Opponents of Dartmouth’s proposed dorm on the old golf course have honed their NIMBY talking points but never suggest alternatives. Yet the need for more student housing is acute. I’ll offer a few modest proposals.
■ Convert Baker Library into a giant residential building. Now that most information is online, the need for keeping musty old books at the center of campus is anachronistic. Half the books could probably be burned in the annual bonfire, the remainder moved to an offsite storage facility, available upon request.
■ Replace the current football stadium with residential housing and build a new stadium on the golf course. The impact on the NIMBY neighbors would be minimal, five home games a year.
■ Build out the Dartmouth Green. Other than a few students tossing frisbees in the fall and the graduation ceremony in the spring, the Green is wasted prime real estate.
■ Exhume and rebury the remains currently in the Dartmouth cemetery to the old golf course, chop down a few tall pines and fill in the ravine. The old duffers will never know and are in no shape to protest at a zoning board meeting.
■ Purchase an old cruise ship and have the engineering students figure out a way to bring it up the Connecticut River à la Fitzcarraldo, then tie it off at the Ledyard Canoe Club.
I could go on. With a bit of creativity there is no shortage of solutions to the student housing crunch.
Philip Glouchevitch
Hanover
Please leave Hartford flags
Now that Veterans Day has passed, the Hartford veterans council will be picking up flags from the cemeteries. Please do not remove them because we take the flags off the sticks. This way we know where the flags go back for Memorial Day. It makes it easier when the school kids help. Thank you very much.
Denis B Backus
Hartford veterans council president
Sharon
A ‘sad and misguided’ rally
The Upper Valley rally to oppose war and military spending is sad and misguided.
Sad because of course every sane person regrets the tragedy of wars and the necessity of allocating resources to such causes, but it’s sad to organize a rally around Veteran’s Day without recognizing and appreciating those who have served these necessities.
Misguided for two reasons. First, history teaches one clear lesson: that autocrats use military means to oppress and only free peoples fighting back defeat such oppression. Second, the amounts spent on our military are not nearly sufficient to solve the economic problems our country is facing. Did the $2.3 trillion in COVID stimulus solve our economic problems? No? Then the $800 billion the U.S. spends on the military won’t solve our problems either.
David Allen
White River Junction
Election’s aftermath
Now that the 2022 mid-term elections are behind us, let’s see how things shape up nationally and in Vermont. Vermont voters passed conflicting constitutional amendments — the first abolished slavery, while the second perpetually denied personhood to fully developed pre-born babies in utero. It’s the ultimate exemplification of cognitive dissonance.
Peter Welch ascended to fill Patrick Leahy’s Senate seat. He’s the devil we know and has at least demonstrated some willingness to work across the aisle. Becca Balint, on the other hand, is the devil we don’t know, the first openly gay woman to represent Vermont in Congress. Will she push her LGBTQ and pro-abortion agenda? She may be tempted to forget that her constituency is the entire population of Vermont, not just those with whom she identifies.
Three Democratic candidates for Windsor County state senate seats ran as a ticket and automatically forfeited my votes. When three people think alike, vote alike, and speak alike, at least one and possibly two of them are unnecessary. When I was on Hartford’s original Charter Commission, I championed expanding the Selectboard from five to seven to emulate the success of Bennington. Almost immediately three Democrats pulled a similar stunt and ran as a slate, trying to dominate the Selectboard. Vermont’s no place for machine-style politics. Becca White, who was swept into office as a state senator, wrote a self-aggrandizing op-ed piece in this paper a while back that convinced me she lacked the gravitas to serve in higher office. Now we have her in the Senate for two years. She has said she would accept input from all her constituents, but based on her performance on the Hartford Selectboard and in the Vermont House, that remains to be seen.
Nationally, the Democrats succeeded in making this a single-issue election about preserving a woman’s unfettered “right” to abortion, and there will be unintended consequences, both natural and supernatural. They appear to have committed the “perfect crime,” but you can only get away with murder for so long. As Barack Obama said, “Elections have consequences.”
William A. Wittik
Hartford