Tag Archives: Huffington Post

More Snow, Please

14 Mar

Please Let There Be More, One Bostonian’s Plea for Snow

Boston needs more snow. Please let it snow. This isn’t a plea, it’s an imperative, a must, a necessity, a demand.

Sure we’re all burnt out by cabin fever, parking anxiety and T shutdown woes, but we’ve come too far to have nothing to show for it. We’re at 100+, just a scant few inches from the all-time Boston snowfall record. To have arrived at such a precipice of double-cutting distinction, we’ve endured arctic cold 30 degrees below the seasonal average, fought the space saver fight in close quarters, had roofs cave in and lived through it. To not make the record now would be to run the Boston Marathon and drop out at Mass Ave and Boylston. It would be akin to the Patriots’ perfect season going up in smoke to David Tyree and the Giants in Super Bowl XLII.

There’s no two-finger, helmet pinning catch to thwart the residents of the Hub, all we need is for mother nature to finish the job, to cap off the season of our displeasure with a final dusting or two, an angry, yet liberating icing atop our high-towered, multi-layered cake of misery. The winter of 2015 has truly tried Boston’s patience, mettle and sense of neighborly civility. We’ve been so laden that the snow farms that amassed in the Seaport and Danehy Park out in Cambridge grew so tall and Brobdingnag that the ceaselessly laboring bulldozers and backhoes seeking to shift the bane of our obstructed roadways to Babel aspiring heights looked like matchbox miniatures left strewn about a playground sandpit. It didn’t help either that the T, the backbone of Boston’s commerce, came to an utter standstill, further stranding and isolating the snowbound and the weary, and to add insult to injury, the T’s helmswoman threw in the towel when it was time to roll up the sleeves and get the city moving again.  Continue reading →

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Of Boys, Beer and Young Women

26 Jul

Published in the Huntington Post July, 2014

 

Two Sundays ago, before finishing my morning coffee, a friend of mine texted me and told me that I needed to see the front page of the New York Times. The cover story was an expose about a college’s botched handling of a sexual assault case,“Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn’t,” July 12. The reason my friend so “thoughtfully” drew my eye to such an article was because the small liberal arts college in question was where I had gone to school and by the time I finished the damming piece I was irate, tinged with guilt and ashamed.

I was mostly irate at the school for its purported mishandling of the sexual assault case (the article, with its point being that colleges are ill-prepared to handle such complaints, took the administration to task for a poor investigation, dismissing the complaint and accordingly, discouraging the victim from filing criminal charges), an ire that was further inflamed by President Mark D. Gearan’s perfunct and seemingly insensitive letter to alumni and parents, that coldly stated that the school had followed procedure and does not condone sexual assault. Upon receiving that email and a Boston area alumni “Happy Hour” notice within the same hour, I swore I’d never give another dime to the school (not that I gave a lot, but I contributed a small tithe annually). My long held pride in having attended the school had given way to shame.   Continue reading →

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Race, Film and Reflection

4 Sep

Huffington Post

Posted: 09/03/2013 2:41

In the wake of the George Zimmerman trial two movies have come out that have helped shape the discussion on race and the racial divide. The docudrama Fruitvale Station explored a similar real-life shooting, but preceded the tragic event with a poignant preamble that chronicled the struggles of a young black male trying to go straight in a society seemingly stacked against him, and more recently Lee Daniels’ The Butler, followed the life of a black man (Forest Whitaker bringing grace and dignity to the role) raised during the early 1900s on an antebellum plantation in Georgia where he witnesses his father shot and killed by a plantation supervisor (who had just raped his mother) and later goes on to become a member of the White House wait staff, serving eight presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan during his long tenure.

As a freelance film critic, formerly with the now (and sadly) defunct Boston Phoenix and currently publishing in a variety of media outlets, I was carefully preparing my review of The Butler for a South Carolina paper, and in looking at the film’s credits, I noticed that the basis for Danny Strong’s script was a Washington Post article by a reporter named Wil Haygood, who in print had documented the decades-long career of Eugene Allen, the man Whitaker’s fictional Cecil Gaines is based upon.  Continue reading →

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Disconnected

23 May 
Published in the Huffington Post on 5/22/2013

Social networks are wonderful tools that can spark and foster friendships. They can also disable them too, especially when it comes to politics and ideology and two opposing egos get in too deep to acknowledge the commonality that joined them in life and the World Wide Web in the first place.

Such was the bitter lesson I learned in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting. I had made a post stating that the best place people could send contributions to benefit the victims and the town of Newtown was through the United Way of Western Connecticut. It was what the town’s website had expressed and there were reports that the gifts and the hodgepodge of contributions that were pouring in through other means were choking the relief efforts.

So my ‘friend,’ someone I had known for over a decade through work, countered with a post that Newtown was too wealthy and that he was going to make his charitable contributions elsewhere.   Continue reading →

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Living with Terror – Huff Post

19 Apr

Living With Terror

Posted: 04/19/2013 1:32 pm

 

I live in Cambridge, used to live in Newtown and have been struggling with aging parents and in-laws, of which, three of the four have serious medical conditions. Life, to say the least, has been emotionally taut and challenging over the past few months.

It’s hard to comprehend when you live so close to something so big and tragic as the marathon bombing that happened in Boston last Monday, but it takes a toll on you slowly and surely. Over Christmas I went down to visit my parents who recently moved to a town just north of Newtown. It was just two weeks after the shooting and being just a few miles away, I took a slow drive through the back roads I knew that would slip me into the backside of Sandy Hook sans the media trucks and Westboro malcontents. I had always made a regular visit my old town, but this was different. As I crossed over the river and the town line, I had a physical reaction, one of going physically limp and my heart sinking. The hub of Sandy Hook was in the middle of a healing event beset upon by TV crews (vultures as my mother called them), so I sailed through, got a cup of coffee at one of my usual spots and returned to my family, but I could not shake the sorrow and the immediacy of having had been somewhere that had been so scarred and maliciously maimed by evil intent, a place I had a long and fond past with.

Continue reading →

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