The worthiest enemy of authoritarianism is authority. But who are the authoritative heroes available to us, and to the younger generations in particular? Who speaks a truth that everyone can get behind?
And the rest of us will be thrust into a national emergency of conscience. For we have allowed children to be snatched from the arms of their parents and sent to inadequate holding cells, cages, transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from their loved ones to caretakers in the employ of nonprofits, men and women who don’t know the names of the villages of these children, their aunts and uncles, their neighbors, or what they love to eat for dinner.
Great Barrington Police Chief Bill Walsh said his department "played a minimal role in this operation"; that he reported it to his boss, Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin, the next day; and that he responded to media inquiries on the incident.
"It was kind of disturbing for everyone in here,” Will Curletti said of the customers and employees in his coffee shop. "You know, the government is shut down and we're still pulling people off the street. You hate to see that happen."
The idea is to bring foreign students to enrich the experiences of current students at Mount Everett and, in the process, provide needed revenue to the school district and ultimately help boost district enrollments which have been dropping throughout the county.
Recently, our attention has been split by the plight of the Thai boys trapped in the cave, and the bizarre behavior of President Trump in Brussels, the United Kingdom and Helsinki. And yet there are thousands of parents and children trapped in a kind of hell, waiting to find each other.
In her letter to the editor, Joanne Rogovin writes: "An estimated 500 men, women and children filled the hill next to the GB shrubbery, protesting the separation and detention of children and families at the Mexican border."
This time, thankfully, the free press that our president mocks day after day as fake gave us the chance to hear firsthand from these mothers and fathers and their children, to see for ourselves the cages the children were sent to and to hear their cries.
Imagine fleeing for your life, walking, yes WALKING, about 1,500 miles with only the clothes on your back and a rucksack with a few minor possessions. Once here, ICE agents bind your hands with zip ties and steal your children.
Trump’s comments came in the run-up to the birthday of iconic African American civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King and the seventh anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed nearly 250,000 people.
For its new leader, the search panel chose a familiar face, Brooke Mead, who has been at BIC for 15 years, for many of those years the center’s only full-time staff member.
Are we a country irreconcilably divided? Rather than one issue, we seem unable to discourse rationally about climate change, immigration, health care, taxes, Russian espionage, or the man in the White House.
"Living in fear is the not the quality of a welcoming and safe community — it is instead the very essence of a totalitarian state. A community in which any of our members live in fear is not the kind of community that any of us, regardless of political affiliation, I am sure, want Great Barrington to be."
-- Housatonic resident Anne O’Dwyer
Fear has made Pittsfield-based immigration lawyer Michele Sisselman a very busy woman lately. “It’s frightening,” she said. “And everybody is scared, including U.S. citizens.”
