I must take up pen to disagree with my friend and fellow Democrat Peter Burling regarding his recent Forum letter suggesting that Attorney General Gordon MacDonald isn’t qualified to be New Hampshire’s next Supreme Court chief justice due to lack of judicial experience (“N.H. chief justice should be an experienced jurist,” June 15).
In my view, this is just another example of the tit-for-tat partisanship that is standard operating procedure now for our political leaders on all sides. Just more banging the partisan pots and pans, which can help explain why civility and bipartisanship are no more.
Were judicial experience to be the qualification test, our country would have been deprived of many judicial superstars, including Abe Fortas, Byron White, Arthur Goldberg, Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, William Rehnquist, Robert Jackson and many, many more.
I worked for many years with MacDonald during his distinguished private practice career, as he represented Dartmouth-Hitchcock and most other New Hampshire hospitals on many federal and state matters of importance to our mutual patient-centered missions. He has a brilliant legal mind and is a great communicator and strategist.
He is also a family man of strong character and will no doubt be a first-class and politically unbiased chief justice.
FRANK G. McDOUGALL
Quechee
Now is the time to begin paying attention to politics and to start listening to the candidates who want to become president of the United States.
Trust me. You will not have to spend all your time focusing on political news and the debates on your TV. I’m a TV channel flipper who flips from CNN to many different shows; (The Zoo, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, PBS, Unsolved Mysteries and 1,000-Plus Lies), while still getting a good dose of political information. (Actually, the show 1,000-Plus Lies does not exist on television. It’s only playing in the White House. In fact, its name may change to 2,000-Plus Lies by next year.)
All candidates make promises. Some promises get done, some go unfulfilled because of House or Senate opposition, and some are outlandish lies from the very beginning.
I am not very politically savvy, but I did recognize the outlandish lies in 2016 because I listened.
Please start listening now, and vote in 2020. You owe it to your children and grandchildren.
LINDA BROWN
Springfield, Vt.
Now it’s the fashion to burst into a classroom, business office, group meeting or anything that might be annoying (or maybe just for fun) and kill as many people as you can.
Who is raising our kids? Other kids. After being with kids all day at school and with different kids, or TV, our kids come home to an empty house. Where is mom or dad or a church group to relate to and learn values from?
After World War II, these massacres were unthinkable — we were a proud people. But now who teaches kids? TV “games,” gangs, groups with an agenda to “destroy,” pay back or maybe make a name for oneself.
The values we fought for are gone (but maybe dad left a gun in the cupboard that we could grab).
Kids and TV teaching kids — what can we expect, or do?
CHARLOTTE BROUGHTON
Grantham
Thank you to Corey Chapman for a wonderful, thoughtful and compassionate tribute to his friend David Ainsworth (“A farmer’s life,” June 15).
EDITH PERO
Sharon
In reference to Deb Beaupre’s recent Close-Up column (“Life Here: The Valley is beautiful, except for this symbol,” May 25): For any disease, we must note the symptoms and then search with rigor for the cause.
My first experiences here, as a visiting parent, made me think I’d caught a glimpse of the promised land. When I got off the Dartmouth Coach a few years later to begin the current stage of my life, I was mighty glad to enter this earthly paradise. I soon learned, of course, that it ain’t.
The streets of Hanover don’t prepare you for the face of privation and struggle that a ride on the Red Line makes manifest.
I don’t catch much of a suggestion of “white privilege” there. I see generations of poverty and barely making it, with all the malnourishment and lifelong exhaustion they bring. I see obvious and subtle signs of illness and disability, both physical and mental.
Hatred of “the other” — whoever that “other” is — doesn’t come from a healthy place.
Displaying the Confederate flag — especially up here in these northern climes — is more about a futile resentment and anger birthed in a cauldron of failure and despair than any sort of political ideology.
Many people who end up as neo-Nazis or white supremacists have in fact come from chaotic or abusive families. Both Dylann Roof (the Charleston church shooter) and James Alex Fields Jr. (the Charlottesville killer) had severe struggles at home and in school. They were socially isolated. Roof’s father was absent with a new family and the Fields’ father died before his birth.
Neither Vermont nor New Hampshire are good places for the vulnerable — with their appalling rates of rural poverty, underfunded schools, a terrible dearth of family intervention programs and shocking rates of alcoholism and other addictions — though they’re certainly heaven on earth for the wealthy, or even just the very well-off.
For all the rest? As I keep saying, being a minority and outsider up here lets me see it all so clearly.
SARAH CRYSL AKHTAR
Lebanon