Category: Opinion
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With Spare Change News closed, a local fund awards one SCN vendor-writer a way to pay rent
Governor Baker’s March 23 emergency order for all non-essential businesses to close impacted Spare Change News and its vendors like myself significantly. Spare Change News closed its doors for 11 weeks and reopened Friday, June 12. Over the past three months, I sold older back issues to the public in my Coolidge Corner, Brookline spot.…
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Covid-19 and cages on Boston’s Methadone Mile
Just before all hell broke loose in Minnesota and Kentucky, I happened upon a story shared by a friend and done by Turtle Boy Daily News that said homeless people on Methadone Mile were being locked into a cage. I saw the pictures, but I still couldn’t believe it. Even knowing that I was at…
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A New Normal
In a recent ad by Joe Kennedy, who’s running for one of the U.S. Senate seats in Massachusetts, he talks about how now there’s “talk to go back to normal. Our normal was broken.” As far as political ads go, it’s effective. I began to think: exactly what was normal, and what the heck is…
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All We Are Saying
The world we live in has been rocked by crisis after crisis. First the Coronavirus slipped in amongst us, taking, at first, the most vulnerable populations from our nursing homes, Veterans’ Homes, Senior Living Facilities and then attacking the people who have the least access to medical care because they are financially stressed, Black and…
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There are a lot of lessons in this pandemic – will we learn them?
COVID-19 has taken over all of our lives. It has separated us from family and friends, closed schools, playgrounds, and churches; it’s taken from us all that we take for granted. Simple things like going for walks seem risky, and many of our cities look like ghost towns. It’s so quiet you can hear the…
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Sheltering in Place
These are weird times. The doctors postponed Mary Esther’s spine surgery until June 10 because of the situation. Her lungs are challenged normally, so it’s important that she not get exposed to the coronavirus. This strange thing has put all our lives on hold. My heart goes out to people who are homeless and have…
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Uncertainties and Impermanence
My wonderful wife, Mary Esther, and I just returned from a visit with the surgeon who will be operating on her back. It’s much more involved than we thought it would be, and we are meditating every day just to help us cope. We’re trying to keep it in the day, but we can’t help…
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Is Boston truly ready for Coronavirus?
Just the other day I was at one of the busiest malls in the Boston area, it was a nice warm pre-spring day, the kind of day you look forward to after a long New England winter. Instead of being packed to the gills like it would usually be on a day like this, the…
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Recipe For A Terrorist
Deprivation. One of the main ingredients. Frustration. Another important ingredient. Intelligence. Ahh, yes. Not all the ingredients needed for creating a terrorist have negative connotations. Once upon a time I was a little boy growing up in the city of North Arlington, New Jersey. I wore glasses in the first grade. I was the only…