Letters to the Editor
We are writing this letter with a heavy heart. Recently native Tim Fullin was diagnosed with cancer. Tim is going through chemotherapy treatment; he is the husband of Linda and the father of three children who are all locals as well — Veronica, T.R and Keith. Tim is a grandfather, uncle, brother, son and an amazing friend. We have all known the Fullin family most of our lives. Most of us went to school with their kids and had Tim service our burners. They are one of the first to help out when you’re in need of anything, night or day. Thanks to the help of Island people and businesses, we will be able to hold a benefit auction at the P.A. Club on Nov. 3. Dinner will be from 4:30 to 7 p.m.; a live auction will begin at 7.
Glenn M. Zafonte of West Orange, N.J., writes angrily of a frustratingly inconvenient experience he had recently in getting ferry space leaving the Vineyard (Vacation Ruined, Sept. 7). His anger is directed at the SSA, which he believes, “does not seem to care . . . has no heart . . . [and] makes little effort to be friendly or cordial.” I could not disagree more strongly, and our experience with the SSA could not be more different than what Mr. Zafonte describes.
The Republican nominee for POTUS, Mr. Romney, has been introducing himself to voters by his middle name, but will that be the name on his line in the ballot next November? Not if he has to fill out a printed three-by-five card like those we use for everything else, with space for a first name in full and a box for a middle initial. No matter what family and friends may call us, in any officially printed context, the three-by-five formula prevails.
On August 24, at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs, Angela Davis and her colleague Gina Dent reported to a packed room on a trip they took to the Occupied Territories of Palestine last year. Their articulate description of what everyday life is like for Palestinians under the 45-year long Israeli occupation, and among the illegal settlers who have moved to Palestine after the 1967 war, was an eye opener to many in the room, but reinforced what many others with direct experiences of the Palestinian situation already knew. In both tone and intention it was meant to be, and essentially was, about Palestinians and Palestine, not Israelis and Israel, although one can hardly avoid discussing all four in such a program.
If Alan Dershowitz, the self-appointed avatar of the new political correctness in America, could have brought himself to attend a meeting at which he was not a featured speaker, he would have heard Angela Davis and Gina Dent give a moving presentation on the apartheid-like conditions under which 2.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank have lived for the past 45 years.
In your article about Angela Davis, you mistakenly describe her as an advocate of rights and liberties. She is anything but that. As a longtime leader of the American Communist Party, she has adamantly refused to speak up on behalf of the civil rights or civil liberties of those oppressed by Soviet Communism and others on the left. Let me recount an experience I had with her, which I reported in my book Chutzpah.