Feeling despair about the future of the republic in the hands of Xboxers and the “whatever” generation?

Feel better. Get to the West Tisbury library and listen to some new literary voices. These mostly twenty-something award-winning poets and novelists think and write with clarity and understanding about our relationships with the world and with each other.

Diversity Council Seeks

Help from New Members

The Island Diversity Council, a grassroots organization with the mission of keeping issues of diversity in the forefront of the Island community’s attention, is seeking new members.

The group seeks to promote programs in the school and create venues for adult education and discussions. The goal is to foster acceptance and understanding between all the different constituencies on the Vineyard.

The Vineyard Playhouse and the Martha’s Vineyard Library Association continue a five-year tradition of presenting an exciting live theater experience for Island children.

The Playhouse’s troupe, The Fabulists, will perform The Call of the Cuckoo, an entertaining stage adaptation of a folk tale from Afghanistan, written by Elizabeth Wojtusik. There is one performance on Saturday morning, March 22, at 11 a.m. at the Vineyard Playhouse, 24 Church street in downtown Vineyard Haven.

It’s spring at the FARM Institute already, with activities revolving around new life in the fields, barns and gardens at Katama Farm – caring for new lambs, calves and chicks; planting, cultivating and nurturing little seedlings.

The teaching farm will offer spring programs for kids five days a week beginning Tuesday, April 1. Once again the FARM can offer transportation Tuesday through Thursday via Stagecoach Taxi from designated schools, thanks to a generous grant from Mass Ag in the Classroom.

In the disturbing yet vital film Taxi to the Dark Side, Army Specialist Damien Corsetti, one of six interrogators who confessed to torturing and killing an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in 2002, stoically peers into the camera and tries to justify his actions.

“When you look at people as less than human, you find yourself doing unthinkable things,” Mr. Corsetti says of his role in the death of Dilawar, the young Afghani wrongly accused of being the trigger man in a rocket attack.

A few things became quite clear at Wednesday night’s public hearing on the draft environmental impact statement on the Cape Wind project.

The first was that about twice as many Vineyarders, assuming those who attended are broadly representative of Island opinion, oppose the project as support it.

The West Tisbury historic district commission this week approved the major parts of a proposed $5.1 million renovation of town hall. The renovation project, slated for a vote at annual town meeting on April 8, is the latest in a series of renovation proposals to voters dating back to 1997.

Between April 1997 and 2005, voters approved several design and development requests ranging between $10,000 and $75,000 for two separate architectural firms. In 2003, annual town meeting voters narrowly rejected a $3.8 million borrowing plan to fund the renovation.

Martha’s Vineyard Community Services will end its Visiting Nurse Service on June 30 after nearly 43 years of operation.

Seventy-two clients and 22 employees — 12 staff members and 10 per-diem workers — will be affected. The agency is not accepting new referrals, said Julia Burgess, executive director of Community Services.

Program director Sharon Clauss-Zanger noted the closing date is subject to assurance of adequate and appropriate transition arrangements for its home-care clients.

It is sap-running time on the Vineyard, and Simon J. Athearn of Edgartown already is in the thick of making maple syrup.

His own topping for home-cooked waffles and pancakes can’t be found in any store. But there is an ample supply for those lucky enough to join him and his wife, Catherine, for breakfast.

Mr. Athearn, 31, said he usually makes close to a gallon of maple syrup and gives it out to family and friends. None of it is for sale.

It seemed an unlikely coincidence that on the very day the community consultation process on the Cape Wind project began, another wind project should suddenly pop into the world, one conveniently out of sight of land, and apparently on the best of terms with the opponents of Cape Wind.

And indeed, it proved not to be a coincidence, as the general manager of the proponent company made clear on Monday.