After attending and participating in the Dec. 16 Lebanon City Council meeting to approve the 2021 budget, it has become abundantly clear that our elected officials subscribe to the “let them eat cake” credo (“Council approves annual budget,” Dec. 18).
After several members of our newly formed group, Citizens for Sustainable Taxes, presented our thoughtful perspective on the city’s budget and its impact on retirees and stressed families, we were desperately hoping that reason would prevail. Unfortunately, it did not. We submitted a petition with more than 230 signatures proposing a reduction in the tax rate by 20% over a five-year period. It crashed and burned. Should our current elected officials attempt to say they are “aware of the problems” or are “sympathetic” to the current tax burden placed on the residents, then I say “your actions speak volumes.” The good news is our petition is rapidly approaching 300 signatures. An online version is available at: www.change.org/lowertaxeslebanonnh.
As my neighbors, friends and I have tried our best to bring this serious matter to the attention of our elected officials, we have concluded the following: First, Lebanon is facing an escalating debt crisis over the next three- to five-year period and the city’s finances will face significant pressure as retirees and families will be unable to pay all or some of their property tax bills. Second, we will need help from within the City Council in order to create sustainable change.
So, everyone must vote in the next election for fiscally responsible candidates and encourage their neighbors, friends and family members to do the same. The only other realistic scenario that comes to mind is to contact your local real estate agent during the global pandemic crisis to discuss your options. Should you be one of the “lucky ones” who is immune to this pinch, then consider yourself very fortunate … this year. Happy holidays.
RAMZI HRAIBI
West Lebanon
Psychologist and educator Carol Gilligan, in her ground-breaking, culture-challenging 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, laid out what she saw as the moral imperative for an “ethic of care.” An ethic of justice, she wrote, had already been developed through centuries of patriarchal dominance, but was almost fatally limited by its lack of concern for everyday well-being and even, for some, survival.
In my view, it was President Franklin Roosevelt and his massive government projects that, 50 years before Gilligan named the issue, began to put “care” into our national conscience. FDR tested — and challenged — our national values and goals in a way that still reverberates today. He sent reporters, photographers and political operatives into areas of the U.S. that had been exploited and abandoned for decades and began to bring forgotten and often damaged citizens into the national consciousness. By so doing, he earned the implacable enmity of many who are still with us today: those who refuse to acknowledge that our plundering, extractive national modus has left millions behind. Our nation’s public identity, paradoxically, has evolved over time into the premise that all those who live here be given the chance to grow, thrive and evolve. So many of us now support this premise that the Republican Party — the container of resistance to this ethic — has lost much of its original purpose and become disfigured through moral bankruptcy.
Our fight is over care — who “deserves” it and who “doesn’t.” Looking beyond our borders, the world now faces a gigantic paradigm shift that focuses on this precept. People will perhaps die in the fight as we move fully into Gilligan’s “ethic of care,” but it’s important to remember that we are facing a worldwide evolutionary shift, that of the opening of the heart, that over the long term will be unstoppable.
NAN BOURNE
Woodstock
Another COVID-19 check is likely coming. The fact is that every government worker, public school teacher, professor, state and local government worker, welfare recipient, Social Security recipient, Supplemental Security Income recipient, and government and state retiree never missed a check during the pandemic shutdown. We don’t need any money. The people who need the COVID-19 stimulus money are the small-business owners and workers. So send money to them!
JEAN LIEPOLD
Grantham