Tag Archives: freedom
Fourth of July
Yeah, it’s the sixth already, but here’s a comment about the parade that I just posted on Lucian K. Truscott IV’s Substack (to which I subscribe and where I frequently comment). I live in a small town on the largest … Continue reading
Juneteenth 2020
There’ve been Juneteenth celebrations on Martha’s Vineyard before, but Friday’s was by far the biggest and most diverse. We gathered at Veterans Park in Vineyard Haven, then marched — well, “walked” is probably the better word — the three and … Continue reading
Do We Love Our Freedom?
I’ve written before about my ambivalence about Veterans Day. November 11 was the birthday of my uncle Neville, a gentle soul who came home shell-shocked from World War II, so the family story goes, and never really got his feet … Continue reading
Going to Church
When I moved to Martha’s Vineyard, I wasn’t surprised by the number of churches. The town I grew up in west of Boston, population about 10,000, had one for every denomination I’d ever heard of at the time (which isn’t … Continue reading
Memorial Day
Memorial Day on Martha’s Vineyard is the quasi-official beginning of “the season,” which is to say the season of crowds, traffic, and unaffordable housing. As elsewhere in the U.S., schools, banks, government offices, and many businesses are closed. Parades are … Continue reading
Je ne suis pas Charlie
Three gunmen attacked the editorial offices of the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. When they left, 12 were dead and 11 injured. In the days since, at least five more have died: four hostages and a police officer. Two of … Continue reading
Are the Terrorists Winning?
Time to trot this one out again. I wrote “My Terrorist Eye: Risk, the Unexpected, and the War on Terrorism” over several years in the mid-2000s. Yes, it does go on at some length about my out-of-the-blue retina detachment. Feel … Continue reading
We Weren’t Locked Down
. . . here on Martha’s Vineyard. We’re a long way from Boston. But the way some of us were glued to our TVs, our computers, and/or our Twittering devices, we might as well have been. Makes you think, doesn’t … Continue reading
Veterans Day
He’s five foot two and he’s six foot four He fights with missiles and with spears He’s all of thirty-one and he’s only seventeen He’s been a soldier for a thousand years — Buffy Sainte-Marie, “Universal Soldier” Ambivalent about Veterans … Continue reading
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 