Opinion
In recent years, the faces of foreign workers on H2B visas have become a familiar part of the Vineyard’s seasonal employment mix. Indeed, their names are known and remembered by people who frequent particular restaurants or come back to certain inns.
That is no coincidence. Vineyard employers who have tapped into the program for a source of reliable seasonal workers often bring back the same individuals year after year.
Primary Colors
On Tuesday voters in Dukes County will go to the polls to cast ballots in the race for the Presidential nomination which has so electrified the nation.
In recent decades primaries have become humdrum, predictable affairs and more often than not voters may not have bothered to cast ballots, believing — perhaps correctly — that none of it mattered.
But not this year.
It has been a long time since I have lived on the Vineyard, so forgive me for asking, but when did the term New Yorker become derogatory? What does it mean to call someone a New Yorker? Because New York is several cities, to say that one person who hails from Park Slope in Brooklyn and another from East 63rd street in Manhattan are equally rude is like comparing persimmons to pineapples.
On cold, clear winter Vineyard days, I have trouble staying indoors. I am always tempted to set off for a walk in the woods or along a beach. The air is fresh, the sky blue. Trees gray as elephants stand out against the blueness of the sky.
And so it was on Monday, Martin Luther King Day. The air was a crisp 20, the sky the blue of medieval religious paintings, and tree limbs were clearly etched against it. Driving on Barnes Road near the Oak Bluffs water works, I stopped for a walk along the Lagoon.
Forty years ago my father, Island artist Stan Murphy, was commissioned to paint a portrait of our country’s first black cabinet member, Dr. Robert Weaver. Weaver, a civil rights leader with a doctorate in economics from Harvard, became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) when he was appointed by President Johnson.
I turned 21 in 1968, the first year I had the chance to vote. With an anti-Roosevelt Republican father and a liberal leaning Democratic mother, I tread a torturous political path. And 1968 was a year when caution was thrown to the wind, early and often. No one imagined the year would turn out to be a most tumultuous political experience.
It began with the Tet offensive at the end of January, 1968, a Viet Cong onslaught on American troops. People in the United States had been led to believe we were on the verge of victory, so the enemy uprising was amazing.