Opinion
On Wednesday for her last day of
preschool, my daughter Pickle and I discuss what music to play on the drive from West Tisbury to Chilmark. The drive takes about 15 minutes and over the last two years we have enjoyed a long musical journey together. It is just the two of us and so I have had no censors or suggestions of what is appropriate or even good.
Pickle fell in step with my groove early on, leaning heavily toward men of the late 1970s. In our hermetically-sealed musical education chamber, a Honda Fit, one could say she had no choice.
My wife is from Tennessee and before serendipitously landing on the island where we met, to her a boat trip was something you took on two aluminum pontoons, a platform covered with indoor/outdoor carpet, a small outboard engine, frilly canopy and a few cases of beer on a flat, calm pond on Sundays somewhere out in the country, maybe rafting up with a few other families for a party. Once on Cuttyhunk, her assumption was that if anything ever happened to our boat, we would each take two kids in life jackets and swim for shore.
The Gazette turns back the page in this week’s edition as it revisits the Harris Poll, a first-of-its-kind scientific public opinion survey the results of which were published by this newspaper twenty-five years ago. What follows is an editorial from July 4, 1987, the year the Harris Poll survey was taken.
I would like to convey thanks to some members of your community. I reside in Edinburgh, Scotland and in June 2013 had the chance to visit Martha’s Vineyard for the first time on the 20th anniversary of my wife’s first visit (she has been visiting on and off for 20 years now).
Suddenly the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road is transformed into an ugly, urban wired and poled road. From one day to the next greenery has had to make way for those ugly long poles now dominating the landscape. Where are we, on the Vineyard, or in some industrial backyard where ugliness triumphs over nature and aesthetics?
O beautiful for spacious skies
is broken, angry, out of work.
Our alabaster cities clang
with voices split and shrill.
Lobbied, pledged, our leaders strut
they shame the patriots’ dream.
Election more than country love
they poke the public wound.
Where are courage, statesmanship
a majesty worth sacrifice
a reason we should live with less
and strive for something more?
Show us the strength of compromise
that differences can mend.
Relinquish stubborn rhetoric