Commentary
Tisbury has a warrant article for the annual town meeting to see whether the town will appropriate $1,566,000 to start setting aside money to pay for retirement benefits for town employees. We have been funding our pension plan, but we have not been funding promised health insurance and other benefits.
Call me Tossu. Two and a half years ago I embarked upon a watery voyage that brought me to an Island in the Atlantic. After some land travel I arrived at a small dwelling in the woods wherein resided a giant beast. Although it outweighed me 20 times I leapt upon it; at eight weeks old I had the courage of eight mountain lions. The leviathan finally succumbed and it now knew I would rule the roost — not just her but my new brother, Cat Trap (Cho), and our critter sitter, T.
A Light in the Gloom
President Obama this week presented his first budget in Washington, D.C., a spending plan crafted to address not only the nation’s economic crisis but also its yawning inequality. Here on the Vineyard — where we have as bipolar an economy as you’re likely to find — we were presented with good news about closer-to-home efforts to bridge the gaps between us.
Foremost of these was the announcement that construction will begin next month on a long-awaited community YMCA.
Closing the Gap
Such is the unpredictability of the season: last Saturday’s sunshine prompted a Tisbury man to shed his shirt and go bare-chested at the task at hand: shovelling snow from the sidewalk. The season’s economic climate has been likewise unpredictable, the only regularity being bad news piling up in drifts. Between the diving Dow and the rising unemployment lines, most of us on the Island try simply to forge ahead as steadily as we can, trying to keep the shirts on our backs.
Just before February vacation, my class went to Edgartown Cinema and saw the film Defiance. It was a movie about the Bielski brothers who survived the Holocaust by building a community in the forest. They lived in hard conditions, but they saved 1,200 people. Even though this number seems small when you consider that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, if they had only save d one person it would have been worth it. One life is still so much. “Our revenge will be our survival,” said the Bielski brothers, and this is so true.
CARE FOR THE DYING
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
I was heartened to read of the Vineyard Nursing Association plans to bring a Medicare-certified hospice program to the Island. Twice in the last several years I’ve watched the families of friends of mine make the gut-wrenching decision to move their dying loved one off-Island for lack of end-of-life medical care here that would be covered by their insurance.