Category Archives: Columns

Hiroshima and Pilgrim: rational fear

It’s debatable whether the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, horror though it was, was justifiable as the most life-sparing (at least for Americans) way of forcing Japan to surrender. But one thing is clear– that debut of nuclear power has proved a hard act to follow. The powers-that-be tried hard to erase that initial […]

August 17, 2014 – 2:44 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Second-home owners in local government? Think twice.

The non-resident taxpayers are getting restless. “Part-time residents want more say in town,” headlines a recent “Cape Codder” story. “Second-home owners in Provincetown are calling for a bigger seat at the table when it comes to local government.” According to the president of the Truro NRT group at a July 5 meeting, “this is not […]

August 8, 2014 – 4:24 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

TOO BIG FOR OUR BRIDGES?

Forgotten in the celebrating of the 100th anniversary of the Cape Cod Canal is its contradictory effect on Cape life. The purpose of the canal was to save ships the time, money, and danger of going all the way around the treacherous Cape itself. Incidentally it turned us into an island of sorts, profoundly affecting […]

July 31, 2014 – 2:21 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Pilgrim Progress : the beat goes on

Pilgrim has withstood a virtual tsunami of bad news the last couple of years. It seems like just about everybody wants it to go away. All Cape and Vineyard towns, the governor, and our state and US representatives– all want to see it closed, for reasons that have been rehearsed almost daily in this paper. […]

July 18, 2014 – 9:36 am | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (0)

Reminding ourselves of the story of progress

You hear the word “story” a lot these years. One way of thinking about the current national mood of discontent is that we—our feckless Congress but the rest of us, too– have lost track of the story. What the story is or was and where we were in it. It’s as if the bookmark had […]

July 1, 2014 – 10:48 am | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Risk Management

In the late 1990s a large number of Wellfleetians organized to keep cell phone towers out of our town. A big part of it was aesthetic. We didn’t want them dominating our modest skyline, competing with church steeples. We didn’t like the prospect of people polluting our pristine experiences at the pond and ocean by […]

June 13, 2014 – 5:18 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Cops and community: where should the buck stop?

What was the story of the arrest of two Wellfleet locals in front of the Wicked Oyster restaurant on the evening of May 3? Actually, there are currently two very different stories. The story told in the police report mentions some serious-sounding crimes such as DUI, assaulting an officer, endangerment of the two kids in […]

June 2, 2014 – 9:57 am | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Retirement: it’s got issues

Given our growing number of retirees, it’s surprising that there isn’t more debate, in these pages and elsewhere, about the theory and practice of doing what so many of us are busy doing: aging. Having reached the age when I’m no longer taking immortality for granted, I’ve begun to pay attention to the discussion about […]

May 19, 2014 – 1:21 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The rising tide of us

Robinson Jeffers, a misanthropic poet of the early part of the last century, preferred hawks to his own species. Though having to share the world with a mere 2 billion fellow humans (compared to our 7 billion), it was way too many for him. Wikipedia calls him an icon of the environmental movement, but he […]

April 5, 2014 – 10:44 am | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Pete Seeger and the contradictions of American heroism

Pete Seeger, as you are probably aware, died recently at 94. If you haven’t already, you should see the movie about his life, “The Power of song.” It’s good to be reminded of a time–mid-20th century, the most active years of Seeger’s life—when there w as real hope in music, in that music called “folk […]

March 25, 2014 – 7:09 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)