my wife overheard a conversation between an Akin’s customer and employee. The customer, an older woman with a physical disability, had just expressed her shock at the high cost of her prescribed medicine. “Medicare always covered it before. Why aren’t they covering it now?” As the employee gently explained that she had arrived at the perfidious “donut-hole” stage of her coverage, my wife heard another patron grumble something about “Obamacare.”
The woman said she didn’t know what to do. She needed her medicine but she didn’t have the money to pay for it. After conferring with the pharmacist, the employee returned with the filled prescription. “We’ll put it on your tab,” she said, “and the pharmacist will call them and try to see what we can do to get it covered.”
Several lessons may be drawn from this episode. Obviously, no mail-order pharmacy would have provided this woman with her medicine without payment. The same is true of big-chain drug stores like CVS and Rite-Aid, both of which have branches in Warwick. But this incident also illustrates the widespread ignorance on the part of citizens who are unfamiliar with the implications of the healthcare-reform legislation passed last year. For all its faults, “Obamacare” aims to eliminate the donut hole—that is, if the Republicans about to assume control of Congress allow reform to go into effect.
The donut hole is a carryover from Medicare legislation enacted in 2006 during the Bush administration, when elected officials who are in the pocket of the big pharmaceutical companies insisted on its inclusion. After a Medicare beneficiary surpasses the prescription drug coverage limit, they are financially responsible for the entire cost of prescription drugs until the expense reaches the “catastrophic coverage” threshold.
This paved the way for the big health insurance companies to start selling “gap insurance” to those seniors who could afford it. According to a study done in 2007, premiums for plans offering gap coverage are roughly double those charged by the same insurers for their standard plans.
With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (so-called Obamacare), people who fall within the donut hole receive a $250 rebate within three months of reaching the coverage gap to help with payments. (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began mailing rebate checks earlier this year.) The donut hole is slated to be completely phased out by 2020, but that seems a long way off and we are currently witness to an all-out assault against “entitlements.”
As U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote recently, “The billionaires and their supporters in Congress are hell-bent on taking us back to the 1920s, eliminating all traces of social legislation designed to protect working families, the elderly, children and the disabled. No ‘social contract’ for them. They want it all. They want to privatize or dismantle Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and let the elderly, the sick and the poor fend for themselves.
“They want to expand our disastrous trade policies so corporations can continue throwing U.S. workers out on the street as they outsource jobs to China and other countries known for low wages. Some want to eliminate the minimum wage so American workers can have the ‘freedom’ to work for $3 an hour. They want to eliminate or slash the Department of Education, making it harder for working-class kids to get a decent education, child care or the help they need to go to college.
“They want to curtail the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy so ExxonMobil can remain the most profitable corporation in history and oil and coal companies can continue to pollute our air and water.
“They want to make sure billionaire hedge-fund managers have a lower federal tax rate than middle-class teachers, nurses, firefighters and police officers by maintaining a loophole in the tax code known as ‘carried interest.’
“We know what billionaires and their Republican supporters want. They’ve been upfront about it. But what about Democrats? Will President Obama continue to reach out and compromise with people who have made it abundantly clear that the only agreement they want is unconditional surrender? Or will he use the powerful skills we saw in his 2008 presidential campaign and bring working families, young people, the elderly and the poor together to fight these attacks on their well-being?
“Will Senate Democrats continue to pass tepid legislation, or will they use their majority status to protect the interests of ordinary Americans and—and for a change—put Republicans on the defensive?”“
While it’s true billionaires and their supporters are ‘fired up and ready to go,’ there’s another, more important truth: There are a lot more of us than there are of them. Now is the time for us to stand together, educate and organize. Now is the time to roll back this orgy of greed.”
This is a lot easier said than done. So far the billionaires have done a good job of misleading people by pointing the finger and blaming “big government,” “government spending,” and “Obamacare” for all our country’s woes. But Bernie is right. We see the victims of the orgy of greed each day of our lives, even in our own little drug store in Warwick.
Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.
By Shawn Dell Joyce
Thanksgiving is a holiday built around food. We gather, we gorge, and sometimes acknowledge the hands of the cook, perhaps thanking the divine, but rarely do we honor the hands that feed us.
Growing the food that feeds our county is one of the most thankless and low paying jobs a person could have. In 2002, the median net income for a US farmer was $15,848, while hired hands and migrant workers averaged around $10,000 per year. Farming has become so unpopular that the category was recently removed from the U.S. Census, and federal prison inmates now outnumber farmers.
Migrant pickers often put in long hours, up to twelve hour days, earning about forty-five cents for each thirty-two pound bucket of tomatoes. This amount hasn’t risen in over 30 years. At that rate, workers have to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes to earn minimum wage. Most farm workers don’t get sick days, overtime, or health care. Some farmers often don’t fare much better.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we stopped putting such an emphasis on “cheap” and instead put an emphasis on “fair” maybe those hands that grow our food could afford to eat as well. Raising farm wages would have little effect on supermarket prices. Mainly because farmers and farm workers are paid only about six to nine cents out of every retail dollar spent.
If we raised farm wages by 35 percent and passed that cost to consumers, it would raise the retail price by only a few pennies according to the Center for Immigrant Studies. The total cost to consumers for all fresh produce would add up to less than $34 per year, per family. If we raised wages by 70 percent, that cost would be about $67. Divide this over 52 weekly trips to the supermarket and you’re looking at spending barely a dollar more each week. Wouldn’t you spend that much to know that people didn’t suffer to feed you?
In January 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor informed Congress that farm workers were “a labor force in significant economic distress.” The report cited farm workers’ “low wages, sub-poverty annual earnings, (and) significant periods of un- and underemployment” adding that “agricultural worker earnings and working conditions are either stagnant or in decline.”
For agriculture to be sustainable, it must provide a living for those who work our land. Let’s honor the hands that feed us by restoring the dignity of a fair wage to farmers and farm workers.
Shawn Dell Joyce is a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School Montgomery. Shawn@zestoforange.com
Nigel
By Carrie Jacobson
I am thankful today. I am thankful every day.
I am thankful to live in a world with sunshine and beauty. Thankful to have friends and family members I love, and who love me back, no matter what.
I am thankful for the dogs and cats who live with us, and who come into my life through painting.
I am thankful for the gift that painting is in my life, and for this amazing chance I’ve been given to start again, to start anew, at the age of 54.
I am thankful now to have a job, and an income, and to not be scared all the time.
I am thankful to be alive.
By Jeffrey Page
If in 25 years someone sits down to write about the demise of quality journalism in America, he or she might want to devote half a chapter to last Saturday’s edition of The New York Times.
Unlike some other big papers, The Times hasn’t fallen into the trap of spending its resources on the classic tabloid mix of gossip, sports, sex, news of television and movie industries, and Lindsay Lohan’s latest predicament. But then along came Page 1 of Saturday’s paper, and reasonable people are left wondering what flavor Kool-Aid the editors were sipping when, with one decision, they turned the front page into a joke.
The lead story Saturday was about a $625 million settlement of health claims by about 10,000 workers against New York City resulting from the Sept. 11 attack. An important story. Next to it was a piece about labor unions agreeing to dual wage schedules as a means of preserving their jobs. An important story.
There was a compelling story out of Port-au-Prince about Haitian canal workers joining the struggle to prevent the spread of cholera, an extremely important story that the editors buried at the bottom of the page.
It should have gone on top but was usurped by a story with this headline: “School Days Without Cuts or Cowlicks? Only in Pictures.”
School photographers, it turns out, are offering digital retouching of students’ pictures. Surely you agree that this story on Page 1 amounts to an unhealthy waste of space. The editors beg to differ; they allowed the reporter to write 33 paragraphs to tell her story. She focused on a towheaded first grader at Bay Ridge Prep in Brooklyn who went to school on picture day with a scab under his right eye, the result of a playground spill. The story then centered on the kid’s parents celebrating the photographer’s removal of the blotch, and wound up as a bizarre discussion of whether excising a kid’s blemishes is a form of revisionist family history.
Thirty-three paragraphs! And with this little fact tucked unobtrusively into the fifth graph: The practice of school photographers digitally retouching pictures of kids who don’t look so good because of their momentary or lifelong imperfections is about six years old. Meaning that story has been around since 2004.
Moreover, the reporter made a prep school kid her subject when there are 1.1 million other kids going to public schools in New York. They have picture day every year, too.
Note: The story about unions agreeing to bi-level wage schedules – an agreement that could foreshadow an extremely difficult time for organized labor in coming years – got 26 paragraphs. And the story about cholera in Haiti got 32, making it – in the freakish judgment of the editors – equal in importance to the story of parents worrying about one of the marks of childhood appearing on a school picture.
The next time some newspaper editors get together to bemoan plummeting circulation and readership figures, they ought to go back to Saturday’s Page 1. If they fail to understand that readers don’t like to be played for fools with garbage like that, they reveal that they are the fools.
Up here in the Hudson Valley, we pay $2 for a copy of the Times. For $2 we want news, not fluff about the inconveniences of the privileged class.
Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Bob Dylan
By Bob Gaydos
The time has come, admittedly much to my chagrin, to wrap this thinkers thing up and return to the real world of Rand Paul, Bristol Palin and Jersey Shore. Lord, what fools we mortals be. (Yeah, I lifted it.)
Some Eliot:
* * *
By Shawn Dell Joyce
I was invited to speak to our county’s Planning Board about ways to localize our economy. We first have to realize what our assets are, what resources we have that we can build on. In Orange County, we have a picturesque countryside, a rich history, a growing arts community, many small family farms, a few large scale industries, an international airport, and an underemployed population.
We also have to take notice of where our money leaks out of the local economy (called an “import leak”) and how we can plug that leak with a local source to keep our money flowing in the local economy. Two big areas are energy and food.
Lots of our local bucks go to pay for electricity and oil generated outside our community. This is a huge export leak, with a good chunk of our paychecks going to home heat, electric, gas, and fuel oil. A leak this big will need more than one plug.
–If we support large scale local power generation like Taylor Biomass, we can generate power locally that stays in the region. If we could work with Taylor, we could make it our own local utility and get a much better rate than dirty coal, or nuclear could provide. It would also generate local jobs.
–Home heating costs could be localized by creating our own local source of biofuel; pellets made from crop residues. This is already in the works, and provide local farmers a use for crop residues (press them into pellets) and local homes a source for inexpensive carbon-neutral heating. Let’s incentivize this program and encourage this local industry.
–Other home heating and power costs could be greatly reduced and localized through the PACE program (Property-Assessed Clean Energy) This national-level program encourages counties to offer low-interest rate loans through property taxes to pay for solar hot water, solar electric, energy-efficiency upgrades, and other “green” home improvements. This involves a local bank loan, local green energy provider and builders, and generates great LOCAL economic impact while lowering homeowner’s monthly bills.
Probably no other program, instituted on a county level, could have a bigger impact on reducing our monthly bills and generating local green jobs and economic impact than the PACE program. A similar program was set up in Cambridge, MA, designed to lower small businesses operating expenses by connecting them with energy efficiency auditors, local banks and local upgrade providers (insulators, contractors, etc). The money all stayed local and small businesses were more solvent.
Additionally, Orange County is part of the food shed for New York City. Much of what our farmers grow gets shipped elsewhere, meanwhile we import tons of food for our schools and restaurants from other states. It is criminal that our schools buy apples from Washington State while our apple farmers have surplus crops rotting in storage. This is a huge economic leak.
If our county mandated local schools and kitchens to order directly from local farms, even incentivized the process to level the cost difference, it would make a huge difference in the bottom line of our local farms. A way to plug this leak is set up an agent who would have local farms grow specifically for several school districts. Perhaps work with PTA’s to offer local apples as fundraisers instead of Florida citrus as well. Create salad bars as part of the school lunch program, and connect farms and schools through a county agent to make it happen. Winter Sun Farms in New Paltz already offers industrial-scale lots of frozen produce from local farms to school districts.
Other communities depend on attracting large corporations and big box stores as a way of bringing in more economic activity. This strategy has been proven to work in reverse as small independent businesses make up about half of the economic backbone of our communities. A recent study revealed that $1 earned by a local farmer had the impact of $2 on the farmer’s community because it changed hands so many times locally.
“About 42 percent of our economy is “place based” or created through small, locally-owned businesses,” notes Economist and author Michael Shuman. He estimates that we could expand this figure to 70 percent or more, by localizing some of our main expenditures. In the process, we would boost our local economy, and save money at the same time.
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning sustainable artist and writer and director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery.