By Shawn Dell Joyce
As the weather warms, the tranquility of the Wallkill Valley is punctuated by the calls of red-winged blackbirds and the constant drone of lawnmowers. We put a lot of effort into our perfect lawns, but is it really worth it?

We pour 10 times more chemicals on our lawns than farmers use in their fields, according to my friends at Soons Farm in New Hampton. This makes lawns toxic to wildlife, soil-microorganisms and earthworms, and polluting local water supplies. Up to a third of bagged household waste going to our landfills is lawn trimmings and leaves raked from our yards.

Traditional gas powered lawn mowers are responsible for 5 percent of our air pollution according to the Environmental Protection Agency. One gas mower running for an hour emits the same amount of pollutants as eight new cars driving 55 mph for the same amount of time, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Even the innocuous Weedeater results in 21 times more emissions than the typical family car, while the leaf blower can emit up to 34 times more, according to Eartheasy.com.

All this adds up to about 800 million gallons of gas burned each year in the quest for the perfect patch. But, about 17 million gallons of that fuel doesn’t quite make it to the mower tank and winds up spilled on the ground. That’s more than the Exxon Valdez spilled in 1989, and chances are that most homeowners do not clean it up. If that spilled fuel is left to evaporate into the air, it results in smog-forming ozone when cooked by heat and sunlight, and seeps into our water supply.

If your mower happens to have a two-cycle engine, it releases 25 to 30 percent of its oil and gas unburned into the air, along with particulate matter, carbon dioxide, and other ingredients of smog. This unhealthy soup we breathe contributes to cancer, and damages our hearts, lungs, and immune systems.

Want to lessen the environmental impact of your lawn?

The “greenest” thing you can do is convert your lawn to a vegetable garden and replace the turf with lovely raised beds of edible greens.

If that is too crunchy for your taste, how about trading in those gas guzzlers for the old-fashioned human-powered kind of mower? Reel mowers are easier to use, quiet, non-polluting. And you don’t have to worry about spilling gas. With the money you save on gas alone, you could buy a good pair of clippers for the bushes and a scythe for whacking weeds.

If you want to take the work out of lawn care, consider investing in electric mowers and weed whackers. Electric mowers range in price from $150 to $450, and the average cost in electricity to power the mower for one year is about five bucks, with no spilled gas and fewer emissions. Propane powered lawn equipment is a good choice when your lawn is the size of a golf course.

Use your brain instead of herbicides. If your lawn has dandelions, then your soil has a high pH level. Lower it with sulfur, or spot treat individual dandelions or poison ivy with a shot of vinegar.

Set up a compost pile, or buy a composter for leaves and lawn clippings. Use your composted yard waste and vegetable trimmings to build healthy soil on your lawn.

Shawn Dell Joyce is the director of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. www.WallkillRiverSchool.com

Jojo

By Carrie Jacobson

Usually, I use a lot of paint. But there are times when I use almost none at all. I like both outcomes.

It’s the same in life, I think. And I guess the trick is learning when to go for heavy and when to go for light.

I don’t think the answer is easy or clear-cut. But I do think that if I listen hard, and go with what I’m feeling, I’ll make the right choice.

I quit my day job this week. Well, gave notice.

Yes, in a horrible economy, with not much light showing at the end of the tunnel, I am walking away from a paying job… so that I can make art for a living.

My husband and I made this decision easily, in December, and have hemmed and hawed ever since, saying we’d stay here until the house sells, until the path is clear, until we know what the outcome will be.

I don’t think we can know it until we commit ourselves to a choice.

So. Lots of paint? Not much? Jojo looks pretty good either way.

Think good thoughts for me.

By Emily Theroux
When Rick Perry was still in the running for the GOP Republican nomination, he called folks like Mitt Romney “vulture capitalists.”

The Mittster (half Mitt, half monster) made short work of Perry, as he later did of both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, by bombarding unfortunate primary states with brutal attack ads.

It’s quite true that Romney, as has often been said of him, lacks a certain basic empathy for other human beings, at least those to whom he is not related by blood or marriage. But as intensely repellent as I find Mitt Romney, even I thought that perhaps Perry was going about half a mile too far down one of those winding Texas roads when he compared Mitt with what we used to call a “turkey buzzard” in North Florida.

Then the Obama campaign released a powerful two-minute warning to those who believe that Romney’s “business credentials” are going to help him skip across the finish line in November. It came in the form of a new campaign ad featuring former steelworkers still bitterly angry that the jobs many of them had held down for 35 years had been callously slashed after Mitt the Ripper’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, announced to investors that they were going to Kansas City in 1993 to start hacking the dead wood from their newest “acquisition,” GST Steel.

“[Bain Capital] borrowed millions to modernize the facility, but it also used the borrowed funds to pay itself back for its initial investment in GST,” said Dave Helling of The Kansas City Star. “In 2001 – two years after Romney left Bain Capital – GST Steel declared bankruptcy, leaving more than 700 people out of work. … Obama supporters said Romney’s departure did not absolve him of responsibility for GST’s demise or its workers’ troubles, which included reduced health and pension benefits.”

“You load something up with debt – debt you know is going to cause it to fail – and you’re able to walk away from the misery you caused so many people,” Helling quoted David Foster, who negotiated for GST’s unionized workers, as saying. “That to me is all I need to know about the value statement of this particular candidate.”

“I am Mitt Romney, Destroyer of Livelihoods”
Romney is staking his entire campaign on his potential appeal to independent voters as a highly successful free-market business pioneer who “created tens of thousands of jobs” during his 15-year tenure as CEO of Bain. The conceit he wishes to project, however, relies on the willingness of the public to view him favorably as “Mitt Romney, Job Creator,” rather than “Mitt Romney, Destroyer of Livelihoods.” He’s happy to boast about Bain’s “success record” at bringing fledgling start-ups like Staples up to speed or nursing moribund companies like KB Toys and Totes, the umbrella company (which later merged with Isotoner), back to life, yet he has never been too keen on fessing up to the downside of the private equity racket. The tools in the raider’s toolkit include “roll-ups” (which force one or more firms in the same industry to merge in order to cut jobs, as Romney did with a company called Ampak in 1992), “drive-by-deals” (investing in a start-up with the goal of a quick exit strategy), and “buy, strip, and flip” (buying out a target firm, usually with a leveraged buyout, stripping most of the equity, and getting out quickly).

“I never thought of what I do for a living as ‘job creation,'” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

That blunt reaction, from a business partner who knew Romney well, puts what such firms actually do in relatively matter-of-fact terms. Equity capitalism is by nature an opportunistic business model that oozed into the nasty little crevices left behind by Reaganomics’ “trickle-down” theory, after it failed utterly to dribble a scrap of anything down to the middle and lower classes. The faucets of opportunity ran bone-dry in working-class neighborhoods that bore the brunt of recession, decreasing tax revenues, and increasing unemployment, while fountains of obscene wealth were being showered on those who had already climbed the ladder (or were born on its top rung).

Returning to full employment in this country by creating the kinds of stable jobs that once paid a living wage – and provided much-needed benefits as well as a social safety net for retirees – is no longer even compatible with the interests of this new, radical brand of capitalism. Downsizing the workforce, outsourcing jobs, allowing the infrastructure to crumble, and drastically cutting spending on social programs are a sign of the times and the wave of the future. The jobs that Romney so heartlessly eliminated are not coming back – and don’t expect him to feel any compunction about it. Empathy is simply not in his vocabulary.

“Success” is measured by whoever is doing the measuring, and when they are doing it. A successful outcome in 1992 for Romney the businessman would have been manipulating the acquired company’s structure in such a configuration that it would “earn” the greatest possible amount of profit for investors, while a successful outcome in 2012 for Romney the candidate would be convincing independent voters that his true goal is creating thousands of well-paying jobs for unemployed workers. (A successful outcome for the former employees of failed companies like GST Steel and Ampac would have been convincing a stoic and unresponsive Romney, for the first time in his privileged life, to view workers, rather than corporations, as people.)

This breakthrough would require a level of heart and soul that Romney may not ultimately possess. Consider the following arresting fact, just for the sake of argument: An opinion piece in Sunday’s New York Times titled “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths” revealed the startling results of two recent psychological studies. The first demonstrated that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” as opposed to only 1 percent of the general populace. The second study revealed that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat, and break the law.

People who are incapable of empathy or remorse, who make stuff up about their records and conceal wrongdoing they’ve engaged in throughout their lifetimes, people like the Enron Gang who commit accounting fraud, people who think (or know) they won’t get caught for tax evasion, people who participate in “toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, and perjury” all fall under op-ed writer William Deresiewicz’s withering scrutiny.

No wonder Richard Cohen of The Washington Post said of Romney, “Lying isn’t a sin; it’s a business plan.” (And please note: neither Deresiewicz nor I called Mitt Romney a “psychopath.” His penchant for prevarication, however, has been widely observed and remarked upon by the press. Daniel Benen, formerly of Talking Points Memo and now writing for The Rachel Maddow Blog, has been keeping a weekly weblog recording the plethora of lies that Romney is caught telling every day – without even having access to all the ones he gets away with.)

‘What Do Psychopaths Want?’
But still it’s worth asking: What do psychopaths actually do? While there is no established psychiatric definition, certain personality characteristics predominate among people categorized as psychopathic:

1) Psychopaths have been observed to be almost entirely bereft of empathy and unable to appreciate other people’s experiences or motivations. (When Bain was in the process of shutting down a failed company, according to a former employee, Romney never suggested doing anything to save workers’ jobs. “It was very clinical,” he said. “Like a doctor. When the patient is dead, you just move on to the next patient.”)

2) Psychopaths tend to be intolerant, shallow, fearless, and unable to feel shame. (“I’m unemployed, too,” Mitt the Multimillionaire” told a group of jobless citizens; he failed to see why that statement wasn’t funny and might even be offensive. One former staffer said Romney had “a particular blind spot for people as people.”)

3) Psychopaths can be extremely anxious people. (“Mitt was always worried that things weren’t going to work out – he never took big risks,” said one of his colleagues. “Everything was very measurable. I think Mitt had a tremendous amount of insecurity and fear of failure.”)

4) Psychopaths can be pathological liars who frequenty exploit and manipulate other people. (“The president is planning on cutting $1 trillion out of military spending.” “We’ve got a president in office three years, and he does not have a jobs plan yet. I’ve got one out there already and I’m not even president, yet.” “I went off on my own. I didn’t inherit money from my parents.” Romney also said once “Obamacare” is implemented, “government at all levels” will “consume” 50 percent of the American economy.”)

5) Psychopaths can be impulsive and irresponsible, and often have a low tolerance for boredom. (“It is the opinion of some of Romney’s friends … that the repetitive business of campaigning simply bores him and that this boredom is responsible for the fairly sizable gap between the charismatic man they know in private and the battery-powered figure who often appears in public,” wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York magazine.)

6) Psychopaths frequently say strange and incoherent things. (All right, I’m still not making any accusations, but just consider the following statements: “I like to fire people who perform services to me.” “The trees here are just about the right height.” “Strange things are happening to me.” “Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?”)

But perhaps the most lasting effect Romney’s strange personality has made on an institution to date was his vainglorious self-regard and creepy propensity for inspiring other people to emulate him. “Bain partners think the profits they made are a sign of their brilliance,” said David Foster, a former steelworkers union official who negotiated labor contracts with GST management from 1994 until the company’s bankruptcy. “It’s not brilliance. It’s lurking around the corner and mugging somebody.”

Just wait and see if we fail to communicate our alarm about this strange bird to enough other people, what kind of mark a Romney presidency might leave on the White House.

By Bob Gaydos

Mr. Methane

“So you know how some people use religion to say that gay marriage should not be allowed and others say that as long as it doesn’t affect them they don’t care, that it should be an individual choice?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. So you know how people add dressings — Russian, Italian, ranch — when they eat salads?”

“Yeah.”

“So how come when I eat my salad with no dressing people look at me funny and tell me I’m weird? Isn’t that my individual choice?”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

(Long pause for effect.) “No … you’re weird. That’s just messed up. A salad with no dressing? Dry? How about oil and vinegar?”

“I hate vinegar. I do put ketchup on my lettuce, though. And it’s tomato ketchup.”

“Eww. That’s disgusting. What’s wrong with you? This sounds like it might stem from some repressed childhood crisis.”

“But it’s tomato ketchup.”

* * *

The two Bobs have been meeting over coffee and buttered, toasted sesame bagels for some time, figuring out what’s wrong with the world, how it easily could be fixed if someone would only let them and agreeing that their sons were going to do whatever the hell they pleased, so it made no sense to worry about them. Although they did.

This particular morning, there was a shortage of weighty topics, though and having exhausted salads without dressing they moved on to dinosaur farts.

“So,” says the Bob who likes dressing on his salad, “I saw this report from the BBC. It says the dinosaurs, in effect, farted themselves into extinction.”

“What?”

“Yeah. You know how cows produce an incredible amount of methane, which is the scientific name for cow farts, and methane is one of those greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming?”

“Yeah. OK …?”

“Well, some scientists in England figured if cows today produce 50 million to 100 million cubic tons of methane a year, which sounds like a s**tload of methane, the biggest dinosaur species, like the Brachiosaurus, must have created even more.”

“Seriously, they got money to study this instead of why boring soccer games cause riots?”

“Yeah. A bunch of scientists from universities in England and Scotland figured out mathematically that the big dinosaurs that lived about 150 million years ago created about 520 million cubic tons of gas every year, which must have really stunk up the joint. But they say it also made the earth much warmer — 18 degrees hotter — than it is today and that helped melt the ice caps and glug, glug, no more dinosaurs.”

“No s**t?”

“No. And if you remember your biology, those dinosaurs were vegetarians.”

“So?”

“So it mean they were basically eating salads without dressing and farting themselves to death. A cautionary tale if there ever was one.”

“Eat your bagel.”

“Fine. Wanna hear some good news on the save-the-earth front?”

“Sure.”

“OK, so some students and professors from Yale were apparently wandering through the Amazon rain forest on an educational expedition and found fungi that — get this — eat plastic.”

“Get outta here.”

“Really. There’s a paper on it. They gathered up a bunch of plants and snooped around inside them and found a couple of fungi that eat and digest polyurethane. In fact, they don’t need anything else to survive. And you know the greenies keep telling us we’re going to be buried alive in polyurethane. Maybe the fungi can save us.”

“Well, I guess that would be a good thing. But is polyurethane even a plastic?”

“I don’t know. I think so, but that’s not the point. When did you become such a science whiz anyway? The point is, it’s in everything we use and throw away. Maybe the fungi can be used to get rid of some of it. Cool, huh?”

“Yeah, great. But tell me this — what happens after the fungi eat the polyurethane?”

“Whaddyou mean?”

“It’s digestion, right? What do the fungi give off as part of the process? Are they putting more methane into the atmosphere?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. But how much could fungi fart in comparison to cows or dinosaurs? And it probably wouldn’t smell as bad.”

“Yeah, probably not. All right, gotta go. See you next week.”

“Right. Hey, maybe try a little honey mustard dressing on your salad next time, instead of tomato ketchup.”

(Part of the preceding actually happened. The rest was made up, but entirely plausible.)

bob@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

It’s been 10 years since the death of Bill Lowry, one of the great people of journalism. To appreciate how great, let us consider for a moment his complete opposite.

That would be Rebekah Brooks, until recently the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s herd of British newspapers. Now, The New York Times reports, she’s about to be charged with withholding information in the hacking scandal.

Recently The Times noted Brooks’ testimony before a Parliamentary investigating committee and her perhaps unintended revelation that her professional life was everything it should not have been. She told her questioners that she “kept in touch by telephone, text message and email” with her favorite British politicians, including David Cameron, the current prime minister. Hmmm.

The Times continued, “They met at lunches and dinners. They socialized at cocktail parties, birthday parties, summer outings, Christmas celebrations and, in one heady instance, on a yacht in Greece.”

So there you are, a reader in Britain trying to get unbiased information when the person who runs your morning paper is having a high old time with the people she’s supposed to cover.

Enough of Brooks.

In the mid-seventies, Bill Lowry was the Sullivan County bureau chief of The Times Herald-Record. He made sure that if you were going to work for him, you understood certain rules that only a blithering idiot could misinterpret. No, um, if invited, you would not sail the Greek isles with the people you cover.

In fact, you accept nothing but words from the people you write about, and you always check the accuracy of those words. He insisted we stick to a bit of old Chicago wisdom: You trust your mother but cut the cards.

If Bill was interviewing a source at the local luncheonette, he would insist on picking up the check. No one in his right mind ever would have believed that Lowry could be bought with a cup of coffee and a cheese Danish but he worried how it would look if a reader walked in at the moment that a mayor or a political party leader grabbed the check. At such moments, if struggle was futile, Bill would leave a $5 tip.

We worked in an office a block from Kaplan’s Delicatessen in Monticello, a place that made great mushroom and barley soup. It was snowing and bitterly cold one night when Anne Kaplan – she owned the deli and was mayor of Monticello – was closing up. She brought two quarts of mushroom and barley to the bureau. “To keep you guys warm,” she said and walked out.

Lowry ran after her to return the soup. Then he went to a nearby diner and bought coffee and sandwiches for his reporters. Annie thought Bill was crazy, and of course he was no such thing. We loved Lowry.

He and his brand of journalism infuriated a lot of people who were used to being palsy-walsy with reporters and editors. An example: Bill and I were covering local court one night. A woman faced charges of prostitution and theft of a john’s credit cards. The john didn’t want the case to be in the newspaper and the judge ordered the courtroom cleared – of the press and no one else. Understanding a perversion of judicial power when he saw it, Bill told me to leave but he refused to budge.

As a cop escorted him out, Bill yelled to me, “Write this story!”

When he wrote about unusual patterns in racetrack payouts he was threatened with physical harm. On any number of stories he spotted headlights in his rearview mirror that may or may not have been back there a little too long.

His heart was as enormous as his conscience. One example: He allowed some local characters to pass the time in the bureau including an old man we knew only as Mr. Barash. Mr. Barash appeared to be about 80 and spoke with a thick Yiddish accent. He would sit and stare out the big front window. “Nice day,” he would say more than once no matter what the weather. When it was time for lunch, Bill would get an extra sandwich for his guest.

Bill chased important stories such as the fact that some of the most god awful slums in Newburgh were owned by some of the most respectable politicians. He wrote compelling stories about the trials and sentencing of the serial killer Son of Sam. He wrote about the treatment of poor people by the affluent, and about the conditions under which poor people had to live.

He sought to relieve misery by exposing it for as long as it took to change, possibly the result of his education by the Redemptorist Brothers at an upstate monastery where he came this close to becoming a priest. Instead he joined the Army. Later he switched to journalism, and practiced the brothers’ fourth vow after poverty, chastity and obedience – perseverance.

Later in his career, Bill went to The Record in Hackensack where some assignment editors liked his writing and sent him to write about the 1986 World Series. The Red Sox beat the Mets 1-0 in the first game, and Bill wrote: “So here it is, the opening of the World Series. Some 55,000 fans jam Shea Stadium to overflowing. Millions more watch on television across the country. Can Christmas be far behind? It’s The Game. And it’s a bore.”

He believed that animals – but especially dogs – had more integrity than people. He brought countless strays home to his place in Walker Valley. He once told a colleague that the only really important story he ever wrote was one that prevented a horse from being put down.

jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Grand Canyon National Park

Under a Pine at the Grand Canyon

by: Edward Robeson Taylor (1838-1923)

Beneath a friendly, towering pine we lay–
Its sun-smite needles dancing in their bright,
Gem-glittering sheen–and breathed the deep delight
That streamed ecstatic through the veins of day.
Below, the awesome canyon’s vast array
Swam silent in its sea of azure light,
While far beyond, within our wondering sight,
The desert stretched illimitable gray.
Above us screamed a rapture-hearted jay;
And while the breeze swept music to our ears,
Whose murmurs deepened all the joys of rest,
Dream’s noiseless pinions wafted us away,
Beyond the toils and tumults of the years,
To purple-glowing Islands of the Blest.

Photography by Rich Gigli

Wash Day

Oh Monday was our washing day,

and while the clothes were drying,

a wind came whistling through the line

and set them all a-flying.

I saw the shirts and petticoats

go flying off like witches.

I lost (oh bitterly I wept),

I lost my Sunday breeches.

I saw them flying through the air,

alas too late to save them.

A hole was in their ample part,

as if an imp had worn them.   (Author Unknown)

By Emily Theroux

My best friend, Jim, is a Georgia native who escaped the backwaters of the Deep South after growing up there, just as I did. Since 1996, when I wandered one summer afternoon into his Middletown quilt shop, Jim and I have shared a multitude of interests. We’ve walked miles together to stay in shape, collaborated on making pillows and curtains for clients, ranted about the sorry state of American politics, watched Rachel Maddow eviscerate conservatives, traded good books, and gossiped about everything from obnoxious acquaintances to attractive men. Jim taught me how to make quilts, and I helped him figure out how to navigate Facebook. We spend a solid hour or more on Skype every few days, planted in front of our computer screens only blocks apart.

Both of us are married – me for 15 years; Jim, technically, for three-quarters of one. My spouse is a man, and so is his. Last fall, after same-sex marriage became legal in New York, Jim was finally able to wed Gary, his longtime partner, on the 35th anniversary of the day they met.

Jim is a singular individual, not a demographic statistic or a societal scapegoat to be trotted out any time a televangelist needs a reason why God hates hurricane victims, or an office-seeker wants to scare “values voters” for political gain. Jim did not “choose” to be gay (as the ignorant and the powerful alike insist), and his identity encompasses a great deal more than his sexual orientation. In a blog Jim recently began writing, he summed up his reaction to being objectified by politicians who revile him and religious proselytizers who think they can change him: “To put it simply, I am tired of  ‘sitting in the back of the bus.’ I am tired of being labeled. I am tired of being discriminated against. I am tired of religious nutbags calling me ‘evil’ and ‘degenerate’ and blaming me for natural disasters. I am tired of political candidates using me by declaring that I am ‘morally depraved’ and responsible for destroying the ‘sacred family unit,’ while, at the same time, these politicians hide behind Jesus (I was taught that Jesus was all about love, not hate) to justify their relentless prejudices and religious intolerance. To everyone who thinks they’re ‘normal’ and I’m not: How the hell does my being married have any effect on your life?”

Both parties ‘categorize’ voters, but for different reasons

My friend sees himself as a person who happens to have diverse connections to all kinds of other people, not a “gay man” – a distinction that evades those who marginalize other people by assigning them to groups identified by a common race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. The resulting “demographics” have been used by members of both major political parties to make electoral calculations. Democrats tend to focus on “minority” social groups in order to help them succeed in a society steeped in exclusion of the powerless. While their motivations to help the less fortunate may indeed be genuine, Democratic politicians still hope to win the votes of members of the demographic groups they are assisting without losing those of “independents,” whom they cannot so readily categorize. Republicans often isolate targeted social groups in order to demonize them and thereby divide potential voters into “us” (primarily wealthy white businessmen, along with “low-information” voters who hope to emulate their success) versus “them” (Democrats, racial and ethnic minorities, feminists, gays and lesbians, and non-Christians).

A North Carolina amendment making same-sex marriage unconstitutional passed all too easily because it employed gay stereotypes to appeal to the ignorance and bigotry of the majority. Few who voted in favor of it knew that the amendment would also invalidate domestic unions between unmarried opposite-sex couples and dissolve domestic-violence protections. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said advocates of the law were asking the wrong question for a democracy – as often happens when civil rights issues are submitted to the popular vote of a poorly informed electorate that has already been brainwashed against the targeted group. “The question shouldn’t be, ‘How do you feel about same-sex marriage?’ but do you let the majority rule against the rights of the minority?”

The Democrats, although they don’t share the ruthless Republican agenda of targeting gays and lesbians to polarize the electorate, are not entirely blameless when it comes to politicizing them. In 1996, while running for the Illinois state senate, Barack Obama indicated on a survey that he favored legalizing gay marriage, but by the time he ran against black conservative Alan Keyes for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he began to voice “religious reservations.” Polls of churchgoing black voters revealed a general cultural disapproval of gay “sinners,” and Obama needed the vast majority of the black vote to win his Senate seat. When he announced his presidential bid in 2007, Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage but approved of civil unions. By 2011, a spokesman said Obama believed the issue was “best addressed by the states” (a loaded historical reference that angered even Obama’s gay campaign donors), while adding that committed same-sex couples should receive “equal protection under the law.”

Obama’s views on marriage equality ‘evolved’ at a snail’s pace

Critics roundly lambasted Obama for dragging his feet on the issue of marriage equality. There was no question that he had done more for LGBT Americans than any president ever had. Yet Obama continued to claim, with increasingly less credibility, that his position on same-sex marriage was “evolving.” Then Joe Biden opened his big mouth once again and told David Gregory on Meet the Press that he was “entirely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. The following day, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan echoed Biden’s endorsement of marriage equality. By that time, the president’s hesitation to follow the lead of his own administration had begun to look like “vacillation” or worse, “poor leadership.” Once the North Carolina ban passed, the pressure became overwhelming for Obama to make his position on marriage equality clear.

It was taking too long to “build a more perfect union,” as the president had promised in October 2010. So President Obama changed course rather abruptly by declaring during an interview that his evolution on the issue was complete, and that he was now in favor of full marriage equality.

Hostilities commence after president ‘declares war on marriage’

Now that the president has uttered the historic words, what happens next? The fear of alienating black voters must have long appeared well-founded to a man living in a virtual bubble. Yet one conservative blogger opined that, given the wretched state of the economy, open support for same-sex marriage probably wouldn’t cost Obama very many black votes. A surprising 60 percent of the vote in North Carolina counties with black majorities was cast in favor of banning same-sex marriage, but Barack Obama’s name was nowhere on the ballot.

Reaction from the right was fast and furious, though predictable. “Obama Flip Flops, Declares War on Marriage” shrieked Fox News Nation’s headline. Eric Cantor triumphantly tweeted, “With the economy in stagnation and crippling amounts of debt, the President seeks to further divide America by launching in [sic] a culture war.” The Log Cabin Republicans condemned Obama for being “a day late and a dollar short” by waiting to speak out until the day after LGBT activists lost the North Carolina vote.

My friend Jim, however, wasn’t so quick to condemn the president, even after waiting such an interminable length of time before at last seeing his position vindicated. “Finally!” Jim said. “Needless to say, I’m very happy that he has chosen to stand up for our civil rights, which is what it’s all about for me. I will certainly vote for him for president now.

“This issue was seriously affecting his presidency, and I think he just had to come to terms with it,” observed Jim, whose final assessment was blunt and to the point. The president’s choice, in the end, Jim said, “was to s**t or get off the pot, and he finally s**t.”

Stand fast, compatriots! The onslaught from the other side, an entire raft of it, has only just begun to fly.

Greece's deus ex machina has been turned off.

By Bob Gaydos

It has been quite a while since what happens in Greece has mattered in a grand-scheme-of-things sort of way. Heck, it’s been a couple of millennia, give or take a few hundred years here and there, since the birthplace of democracy has had superpower status. For a very long time, Greece has muddled through, more or less contentedly, on grapes and wine and nostalgia for its days of glory.

But apparently even classical ruins and beautiful Mediterranean scenery aren’t sufficient to keep tourists and history buffs visiting Greece often enough to offset the reality that when hardly anybody pays taxes, the stage is set for more ruins — and these won’t be anywhere near as architecturally meaningful as the ones the world has come to know and love.

Greece today is a mess. A train wreck. It is a country on the verge of a financial meltdown and almost nobody — even other European countries who are its partners in the Eurozone — is saying it’s too big too fail. The deus ex machina that has come to its rescue before is on the verge of being turned off. Olympus is on hiatus.

“And so what?” we say in our typical American way. “I can still get baklava.”

Perhaps, but what if the baklava factory (just go with the metaphor) goes belly up? And what’s a Greek salad without feta cheese? And, for the sake of serious argument, what about the Greeks themselves, especially the ones most vulnerable to a total economic collapse? That would be older Greeks, who face sizable cuts in their pensions and a serious lack of health care resources and the youngest, the ones who see no future in their country because the grownups have made a mess of it.

If you see some parallels with the situation in the United States today, you see where I’m going. But the threat goes beyond older folks having to tighten their belts and younger folks having to face an uncertain future. The threat — and the lesson for Americans — lies in what many members of those disaffected groups did recently when Greeks elected a new government.

They went nuts.

Sunday, Greek voters rejected what for them are centrist parties — those whose leaders had agreed to a rigid fiscal bailout plan with Greece’s creditors — in favor of, well, no party. Worse, in the parliamentary system with representatives of many political parties running, Greeks gave 15 percent of the seats in the Hellenic Parliament to communists and neo-Nazis, split pretty much evenly. Somehow, the two rejected political philosophies that clashed in Word War II are now expected to work together and with others to save Greece. Herodotus must be rolling in his grave.

The neo-Nazis, known as the Golden Dawn Party, are by far the scarier proposition because they believe what they believe fanatically. They do not believe the Holocaust happened. They do advocate placing land mines at Greece’s border to keep out immigrants. They have threatened reporters who wrote honestly about their meetings, their Nazi salutes, their swastika-like flag, their selling of Mein Kampf, their suspected links with the Greek secret service and police and the fact that they demanded reporters in the room stand up when their party leader entered.

Yes, we have communists and neo-Nazis in America, but these days, even with our fractured political system, they almost never get elected to public office. On Sunday, many Greeks didn’t seem to care who was elected. Many of them are still upset about waiting until 65 to retire and paying taxes. No party came close to a majority, leaving the government in chaos as different groups try to form coalitions.

Significantly, the votes for communists and neo-Nazis came heavily from the old and the young. The fearful and the fed up. The young, especially, having little sense of what Nazis, neo or otherwise, really stand for, seem to have decided that since the adults messed it up, it doesn’t matter who is in charge.

But it does. In every country.

On a less-frightening scale for now, one of America’s two major parties is finding out what happens when mainstream citizens, middle-of-the-road Americans, the people who pay their taxes and form a community, stop paying attention to who runs for office and don’t bother to vote. The angry and fearful go from being loud nuisances to taking over. They dominate the political debate. They run for office. They reject any thought of working with members of other parties and they threaten those in their party who don’t always agree with them with retribution — well-financed campaigns to drive them out of office.

They also occasionally make outrageous claims that go unchallenged — for example, that some 80 Democrats in the House of Representatives are actually members of the Communist Party.

Some might say this is a bridge too far, that what happened in Greece could never happen in the United States. I truly hope that is the case. But it has also been said by wiser men and women than I that the only thing necessary for the voices of fear and intolerance to succeed is for the voices of hope and reason to remain mute. I would add, and to discard their vote.

 bobgaydos@zestoforange.com

By Jean Webster

It’s been said that it takes a village to raise a child. In Grahamsville, it has taken a community of people to raise a new library, one that dwarfs the 1898 original, which still stands.

When my husband and I visited Grahamsville recently, we were amazed by the size and beauty of the new building. What an undertaking for this community, where we lived for 30 years. To think that a group of people in this hamlet of about 2,000 could raise enough money to build a new library boggles the mind.

The first Daniel Pierce Library was a cozy place, as old fashioned as the era in which it was built. It was always busy with people borrowing books, reading newspapers, or heading to meetings. The Boy Scouts met upstairs, and in the basement were groups like the Alchemy Club (poets who met monthly), the Monday Art Group, and others.

But the library board eventually recognized that the building was so crowded that they couldn’t order new books without disposing of old ones. A new building was needed, but how to afford it in a town and county far from prospering?

In 1898 there was a rich patron. Daniel Pierce, the founder, had grown up on nearby Thunder Hill, but he went west to make his fortune. Near the end of the 19th century, Pierce visited his hometown, and discovered that the only library was in a small storefront that also housed the funeral parlor. He donated seed money to build a public library with the condition that it be named for him. But Pierce never endowed the library, which had to be supported by the town after it was built.

The 21st century’s library construction became a community project, much like the building of a medieval cathedral in 12th century Europe. Joann Gallagher, the longtime librarian, says one person – Grahamsville resident Phil Coombe Jr. – spearheaded the plan to build the new library, to raise the needed funds, and to find workers.

Coombe, a former state corrections commissioner involved in the building of several prisons, said he wanted the town to have a library that would last 100 years.

A large portion of the money for the construction was gathered through community grants and construction grants from the New York Public Library System. Additional funds came from people in Grahamsville and the surrounding area. Smaller donors who gave more than once included Tri-Valley School children, who contributed their pennies, dimes and nickels. Ann Holt, a Grahamsville resident and retired Sullivan County Community College science professor, has donated over $300,000 and will have a room named for her in the new library.

I remember the Pumpkin Parties, which originated in the 1990s to generate money for the library. The parties still take place every October at the Fairgrounds, and are a great place for families to celebrate Halloween and the arrival of autumn. Though the proceeds aren’t huge, all go to the library.

But money wasn’t the only commodity local people gave. Just as in medieval times, Gallagher told me, local artisans, plumbers, architects, and woodworkers offered their time and expertise. In fact, anything the building needed doing was done by volunteers. Vendors even supplied materials at cost. Gallagher calls all these people “fabulously generous.”

It’s a beautiful building, constructed and furnished inside and out with style and thoughtfulness. It will be used for all those meetings and large events, maybe even weddings.

In addition, a museum dedicated to the towns of Mantela, Lackawack, Eureka, Old Neversink and Bittersweet – all flooded out during the constriction of the nearby Rondout and Neversink Reservoirs – has been added to the library building with funding from New York City. Fittingly, this Time and the Valley Museum joins the new Daniel Pierce Library at the center of town.