View From the Top > Letters

Too Late for the Truth?
I got up this morning at three o’clock and spent the next three hours reading, digesting, and pondering “The United States Military Machine.” Joel [Kovel]’s statement is, for me, the most brilliant, cogent, and incisive statement on who we are as a nation that I have come across. I am in the process of notifying people of the speech and providing a link to Chronogram’s Web site, as well as attaching the speech to the e-mail notice. You have performed a great service by making Joel [Kovel]’s thinking available to people in the hinterlands like me. Please accept my thanks, and continue to inform us of Joel [Kovel]’s work and activities. His book The Enemy of Nature is, in my opinion, the most important book to come along in years and I never tire of singing its praises. I hope to use his latest speech as leverage for interesting people around here in taking his work very, very seriously. Please make a note of my e-mail address and inform me of Joel [Kovel]’s future outputs.

A note about myself: I have a long life to look back on—81 years—and my life is, I think, the story of one among many on whom the truth dawned too late to make good use of it.

Townsend L. Walker, Sr.
Huntsville, Alabama

Attention Pulitzer Committee!
Your Iraq pieces elevate Chronogram to Pulitzer Prize level journalism. Keep up the good work. Chronogram has thrillingly matured, and it is thrilling that it is happening in our community. We need this.

Stephen Kaye, Millbrook

Editor's note: We would like to thank Stephen Kaye for making a generous donation to our Journey to Iraq appeal, which helped send Senior Editor Lorna Tychostup to Baghdad in February with the Hudson Valley Peace Brigade.

The Other Side of Beacon
To the Editor:
As a social worker at the Beacon Counseling Center, I read your article extolling the benefits and glorifying the agenda of the various agencies and development corporations that are gentrifying Beacon with sadness. I would like to share some of the effects gentrification has had on my clients’ lives and those of their families.

I am a daily witness to the stories my clients relate about the effects of this gentrification, about how rents are raised astronomically, how they are being evicted because Section 8 vouchers are not being renewed by landlords hoping to cash in on this development. Residents who have lived in Beacon their entire lives are now recognizing that they can no longer afford to remain in the community with their relatives, friends, and church communities. Familiar ways of life, community, and connections are all being lost as adult children are forced to move out of town for affordable housing, far from their parents, to raise children without benefit of their extended family systems. A client related to me how heartbroken she was that she had to give up her dog because none of the “affordable options” would allow animals. She reported her father had given her this dog, a red chow, and now her father is gone; it was their only connection. Many Latino residents are puzzled and cannot understand the purpose of the new storefronts, which might hold three or four paintings, two chairs, and ne’er a human around the spotlessly painted and hyper-lit up “galleries” which used to be their homes and now hold no meaning to them. They tell me, “Que bizarre!”
How ironic that when we need a democratic presence in Beacon, the recent redistricting effort wrested Beacon away from Maurice Hinchey, who had promised to pay special attention to the city’s poor and Latino populations. What Beacon needs is not another “gallery” or an aquarium, but affordable housing, a Youth Center, and a Center for Latino Culture.

Cathy Carbelleira, Woodstock

Browsing Through the Pages
To the Editor:
I’m one of the many who are devoted to Chronogram as a cultural mainstay—it orients me to my Mid-Hudson Valley world—nudging always, “this is what is available to you—go for it”—from my otherwise silent coffee table.

But, admittedly, I don’t often make it past the esteemed reader, the calendar, and the horoscope, in terms of articles actually read. The Esteemed Reader is always eerily relevant to my life, and thereby helpful; the calendar is an essential guide; and the horoscope is an anomaly as far as horoscopes go, in that it is actually insightful and interesting, even for nonbelievers like myself.

This month, however, I just went for it—for the articles, I mean. I haven’t in the past for reasons unknown to me (I am not a nonreader), and I have often commiserated with people around town about this failing—as they sheepishly admit that they don’t read the articles either, and together, we try to figure out why. I’ll spare you the often silly answers we come up with.

So I made it over the hump this month and was thoroughly impressed, not with myself, by the way, but with Chronogram itself.
Brian’s ponderings on the meaning of his library illuminated my own failed struggle to leave some books behind. I thought of my father, whose books finally overwhelmed part of my childhood home’s structures, breaking through the ceiling, into his second library (once my bedroom), and into the core of his being—he can leave nothing behind—and that’s why we love him so, and he loves us.

Pauline Uchmanowicz’s “Revealing Corporate America” gave a great overview of this year’s subversive writings; Sharon Nichols’ “The Art of Sexploration” titillated potentials unrealized; Eric Francis’ “A Plausible Theory of How We Might Get Out of this Mess” made sense—I even want to read the book he referred to. “Jakey, Get Out of the Buggy,” by Betsy Robinson, was moving as well as thought-provoking. The list goes on.

Literary and cultural commentary woven together to inform and illuminate our lives—so I, for one, am gonna keep reading the articles (hopefully even when there isn’t a literary section). Maybe my fellow Chronogram browsers will all, eventually, just go for it.

Thanks,
Lara Edwards, Germantown

The Children Shall Lead
We received the following letters from students at the Woodstock Day School. While we don’t normally print letters that directly address previously published content, we decided to make an exception in this case.

Divided by a Dollar Bill

Sleep in a bed,
Sleepyhead,
Wake up, stomach growling,
Food is on the table for you,
But not for others,
Sleep on the sidewalk,
Cold and Sniffling,
Wake up, stomach growling,
No food is on the cardboard box
For you,
But for others there is.

—Chiara Harrison Lambe, Age 10, Kingston

You don’t know me. I don’t know you. People are being treated like old leather boots. People dying, lying, crying for food while you spend your last paycheck on unneeded stew. While you sleep in your warm cozy bed, think of those who die from lead. On the streets they lay with their cold bare hands. The nest time you read this, think about it again. You might want to help save a young woman or man.
—Tatianna Pierce, Woodstock

People are going to their radios every morning seeing what’s going to happen. To see if we’re going to war. To see what’s going on. We wake up not having to worry about getting attacked. We wake up to see if it’s a snow day. [Iraqi schoolchildren] wake up to see if their school is still there.

Sincerely,
Brett Glass, Woodstock
Protester for Peace