At this year’s Annual Town Meeting, Article 37 deals with abandoned properties. Not so long ago, who would have thought that such an article would be needed anywhere in our state or even in the East Coast, never mind in a town like Canton? The housing crisis is something that’s not easy to understand. From […]
When it comes to taxes, politicians and voters alike tend to break into two simplistic camps: “No new taxes” and “save the children.” Taxation and whose interests the collected dollars will serve are usually complex. The more complex an issue and the more at stake, the more likely the dialogue will degenerate into simplistic slogans, […]
We liberals looked to President Obama to bring sanity back to America. We were done with a war that had destroyed our economy while making Vice President Dick Cheney — a man literally without a human heart or pulse — billions for his former employer in military contracts. We were done with the Bush Family […]
After 27 years of covering government meetings for Canton Community Television — or as it was known back then, “Cable 8” — camera operator Jerry Frank is retiring. Frank started as the selectmen cameraman back in 1984, when the meetings could only go out live — no repeats, back before VHS recording tape, before computers […]
I have to turn off the radio because I can’t listen to another economic failure due to unregulated greed. Who in their right mind thought the so-called “Super Committee” could ever come up with a workable federal budget? All the factors that froze Congress during the debt ceiling crisis would follow the bipartisan committee right […]
On October 15, my family went to the Boston Book Festival to hear Pulitzer Prize winning and nominated authors speak on the dangers of a lost economic decade on scientific progress. Later that Saturday we found ourselves swept in the passions of “Occupy Boston,” which marched past the Trinity Church near the Boston Public Library […]
This column’s name, “Outside the Whale,” is a play on George Orwell’s 1940 essay, “Inside the Whale.” Orwell’s essay is a book review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, published in 1931 but banned as pornography from the United States until 1961. (Miller’s book was not impossible to get before 1961. My father — who […]
Writers have more places to express themselves today than in all history — from online newspapers to blogs. But with all the opportunity and formats to express ideas, and with our country and with local communities like Canton facing so many problems, why is the writing so banal? Online columns read like personal diary entries, […]
