Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Back in the early 1990s, I was a teacher at a junior high school for the arts in East Harlem, N.Y. There was an elementary school in our building as well. It was a dangerous time and place.
If the weather was good, I rode my bike - at a very crisp pace - to school. If I took the subway from my apartment in SoHo, I sprinted the three blocks from the subway station to the school.
One day, as I left school, I witnessed a small Hispanic kid get jumped and stomped on by four other adolescents. Without thinking, I dropped my bike in the middle of the street and shielded the boy behind me.
The leader of the attacking group told me he would, “knock those motherfuckin' blue contacts out of my head.” It seemed funny to me that he assumed I wore blue contact lenses, but then I recalled that no one in his neighborhood had blue eyes, except those wearing contacts, so I understood his mistake.
Bob DePino writes with great certainty, cloudy judgment, and misguided arrogance about what won't stop the next school shooting. He tells us that background checks, safe locking, raising the legal age, getting restraining orders, and everything else we might do in the future will be ineffective. Instead, he offers...
For the weeks following the slaughter of the innocent schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I hardly left the couch of grief and shame. I've taught kids my entire 35-year career, and I felt as if we - teachers, parents, lawmakers, and society at large - had failed. Our...
Clown, I am. That isn't a metaphor; it's a fact. I wear the red nose - the world's smallest and best-known mask. It's an archetype found in every culture on this planet. I recently went to India. One spontaneous gig was in a dirt cricket field at the Likir Monastery about 55 kilometers east of Ladakh. I went to the monastery as a tourist to take a few photos. The Likir Monastery was built in 1045 A.D. and, as far...
I'm responding as one of the “faceless” members of GunSense VT to Bob DePino's and Eddie Cutler's respective assertions [Letters, Oct. 26]. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather, “It's not personal, it's strictly business.” So I ask both of you to stop attacking Ann Braden (“lies, lies, lies”) with perverted logic and outdated arguments. I know Ann Braden. She's a caring mother of two, a loving, inspired teacher of children in Brattleboro, and a tireless advocate for public safety.
Thanks, Michael Balamuth, for your commentary. Your ideas will bring out the fear and paranoia of the less than 20 percent of our society that does not support universal background checks. When I was in my late teens, I owned a rifle. I was immature, not educated in any kind of gun safety, and had an addiction to alcohol. But for some whiff of grace, I didn't hurt myself or another person. Now, I volunteer for GunSense VT. We are...
A teenage boy got off the bus recently in downtown Brattleboro. With blue headphones on and bopping to his own music, he picked up a piece of one-inch-thick chalk and wrote on a high black wall that he was grateful for “life.” Another person walking by gave him a thumbs-up, and the teen continued down Flat Street. Through the installation of her Walls of Gratitude - the centerpiece of a larger show she curated, Watching Angels - Margaret “Meg” Donahue...
