Editorials
Open and Shut Case
The plan to rehabilitate the old Oak Bluffs library by converting the building into affordable housing for seniors and a pharmacy must be referred to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission for review as a development of regional impact.
Information, Please
Some fifteen-hundred Vineyarders soon will find themselves with virtually useless medical insurance. These are people on low incomes with no employer health insurance, many working multiple low-wage jobs that leave precious little time for navigating complicated bureaucratic insurance matters.
Aquaculture Stimulus
We have seen the future and this is it: American oysters, bay scallops, blue mussels, quahaugs and softshell clams, thriving by the thousands in natural nurseries that are the coastal ponds and embayments of the Vineyard. The nurseries are aided by the able work of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group, which grows millions of seed shellfish and provides them to the towns for sowing — both in the wild and in saltwater farms tended by entrepreneurial fishermen.
A man waiting for coffee behind me the other day at the Scottish Bakehouse was wearing a navy pinstripe double-breasted suit and recently shined shoes, and he may as well have been sporting a tutu and a beer hat for the looks he was getting.
You could see the customers’ minds working. He wasn’t en route to a funeral, his suit was too light. But at 10 a.m. on a dreary, rainy Tuesday in early April, a wedding seemed unlikely too. Maybe he was a hired gun, just grabbing a Danish before heading up-Island to rub someone out . . .
Girl Talk
Earth Day 2009
When Earth Day began, few people had heard of Chernobyl or Bhopal. Instead of cell phones, we had a cold war. Nelson Mandela was in a South African prison, for there was apartheid not wi-fi, or even many personal computers. The Berlin Wall was not yet down, the Clean Air Act was not yet law. On the shores of a Great Lake, the Cuyahoga River had somehow caught fire, such was the concentration of oil, chemicals and other oozing environmental hazards there.