In the last two months, the Valley News has published two interesting and informative articles on the 2018 Hanover property assessment (“Some Hanover building owners shocked by 50% jump in property assessments,” July 28, and “Hanover property owners call for redo of town’s sky-high assessments,” Aug. 25).
The second article described a fundamental disagreement between those taxpayers who signed a petition calling for a redoing of the assessment and the town’s assessor as to whether accepted industry standards were used in completing the assessment.
On Monday, from 7-9 p.m., in the board room at Town Hall, the Hanover Advisory Board of Assessors has scheduled a public input session “to receive public feedback from citizens on the 2018 revaluation and abatement process.”
I encourage all Hanover taxpayers who have an interest in these important issues to attend.
PETER J. MURDZA JR.
Hanover
Kudos to Wayne Gersen for his thoughtful, hopeful essay on the possibility of creating a new form of national draft in which all citizens would choose two years of either military or civilian community service (“National service could bring us together,” Sept. 8).
In addition to the considerable benefits that Gersen already names (national unification, meaningful work, strengthened national infrastructure, broadened participation in service-oriented fields), its universality also would create a new framework to empower people of all genders, races and backgrounds (at last!) as essential co-creators of the common good.
Forget ad-hoc job creation as a measure of success. We could instead create a country that tends to its wild lands, farms, cities and small towns, its arts and sciences, its elders, adults and children — with wholehearted, shared effort.
JULIE PÜTTGEN
Lebanon
It may surprise Robert M. Baum (“The uses of religion for good and bad,” Sept. 4) to learn that among the people I admire most are the Prophet Micah and Christian theologians Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Avila. They were iconoclasts, scornful of the constraints of dogma, and illuminate for us the universal nature of the Divine.
But Gandhi? His journey toward leading the struggle for the freedom of India began on a South African train, where he was furious at not being allowed to sit in the “white” carriage and forced to ride with the “blacks.”
He never forgave the British for that; it shaped the entire trajectory of his life. And he certainly adjusted his principles later when it came to young female relatives.
Good people are innately so, and their faith is a reflection of their souls. But religion gives us permission to indulge our worst impulses in a false surety that God approves of our actions.
But God is outside and above all that nonsense. The inadequacies of language hamper our quest to understand what can’t be meaningfully expressed in words. Human beings gravitate to hierarchies, and the longing in us to comprehend the great mysteries is easily exploited.
Some of those I love most dearly count themselves as adherents of mainstream religions, and their love for me is infused with a painful apprehension that I might not be counted as admissible to the Good Place.
What they feel in their hearts is always at war with what they’ve been instructed to believe.
And note that religions are inseparable from the cultures that birthed them. Christianity is as much a Middle Eastern faith as its relatives; when it spread throughout Europe, a traditional respect for women’s wisdom was deformed into a terror of “witches.”
Our need for community shouldn’t be a weakness to be exploited by those who lust for power.
Goodness doesn’t require a banner under which to flourish. It just needs each of us, respectful of the humanity of our neighbors, regardless of what they believe in, or don’t.
SARAH CRYSL AKHTAR
Lebanon
The maniacal quest of House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., for something, anything to impeach President Donald Trump would be laughable were it not coming at taxpayers’ expense. Please, enough is enough.
JEFF LEHMANN
Lyme Center
Do you think it was Butch Cassidy or the James Gang who robbed the train station in White River Junction?
As feats of derring-do go, that’s up there with taking money out when they pass you the collection plate in church.
GENE CASSIDY
Wilder