Sharing the Field of Green
The Hanover High baseball team hosted Lebanon last Friday for a sun-filled game at Dartmouth’s Red Rolfe Field at Biondi Park (Valley News, May 21, “Raiders’ Bats Speak Loudest”). As the opposing players shook hands after the final out, the public address announcer thanked Dartmouth and everyone involved for their hard work on “the field of green.”
Thank you, indeed! Hundreds of fans of all ages enjoyed a spirited slugfest between rivals. And the high school athletes were thrilled by the opportunity to play in a college stadium where they typically sit as spectators. Reflecting on the memories from that late-spring afternoon, I am reminded of the words of the late Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale University and Major League Baseball commissioner, “I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”
Richard McNulty
Hanover
The Experience of Mentoring
Since its founding in 1974, Windsor County Partners has supported more than 1,400 mentor-mentee matches. These children and youth have enjoyed an enduring relationship with a caring adult who has been there for them week after week.
As the organization moves into its fifth decade, we at have launched a search for former partners (mentors or mentees) who would be willing to share thoughts and stories about their experience. Statistics reveal many benefits of mentoring: improved health; reduced risk of substance abuse; improved school attendance; and a deepened sense of confidence and purpose. However, the most compelling evidence comes from those who were matched.
If you have been a partner at any time and would be willing to share with us, we would like very much to communicate with you. This could be in person, by phone, by email or in writing, according to your preference. Please contact us by calling our office at 802-674-5101, by email at windsorcm@outlook.com, or at P.O. Box 101, Windsor, Vt. 05089. We look forward to hearing from you.
Laura Page
Advisory Council Member
West Lebanon
Dodd-Frank Shares Some Blame
“Stagnant Pay Slowing Area House Sales” (Valley News, May 22) misses another culprit: Dodd-Frank. On July 15, 2015, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testified to the Senate Banking Committee: “Demand for housing is still being restrained by limited availability of mortgage loans to many potential homebuyers.” Dodd-Frank tightened the rules on mortgage lending, but the real cause of the 2008 crash was the ever-more-complex bundling of loans to feed the speculative exuberance of investors.
Dodd-Frank, as far as I can determine, did nothing to protect the housing market from profiteering investors. Indeed, in 2013, The New York Times reported that the same games had resumed. It seems clear that the main purpose of Dodd-Frank was to protect speculators by limiting the risk that expanding homeownership necessarily entails. In other words, it made it much harder for most people to buy a home for themselves. This is particularly true for the self-employed, independent contractors, contingent workers and freelancers — a group projected to represent 40 percent of the workforce by 2020, if it doesn’t already.
At the beginning of 2014, real estate attorney Shari Olefson, quoted by Yahoo Finance, said that “about 20 percent of people who have mortgages right now will not be able to get qualified mortgages” and that “more people will be pushed into the rental market” (again, benefiting investors, and Dodd-Frank’s tightened rules do not apply to loans for rental properties). Census Bureau data show homeownership continuing to plummet in every region of the U.S. since a peak in 2004, most dramatically for those under the age of 45. Since housing prices have also plummeted, that indicates a much deeper change than stagnant pay, which has been that way for most Americans since 1965 and slowly declining since 1999.
Eric Rosenbloom
Hartland
Ayotte Fails Us Again
Our junior senator has, in a classic example of political doublespeak, told us that she will support but not endorse Donald Trump. Does this meaningless pronouncement mean that in November, Sen. Kelly Ayotte will be helpless to prevent herself from voting for a xenophobic, mysogynistic, egotist to be president?
This man, without a meaningful stand on any issue of importance, is less prepared to be president than any fringe candidate in memory, yet she supports him just as she has obediently parroted the obstructionist Republican Party line for the last five years.
After 20 second-grade schoolchildren were slaughtered in Connecticut, she said no new measures were needed to control access to guns. Her precious “A” rating from the NRA was not to be put in jeopardy.
Her unconscionable vote not to deny terrorists on the no-fly list the ability to buy guns further cemented her relationship with Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.
In the opinion of some constitutional scholars she and 46 of her Republican colleagues flirted with treason when they sent a letter to the leaders of Iran telling them not to bother signing the nuclear agreement with the West because the next president (jumping the gun a bit) would repeal the deal. Then, when an accord was reached, before going to all the unnecessary bother of reading it, she vowed to vote against it. Fortunately, she didn’t get the opportunity.
Most recently she has shirked her constitutional duty to consider a nominee for the Supreme Court. No need to know who the president would nominate because no one he selected would be acceptable.
New Hampshire deserves two senators who can think for themselves and not hew to a doctrinaire, nihilistic party line that serves our state and the country so poorly. We would all be better off if Ayotte went back to the private sector in January of 2017.
Lloyd Bunten
Canaan
Attack of the Zombie Party
That was a fascinating headline — “Vermont Republicans See Opening” — in the May 20 edition. At the risk of offending the forced birthers among us, I must ask what keeps this zombie party alive? Fifty years ago the Republican Party was the conservative voice protecting individual rights. Now it strives mightily to block access to full-range health care for every woman in the land, and in the whole world if Republicans have their way. Meanwhile, hand in hand with the NRA, the Republican Party protects the individual rights of violent males to buy enormous quantities of guns and ammo to daily shoot up our streets, our children and anyone offering full-range health care to women.
In Vermont this party’s lead candidate for governor loves to — don’t think about carbon dioxide and 400 ppm for a moment — race cars around and around race tracks. What century are we in? In a single race this candidate likely neutralizes all the car pooling and trip planning efforts of several Vermont towns. To be fair, Republican governors are already showing us what they can do to state budgets (Kansas), workers’ contracts (Wisconsin), water supplies (Michigan), the environment (Texas) and rush-hour traffic (New Jersey). Why not throw Vermont on the heap?
Sounds like a fine party. I hope it receives the votes it deserves.
Robert Spottswood
Norwich