Garth Shaneyfelt: Paying the piper

Another big jump in water and sewer rates will continue to be a challenge for residents. Averaging 9% per year, the rates will double approximately every eight years! The Department of Public Works works hard and deserves appropriate raises and indeed cost of materials continues to climb. As evidenced by the constant construction and emergency water main repairs needed, much of our 100-year-old infrastructure had been neglected for quite a while; we can place blame squarely on the “rates never went up that much back in my day” folks!

Bill Lafley: Questioning what makes American great

The writer of a June 13 letter to the editor states that Massachusetts electric rates are 50% higher than other areas of the country and that New York might allow a natural gas pipeline to be built implying that may help reduce these rates. According to a June 14 Wall Street Journal article on the rising electricity rates throughout the country, “higher natural gas prices are partly to blame.” The other reasons are the utility companies’ investment of billions in upgrading their aging infrastructure and the increased electricity demand from artificial intelligence.

George Munger: Good Samaritans, all of us

We are all the good Samaritan.

Guest columnists Jennifer Core and Claire Morenon: Immigrants — the heart of our local food system

By JENNIFER CORE and CLAIRE MORENON

Immigration crackdowns, and the resulting protests, have been at the center of the news for the past several weeks — this is a violent, divided moment centering around a highly divisive issue. It is also a sweet season in the Valley — the height of the growing season is just beginning, and farmers’ markets and farm stands are filling up. These might seem like completely unrelated realities, but they are closely connected by one thing: the deeply skilled, and largely invisible, farmworkers who plant, pick, and process the harvest — many of whom are immigrants.

My Turn: Human health depends on a healthy planet Earth

By DR. DAVID GOTTSEGEN

What I renamed “The Big Beastly Bill” passed the Senate on Friday. It signed into law dramatic cuts to our public health care system. In the meantime, over at Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. has fired all the experts of the vaccine advisory committee, threatening the supply of life-saving immunizations for millions of Americans.

My Turn: The big beautiful bill

By GENE STAMELL

I should have known they’d get it all wrong. Oh, I’ve heard the woke socialists moaning and whining: “He doesn’t listen to people around him.” Listen? I listen. I’m the best listener who ever lived; my hearing is off the charts. But nobody listens to me! I never said I wanted a big beautiful bill, in the singularity tense. I said bills, in the plurality tense.

Mary Metzger: Still conserving land

A year ago, Mass Audubon began a fundraising campaign to accelerate land conservation in the commonwealth. The 30 X 30 Catalyst Fund hoped to find $75 million to protect 30 % of Massachusetts by 2030. To date, $40 million has been raised. Working with other state, regional, and local conservation groups, the fund has jump-started over 20 projects, totaling 18,000 acres. The conservation team has also been able to purchase land from owners who cannot wait for current uncertain federal funding to materialize. Eligible properties are judged by their ability to help clean air and water, provide biodiversity and wildlife corridors, and capture carbon for climate resilience. Intact forests in western Massachusetts and coastal properties are especially crucial to safeguarding these cost-effective solutions of Nature.

Ann Richardson: A very kind gesture

While shopping for plants recently at a local flower store, I saw a woman with ivy vines and a peony in her cart. She had been shopping in the discount area and had spent a long time looking for “the best of the rest,” some plants looking half dead. But she had found some lovely choices. After admiring her choices and a brief chat, she went to the checkout but came back quickly as she had lost her wallet. A short time later she returned with a smile and her wallet, and I told her she was lucky to get the last peony worth buying. I gave her a hug, wished her happy planting and she went on her way. After I found the best of the rest, I checked out, but when I got to my car … she had left me the last peony by our car! My heart melted! But she was gone, without a note. This is my “thank uou” note to her.

Reenie Grybko Clancy: More ideas on reusables

During the 1940s and 50s, single-use items were just coming into vogue. Remember the advice given to Ben in “The Graduate?” Plastics? It was certainly taken seriously and now has become an almost insurmountable problem. The June 28 My Turn on reusable take-out containers is great [“It’s time for reusable take-out containers”]. But why wait for businesses to implement the practice on their own or worse, wait for government to pass yet another law. Do it yourself.

Peter Flynn: What have you really gotten?

Hello MAGA people. I have a challenge for you. I want you to identify one good thing about the past six months that personally has touched you as a New Englander. For instance, anytime I drive down a newly paved road I think, “Thanks Infrastructure Act. Thanks Joe.” So what is it you can thank Donald for? Please don’t tell me about closed southern borders unless you have been to them. Whatever is happening 3,000 miles away has not touched you personally. Perhaps you know someone who has been deported locally. Has that improved your life? Did you get a job that the immigrant couldn’t? Maybe your boss gave you a raise now that those immigrants aren’t bringing wages down. Tell me about it please. Can you thank Donald Trump for cheaper or better health care? How about better policing so we can feel safer? Maybe it’s your gun collection, does that make you safer? But did Biden do anything to restrict your guns these past four years? I can’t think of anything. Has Trump provided you with less expensive food or housing? How about lower taxes? Exactly how much do you expect to get back from the Treasury? Is it more than those tariffs are costing you? I know I haven’t covered everything. So please help me understand what is something real and concrete that MAGA folks can point to, touch, and hold up that they are getting that they were not getting before. Thank you for your help.

Maria Charmack: Moms can be college students too

As a 43-year-old stay-at-home mother of three and the first in my family to graduate high school, pursuing a college degree has been both a personal dream and a powerful act of transformation. For years, I put my children first, guiding them through life with love, sacrifice, and hope that they will have opportunities I never had. But somewhere along the way, I realized that my own dreams still mattered and that it wasn’t too late to pursue them. And coming from parents who did not graduate from high school, let alone go to college, I had no guidance in doing so for myself. I was left to figure life out while my friends’ parents took them on trips to visit campuses across the country.

Dennis Merritt: Democrats failed America on health care

Here’s what infuriates me. The Democrats are screaming that Trump’s bill cuts Medicaid for millions for Americans. But if Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Congress under Obama had given us nationalized health, like Obama wanted, and why he was elected, then there wouldn’t be any need for Medicaid. The Democrats under Obama failed the American people and that probably led directly to Trump getting elected. And now, they’re the ones who are supposed to save us from Trump? Sigh. Maybe there’s some hope with the Progressives though.

John Nelson Jr.: Science threatened

The Trump administration has been slashing funding for a broad array of “wasteful” government programs in the name of “efficiency.” Among the victims are funding for research grants. Science is probably “under the radar” for most people, but the irrational, destructive cuts are affecting the advancement of medicine, technology and environmental science; achievements we depend on which have been developed by private businesses applying basic research discoveries funded by taxpayer supported institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health.

My Turn: Putting people ahead of profit — A rule never to be broken

By JIM PALERMO

I began writing this on June 2, in response to John Huer’s column, “Our job anxiety: Chain that shackles us all” [Recorder, June 1]. In the column Mr. Huer – one of my favorite contributors to this page – asserts that “… we have become so enslaved to our jobs that we have lost everything that makes us human.”

From Global to Local: Our human-made problems can and must be unmade

By H. PATRICIA HYNES

In the summer of 2023, researchers “binge-watched 250 of the most-rated movies” of the past 10 years for climate research purposes. A mere 13 percent of films made mention of climate-related disasters, some more seriously and others “offhandedly” in dialogue. In contrast, since the rise of Hollywood as the center of entertainment over a century ago, more than “2,500 war-themed movies and TV programs have been made with Pentagon assistance.” Why does the Pentagon partner with Hollywood? And why does Hollywood glamorize war at the expense of the planet?

Columnist Daniel Cantor Yalowitz: Still more heavy lifting

By DANIEL CANTOR YALOWITZ

The fight continues as the battle rages. In my lifetime, I have never seen nor experienced such bifurcation in politics and between and within our political “parties.” It all seems and feels unending, and who knows what (bad) news lurks just around the corner, pregnant and waiting for the release of the next news cycle? Am I the only one out there who feels exhausted and exasperated? The never-ending element of all this “news” has begun to feel like being forced to watch — and live — in that iconic Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. Over and over we go, doomed in a way to recapitulate all that happened yesterday again today until, and if, we learn and integrate our lessons into our lives.

David Parrella: Uninsured?

Remember when we used to worry about the uninsured? Of course you do! It was only 15 years ago and that nice Black man passed a bill that succeeded in reducing the percentage of Americans without health insurance to less than 10%!

The World Keeps Turning: Follow the money

By ALLEN WOODS

In the movie dramatizing the Watergate scandal, a secretive informant meets a reporter in a dark parking garage and advises him to “follow the money” in order to unravel the mystery involving a botched robbery directed by Richard Nixon’s White House. The actual events (testimony from White House lawyers, a mysterious 18-minute gap in the Oval Office tapes when the crisis was discussed) might have been even more sensational than the movie, but the movie phrase had legs. It is now a directive for understanding controversial government and business actions.

My Turn: Dalai Lama an inspiration at 90

By TSULTRIM DOLMA

I want to say happy 90th birthday to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, whose birthday is July 6. He has been my inspiration since I first went with my father on a religious pilgrimage to Lhasa, Tibet, at about age 7 in the early 1980s. It took us about three months to walk there from our village in the Khampa region of eastern Tibet. When we got inside the Jhokang Temple, I was truly amazed to see huge statues and also pictures on a wall of the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders.