TO SEWER, OR NOT

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Regarding the selectmen’s rush to include the Island Grove sewer article on Edgartown’s Oct. 27 special town meeting warrant, I suggest we all take a moment to consider a few pieces of the puzzle before committing ourselves to more debt.

For one thing, if the wastewater department receives the grant, will all the residents of the Island Grove subdivision be required to hook up to the sewer system once it is installed? For me this point is key.

At annual town meeting in 2006, the voters decided that the town should institute betterments in the Edgartown Meadows area to bring in town water. Hooking up to the town system was voluntary. Eighteen months after installation of the street main, only seven out of more than 60 qualifying households had initiated service. Yet we’d been told at town meeting that there was a health crisis in the area and that action had to be taken with all due haste.

My point is, if the town is going to lay out all that money, are enough residents going to take advantage of the system to make that investment worthwhile? On the other hand, in light of the dismal economy, requiring all subdivision residents to hook in would be an alarming development. I know that if I lived there, I simply couldn’t afford it, and I wonder if the people affected are aware of all the costs involved.

For instance, would the Island Grove residents get free grinder pumps and only have to pay for shipping, as the Edgartown Meadows residents did? I understand the pumps cost a few thousand dollars. There’s also a system development or hookup charge. How much is that? And the semiannual rates, what are they? What does the average customer pay annually? Do potential customers understand that they would have to pay a private contractor to dig a trench and lay the on-property line that runs from the street line to the house?

These are all questions for which Island Grove residents — and all Edgartown residents for that matter — deserve answers. Let’s have those answers in hand before we decide anything.

Pia Webster

Edgartown

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A DIFFERENT STORY

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

The Gazette recently promoted a theatrical performance called the Laramie Project. The Laramie Project is a play by Moises Kaufman about the reaction to the 1998 murder of a gay-identified University of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyo. The murder is widely considered to be a hate crime motivated by homophobia.

It is very unfortunate that homosexual activists and the liberal media converted this drug-related killing into a hate crime. Testimonies by those who committed the murder attest to the fact that Matthew Shepherd was not killed because he said he was a homosexual.

On Nov. 26, 2004, 20/20, ABC host Elizabeth Vargas ran a report in which a number of figures tied to the case, including the prosecutor, were interviewed. They made a credible case that Shepard was targeted by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson not because of anti-gay sentiment, but because McKinney was high on methamphetamines, giving him unusual violent tendencies as well as a desire for cash to buy more drugs. Vargas not only found that a meth high can lead to the kind of extreme violence perpetrated against Shepard, but that McKinney had gone on to similarly attack another man, causing a skull fracture, very soon after his attack on Shepard.

The facts show that misguided defense of one of the killers tried to make an issue of Shepard’s homosexuality in order to employ a “gay panic defense” based upon the defendant’s alleged prior homosexual experiences, but this was rejected by the judge. In fact, at least one of Shepard’s killers claimed in an interview on ABC’s 20/20 that money and drugs motivated their actions that night, not hatred of gays. One of the girlfriends of the accused testified that they had planned to pretend to be homosexuals so that they could rob Shepard.

The violent death of Matthew Shepard is a tragedy. It is also a tragedy that Matthew Shepard’s name is attached to a hate crimes bill that is before the Senate and House. This bill expands hate crimes to include sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. It is clear that the death of this gay-identified teenager has been used by the media and homosexual community to promote and expand their agenda to change the moral foundation of our country.

Jerry Siegel

Chilmark

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HISTORY REPEATS

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

A love of history, particularly the Civil War era, caused George Bisacca, founder of Eastover Resort in Lenox, to build the American Heritage Room/Museum containing one of the largest, privately held Civil War collections in the United States.

Yearly, during a summer weekend, George and his staff would reenact a Civil War clash. Dressed in blue and gray uniforms, they thrilled the guests with their period outfits and equipment.

In the early 1970s, I was happily a part of the audience when we heard over the loudspeaker (accidentally turned on), that a $10,000 personal wager between George and a visiting U.S. Marine Colonel had been made. The bet was which team could shoot down a 6x6x3 cinder block wall first. Two pairs of Marines using M60 machine guns (two-man weapons introduced in 1957) would compete against a pair of Eastover staffers using a Gatling gun, an 1851 Belgium Army invention and one of the most well-known rapid-fire weapons to be used by Union soldiers in the Civil War 150 years ago.

Less than five minutes later, two thirds of the Marines’ wall was still standing. Nearly everyone looked on in confusion at the Marines and their two M60 machine guns which, first one, then its twin, had conked out, misfired or failed. It didn’t affect the wager, however, breakdown or not. The rat-tat-tat of the Gatling had already destroyed its wall.

I was reminded of the fabulous Eastover Resort, and this event, after reading an AP article in Monday’s Boston Globe: “U.S. weapons failed in Afghan battle that killed nine.”

Forty years ago we lost 58,000 soldiers in Viet Nam, where the M60 was widely used. Today, our kids are in other countries we don’t belong in, seemingly using, again, lousy equipment that fails when their lives are on the line.

We left Southeast Asia almost 40 years ago. I won’t say we lost, because I never knew exactly what we possibly could have won. Today, we need to do the same in the Middle East and South Asia — come home.

Tom Haddad

Edgartown

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BUS ANGELS

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

I’m writing to thank a young woman and two bus drivers who went way out of their way to do a big favor for us last Sunday, Oct. 11. It was our first time on the Vineyard transit system and we were a bit confused as to which bus to be on to take us up-Island. Perhaps we were also a bit rattled because the Jeep we were using on the Island had just died and had been towed away leaving us laden with the paraphernalia we had loaded into it for the day: a camera bag, a heavy tripod and spotting scope, my GPS and a fanny pack with two pairs of Zeiss binoculars. Our bus stopped at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury and several passengers got out and sprinted for the up-Island bus about a 100 yards down the road. When we discovered that we were also supposed to be getting on that bus, the other passengers had boarded and then it was about to pull away. Fortunately, our driver was in radio contact with the driver of the other bus and asked him to wait. We gathered our belongings and started out for the other bus as fast as we could manage. Unbeknownst to us, we left behind our fanny pack with the binoculars! We are very grateful that the young woman on the bus realized what happened and that the drivers of the buses were willing to wait while she chased us down almost to the other bus and brought us the fanny pack. I hope that the drivers and the young woman might see this and know how grateful we are and hope that we can return this act of kindness to someone else if we are in a position to do so.

Robert Bass

Bedford

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ON TEACHING LANGUAGE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

We are teaching English for free to very poor children in a remote barrio in Masaya. Most of the children do not have shoes and live in dirt floor shacks. It appealed to us to teach the poorest children in the poorest public school, to give them an education usually reserved for the children of the rich in private schools.

After two months of teaching we gave them an exam in the simple present, past and future, and to our amazement they all failed. Even the four children of the director, who are all in private school and have had four years of English, failed. These were sentences like: “I am, I was, I will be.”

Then we realized that none of them had knowledge of their own Spanish grammar. How can one learn a foreign language when one does not know one’s own? So we began to investigate the teachers’ skill levels.

There are teachers here, both North American and Spanish, teaching English, saying things like, “Me and my friends are going.” I found an English grammar book here that taught “Whom am I.” I am finding that good language skills are fast becoming extinct.

We are talking about the basic rules of English grammar, never mind penmanship.

We are finding this here. What is happening in the USA? I listened to a lecture given by former Supreme Court Justice David Souter, and I realized that most of the words he used were becoming a “foreign language” to most Americans. The English language is so rich and varied. Sad to think it will be reduced to “yo, sup!” and text-speak. At that point, communication will be shallow and limited, and so will be our minds.

Muriel Laverty

Central America

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NEWSPAPER REFLECTIONS

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Now that the hurly-burly of summer is over I have time to comment on a particular issue of your good paper dated June 12: While You Were Sleeping. Sorry to be so late.

Various members of your staff contributed articles on different areas of Island nocturnal activity, and I found the quality of reporting excellent. The facts provided were very interesting in themselves, but I noted a more subtle, maybe offbeat message in each, which was not the focus of the articles — it just came through to me.

In the bass fishermen report, for example, it is in the selection of the observations reported: the stroll along the shore (not fishing at that time), the warm banter, and the angler’s final appreciative but wistful statement about fishing — “What else is there?” — leaves the reader to ponder the existential question.

Flying Solo: The myriad of large and small duties that the lone airport operations specialist must handle are described in interesting detail. The palpable aloneness of the job emerges without any implication of loneliness — because the man does not feel lonely. Of course readers will have their own particular evaluations of what is lonely.

The Night Smells of Dough: A thoroughly delightful and warmly human transport from the luscious flavor of the Back Door to the international flavor of immigrant travails — who would suspect such human drama in the offering of doughnuts and fritters. The amazement is left to the reader.

On the Midnight Run: Since almost all readers know the scope of the trip from Falmouth or Woods Hole to the Island, they would be startled to read that very small ferries make eight round trips in 24 hours in all kinds of weather. (Filling in the gaps left by the heavyweight ferries). But balanced against such dogged determination is the romantic cast of the cargo: weary music makers, and, once a day, every day, all the news of all the world. Again, the writer makes no judgment.

The Right Place for Dreamers: Another warm report of the more footloose and fancy-free young workers living it up on Saturday night. The writer is nonjudgmental — even enthusiastic, or at least empathic. The article, like the others so well written, leaves ruminations to the readers — whether of nostalgia or of sterner stuff.

911, Recorded Line: The most sober of your articles nevertheless carries the flavor of the Vineyard and has a quaintness about it. The fantasy of the “frequent flyers” who seem stimulated to make 911 calls on the occasion of a full moon — where else but on the Island would there be such Brigadoon elements? What to make of that?

Officer Morse Patrols: The article captures the humanity of the police officer, his courtesy, concern for people’s safety, pride in law enforcement, and his conscientious attention to the small details as well as to the larger purpose of the job. The reader must evaluate the ambiguity resulting when Officer Morse returns to the scene of the teenage house party and meets a young girl who says she was there all night and slept through the whole thing . . . okay.

Naturally, the editor, herself, should be congratulated it goes without saying — but I just did say it — because I’m not a reporter in a class with her writers. Also, the thought occurs to me (at this late point), who am I to presume to commend anything in your world-famous newspaper? Was I carried away by last summer’s magic to elevate the importance of my opinion while thinking of you all winter long, as the song goes?

Frederick D. Massie Sr.

East Providence, R.I.

The Vineyard Gazette welcomes letters to the editor on any subject concerning Martha’s Vineyard. The newspaper strives to publish all letters as space allows, although the editor reserves the right to reject letters that in her judgment are inappropriate. Letters must be signed, and should include a place of residence and contact telephone number. The Gazette does not publish anonymous letters.