A Feeling Of Sadness

For many years, the rural hamlet of Ghent, Columbia County, New York, had an iconic house. It was on the main street, State Route 66. It was quirky, and it was an eccentric landmark. It was a small house with a porch. What made it so unusual was that an enormous tree grew through the porch. Looking at the house made it clear: the tree came first, far more than a century ago, and the porch, a later, flimsier, manmade object, respected the importance of the tree and yielded to it.

Many people saw and marveled at the house and its porch. More than once when I mentioned Ghent, someone responded, “Is that where the house has a tree through the roof?” Here’s a photo of the house from 2011:

Yesterday when I drove down Route 66 I had an enormous surprise. A real shock that led slowly to despair. Not only was the porch gone, yes, it really was completely removed, but also the tree’s limbs had been removed and the entire tree was coming down as well. Today I found the remains of the tree lying in the yard. Here’s a photo of the house today:

I’m sure there are many seeming reasons for this. The house, after all was for sale last year, and who knows what kind of engineering havoc the tree’s roots did to the foundation and the plumbing. This is private property. It’s not a building preserved by statute or ordinance. But all of that seems oddly beside the point.

This is sad. I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it. But it’s as if a familiar neighbor, an acquaintance who lived nearby has died. I know nothing about why it happened, and I know that things like this happen often, but I feel the loss deeply.

I know the famous gatha well:

“From interdependent causes all things arise, and all things fade away, so teaches the Perfectly Enlightened One.”

I get it. I'm sure you do too. This is only another example of impermanence. It’s only natural that the house would eventually fall down, and that the tree would eventually topple or have to be cut down. And that eventually they’d both be gone. And their odd symbiotic relationship would be ended. Nothing is permanent, everything changes, everything fades away. This includes the iconic Ghent house and it’s giant maple tree, too.

Today, in their place is a pervasive feeling of sadness, which, too, I am sure, will eventually fade away.

NYC Haiku

Washington Square Park,
once the center of the world,
What have you become?

4/11/12

New York 1968

The New York Times brings us a 90 minute walk in New York in 1968 in 2 minutes 40 seconds. Freeze it as you go. Look around. Look at the people and how they are dressed. Do you remember this? What emerges is either a city living in misty but wildly speeded up nostalgia or ones surprisingly quite like the present. The voiceover is crazy (and in German) and helps the film in odd ways. Fun to play with. Especially corners you recognize.

Why Town Court Should Be Abolished In New York (Parts 1 and 2)

I could post a long argument with footnotes about why Town Court should be abolished in New York. These courts, formerly called "Justice Courts," are a vestige of 18th and 19th century rural America, and they just don't measure up to what most people now think is just. Their judges don't have to be lawyers (more than 70% aren't) and there is no education requirement for the job. The training non-lawyer judges receive is grotesquely inadequate to make important decisions. And the rulings these judges make can have enormous significance to the people who appear before them. Just take a look at these brief videos:

Why Town Court In New York Should Be Abolished
by: davidseth

Why Town Court Should Be Abolished In New York, Part 2
by: davidseth

I'm just a beginner with this technology. I've now made two short videos. I think they make the point: Town Court should be abolished in New York. I'm just pointing out the reasons.

Stop The Robo Calls, Please

A brief, unsolicited diatribe about repeated robo calls I am receiving from the nutcase and misleadingly named National Organization For Marriage on my home and office telephones. No, they are not crusading for marriage equality. They are campaigning instead for the defeat in New York of important, pending marriage equality legislation in the State Senate. They have a ton of money. They have spent their money on annoying, repeated robocalls that masquerade as a poll.

If the robocall isn’t initially answered, they leave a voicemail message that they called and may call back. Again. That can be heard as a threat. Or a promise. Whichever, it seems to me to be an idiotic maneuver. Why should I care if they called when I wasn’t home? They don’t leave a number to call back. The number that comes up on caller id isn’t answered. But the message is the starting bell for the series of calls, that’s right, a series of calls, all identical to each other, that is sure to follow.

The robocall, when answered, begins with a statement that they are polling about one of the most important questions in the history of human civilization or some similar hyperbole. Then they ask, “Are you a registered voter?” Yes. Next question: “Do you believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman?” F*ck no, I don’t f*cking believe that. You [string of expletives deleted.] “Thank you, good bye.” Click.

I suppose that if I said that I agreed with the proposition discriminating against same sex marriage, I would be told how to call my legislator or asked to give money or enlisted in some kind of Astroturf political organization that was all about denying marriage to people who are in love with each other.

The caller id says these calls are all coming from “FreeRsrch2011” and are being made from Washington, D.C., (202) 630-9908. Who are these people?

The New York Daily News tells the story:

A shadowy group run by religious fundamentalists is bankrolling a pitched crusade against same-sex marriage in New York.

Secretive and flush with cash, the National Organization for Marriage is igniting a culture war as it battles Gov. Cuomo and [New York City] Mayor Bloomberg in their campaign to legalize gay wedlock.

"If marriage is redefined, then New York schools will soon be teaching that it's just as good for Jimmy to grow up and marry Johnny as it is to marry Mary," says the group's $172,100-a-year president, Brian Brown….

Based in Princeton, N.J., and Washington D.C., the tax-exempt group was founded in 2007 to defend traditional heterosexual marriage.

Since then, its treasury has grown from $637,000 to $8.5 million in 2009 as it attacked same-sex unions across the country. In the last 18 months, donations have swollen to more than $13 million, sources say.

Where the cash comes from isn't clear. One backer is the Knights of Columbus… The Knights raised $1.9 million for the group in 2008-09.

The idea of “defending traditional heterosexual marriage” doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Look, if you want to defend marriage and make it permanent, repeal all of the divorce laws. Then everyone who marries will remain married. No matter what. And what, I want to know, does letting gay and lesbian people marry each other do to devalue “traditional heterosexual marriage?” What married people do within their marriages to evade or subvert their agreement does plenty devalue marriage, as does the number of divorces, but how does letting additional people marry devalue straight people’s marriages. I don’t get it. If anything, if you want to strengthen marriage, it makes sense to let everyone marry whomever they want. But I digress. And fulminate because my phone is ringing.

The National Organization For Marriage has tons and tons of money to put into defeating this important legislation. And it looks like it is quite willing to spend plenty of it in New York:

In New York, the group has tapped a $500,000 war chest to blitz the airwaves with a last-minute TV ad buy. It's also making hundreds of thousands of robo-calls as pols mull a possible vote before the Legislature goes home June 20.

With Cuomo and the state Assembly supporting gay marriage, the group has targeted the Senate, pledging $1 million to oust Republicans who break with their party to "defend traditional marriage."

The group spent $1.8 million in 2008 to back Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed same-sex marriage, and $1.9 million in 2009 to repeal Maine's gay marriage law.

If the New York bill passes, one of the group's TV ads says, New York could become like California, where a "teachable moment" means taking first-graders to a same-sex wedding.

Personally, I don't find anything the matter with same-sex weddings. I think the couple's adopted first grade children would like to see the wedding.

So that’s why my phones are ringing. Repeatedly. It’s annoying. It’s a stupid waste of funds. If I weren’t already a supporter of gay marriage before these calls started, the repeated calling would make me one. Nobody I know want’s to be continually called to the phone for this kind of bullshit. That’s why there is a (far too limited) no-call list.

Would you please tell these people to stop calling me? And my neighbors? And all of the people in Columbia County, New York? Please. And National Organization for Marriage, if you’re reading this, Please. Just stop it.

And if you’re one of the recipients of these ridiculous and annoying calls, maybe you’d like to strke back. Good. Spend a minute calling your state Senator. Tell him or her that you support marriage equality and that you’ve got your legislator’s back if s/he votes for the proposition, even if the fat cat nut cases threaten his/her reelection.

Enough. A Plea To Abolish New York's Town Courts

Austerlitz Town Court, Spencertown, New York

Despite a decades long argument that government should be smaller and more efficient, and despite the use of that argument to cut essential aid for poor people, the sick, students, the elderly, the wasteful government boondoggles persist, and it’s as if they were invisible, or at the very least immune from serious scrutiny. There are doubtless boxcars full of these, but high on the list of wasteful, inefficient, unnecessary spending in New York are the town and village courts.

It’s not a pretty picture. New York’s town and village court system is a huge and incredibly expensive dinosaur. The scope and cost of the system and the amount of duplication in it reveal huge amounts of waste and unnecessary spending. And in general the quality of justice this stegosaurus provides is questionable. There are ample reasons to abolish these courts statewide. But is there the will to do so and to replace these courts with district courts? Or are they to be preserved, a living natural history museum of creatures that deserve to be extinct?

What do all these little courts do? In addition to the many traffic tickets that provide so much money to the towns and the state, they have jurisdiction over misdemeanor crimes and initial jurisdiction (bail, felony hearings) of felony cases. They also handle small claims and evictions and other small civil cases. That means that a town court judge— town court judges do not need to be lawyers and they do not need to be fully trained in a law school-- has the power to remand someone accused of a crime to jail on high bail, and the power, if there is a conviction, to sentence someone to jail for up to a year. The town court judge is also supposed to decide difficult and important procedural and even Constitutional questions that arise in misdemeanor criminal cases and even more arcane, to conduct bench and jury trials in these cases. These judges are required to instruct the juries on the law.

Let’s look at how this system operates in Columbia County. Because Columbia is a small county and because the number of cases is relatively small, each of these courts meets in the town or village hall one or more times per month. Naturally, most of the caseload involves traffic tickets. But initial appearances and bail determinations in misdemeanor and serious felony cases are also decided.

There are 1,281 town and village courts in New York State. Each of these has its own clerk’s office and the expenses of operating it. There are 2,154 town and village judgeships. Each of these positions is paid a salary and in many cases various kinds of fringe benefits, including health insurance and retirement. There is no requirement that the judges of these courts be lawyers. So, statewide approximately 68 percent of the judges are non-lawyers. Columbia County’s town court judges fit this profile. And unlike all other New York courts, which are state-funded, these courts are funded by the local government in which they are situated. Statewide operating this many small courts is very, very expensive.

Take Columbia County as an example. In Columbia County alone there are 21 town and village courts (Valatie recently closed its court). According to the 2010 Columbia County budget, the cost of salaries, capital improvements, and non-salary costs of the town and courts in 2010 was $838,569. That figure does not include any of the fixed costs of operating 21 different courtrooms and the cost of equipping 21 different clerk’s offices with the very same equipment and the costs of postage and mailing and the rest of running an office. It doesn’t include the cost of training judges and recording proceedings and storage of documents. It should be clear that the amount spent on these courts is far more than it would take to operate a district court (or even two) to handle all of the current town and village court matters. Put another way, abolishing these courts would save money. That much cannot be rationally disputed. And, presumably if judges in district court were lawyers, the quality of decisions might be improved. Government would be smaller and more efficient. Statewide the savings would come to millions and millions of dollars. But, isn’t it strange? Nobody at all is clamoring to shrink these courts and to replace them with centralized District Courts, which parenthetically would be paid for by the state with funds collected across the state.

For decades complaints about the town and village courts have been legion. The complaints are in two categories: analytical and anecdotal. A number of organizations in New York have investigated the system and concluded that the town court system should be dissolved. Almost forty years ago the Dominick Commission recommended replacement with district courts. Even then, the Commission felt that the quality of the justice system was not best served by part-time and non-lawyer judges, and it noted that the mandatory training town court judges must receive might not “adequately prepare a justice to protect the rights of individuals” and that having part-time work outside of the court “might present conflicting demands on the judge’s time and by implication, result in a less than zealous or rigorous attention to his judicial responsibilities.” Since then, the State Commission of Investigation, the League of Women Voters, the Institute for Judicial Administration, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the New York State Defender’s Association, and others have all called for abolition of these courts. All to no avail.

Abolition has been resisted by the Conference of Mayors, and to no one’s surprise, by the New York State Association of Magistrates, an organization made up of town and village court judges.

And anecdotal complaints about the system abound. These served as the basis for an award winning, 2006 series of four articles, “Broken Bench", by William Glaberson in the New York Times detailing numerous abuses in the system. These articles caused a brief buzz. And then the deafening silence resumed. Inattention to these broken courts continued with shrugs and further avoidance of the topic. At the time the State’s financial crisis had not yet bloomed. The tendered reasons for abolition had to do mostly with the quality of justice dispensed, not with the outrageous and unnecessary costs of the sytstem. It should also be noted in passing that the Commission on Judicial Conduct spends most of its time and money investigating and disciplining the non-lawyer town and village judges.

There are obvious reasons why these town courts persist. Not necessarily in order of importance, these reasons include that the local political parties like having additional paid positions for which election is possible, the judges enjoy their service to the community, some may also enjoy their power or being called “Your Honor.” Moreover, and probably most important, as with other courts, most voters have no idea what the town court does. They think that the town has to have one just as the town has to have a clerk. When these voters get traffic tickets, they tend to mail them in as “guilty”. And they may have no reason ever to be in the town court unless they or their children get arrested or get tickets. In other words, the town courts’ operations are hardly ever observed, let alone scrutinized by the people footing the bill for them. It's assumed that these courts are mandatory, a cost of having a town. A cost of having a government. But they're not.

Another reason why these courts persist may be the thought that it will take an act of the state legislature to be rid of them. And that that will be a time consuming, expensive ordeal. But that is not so. It’s easier than that. Since 1961, under Article 6, §16 of the New York Constitution, New York’s local jurisdictions have had the authority to replace town courts by establishing a unified district court with general trial jurisdiction and full-time judges. This can be done for the entire county or for one or more contiguous cities or towns in the county. In order to establish a district court system, the majority of the electorate in each town or village involved must vote for approval in a general election. In other words, towns that want to keep their town courts can do so unless a majority of the town’s voters want the savings and improvements a district court system will provide.

Can we expect to see such a referendum in Columbia County to abolish all the town and village courts and to replace them with a district court? I have no idea. But it should be obvious that if Columbia County is at all interested in saving taxpayers’ funds, in shrinking the size of unnecessary government, in providing more efficient, more just services, there is little question that this unnecessary and inefficient should be halted and that these courts should be abolished.

ADL Jumps In On The Wrong Side Of The Mosque Debate

Every once in a while, something happens that is so completely wrong, so inexplicably confused, that it makes you shake your head in utter disbelief. Today was one of those days. The Anti Defamation League (ADL), an organization that has been in the forefront of the battle for religious tolerance for decades, announced that it opposed the building of a mosque near the former World Trade Center site. I find this almost impossible to believe.

The New York Times reports:

The nation's leading Jewish civil rights group has come out against the planned mosque and Islamic community center near ground zero, saying more information is needed about funding for the project and the location is ''counterproductive to the healing process.''

The Anti-Defamation League said it rejects any opposition to the center based on bigotry and acknowledged that the group behind the plan, the Cordoba Initiative, has the legal right to build at the site. But the ADL said ''some legitimate questions have been raised'' about funding and possible ties with ''groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values.''

''Ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right,'' the ADL said in a statement. ''In our judgment, building an Islamic center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain -- unnecessarily -- and that is not right.''

Please read this carefully. The Cordoba Initiative has an unquestionable legal right to build at the site. But apparently, that's not the end of the discussion. The right to build the mosque is not in question. No. Something trumps that. ADL tells us that they have questions about funding, as if that were ADL's business, and then there's this magnificent urban planning point. Apparently, there is theoretical penumbra around former World Trade Center site in which all of the construction should not be "counterproductive to the healing process." If the mosque were further away, say 2 more blocks, maybe it wouldn't impinge on the theoretical penumbra, but as it is now, it's too close for comfort. What shameful rubbish.

The big question is what the construction of a mosque has to do with 9/11. On any level. Islam is a religion of peace. The people who brought down the World Trade Towers were fundamentalist lunatics. Nobody is saying that the proposed mosque has anything at al to do with those people. Or their views. Or supported the events. Or is subversive. No. There is no arguable connection. The connection, if you want to call it that, is just this: the hijackers were muslim, and the mosque is muslim. You see how that prevents healing? I don't. You can put all of the whip cream you want on that steaming pile, and it will never, never, never be a dessert.

The Cordoba Institute says it will be transparent and will deal with the Attorney General's Charity Bureau about its funding. Great. That ought to be the end of that thread of the argument. We can expecct the Attorney General to check the funding. What remains, I am saddened to say, is the bigotry.

And whenever there is collossal bigotry, people line up to justify it. The Community Board, the Mayor, and many others recognize that there is no legal, justifiable basis in a city to say that the Mosque that can legally be built on this site shouldn't be built. It has a right to be built. Who can abrogate that right? Nobody. And whose against it? Can you guess? Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a caterwauling mass of rightwing nut jobs. And joining them, to my shock and my great horror, ADL.

ADL's position has horrified others as well:

The ADL, one of the most prominent groups in American Jewish life, is known for its advocacy of religious freedom and interfaith harmony. Its position on the mosque was met with shock and condemnation by several groups.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of J Street, the dovish, pro-Israel group, said he would hope ADL would be at the forefront in defending the freedom of a religious minority, ''rather than casting aspersions on its funders and giving in to the fear-mongerers.''

The Rev. Welton Gaddy, head of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington advocacy group, said he read the ADL statement ''with a great deal of sorrow.''

''As an organization that for nearly 100 years has helped set the standard for fighting defamation and securing justice and fair treatment for all, it is disappointing to see the ADL arrived at this conclusion,'' Gaddy said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations urged ADL to retract its statement.

You can add my voice to those. The ADL is seriously and embarrassingly off course here. It needs to retract its statements. But that doesn't matter to ADL's National Director:

Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, defended his position.

In a phone interview, he compared the idea of a mosque near ground zero to the Roman Catholic Carmelite nuns who had a convent at the Auschwitz death camp. In 1993, Pope John Paul II responded to Jewish protests by ordering the nuns to move.

''We're saying if your purpose is to heal differences, it's the wrong place,'' Foxman said of the mosque. ''Don't do it. The symbolism is wrong.''

Read that again. It makes no sense whatsoever. If your purpose is to heal differences, you don't jump into disputes on the wrong side, when religious freedom is at stake, and you don't attempt to justify your position by incendiarily invoking the Nazis. That is just entirely too much. And it show how terribly wrong ADL's position is.

The Arthur Kill Debate

Today's NY Times has a story about the victorious Arthur Kill Correctional Facility Debate Team. Writes the Times:

The two debate teams sat across a large room on Thursday night waiting for their face-off to begin. On one side were the visitors, four undergraduates at the New School, and their equally young coach poring over documents and comparing last-minute notes. Across the room the home team, four men in their 30s and 40s, leaned back in their seats, pictures of poise, their neatly arranged index cards at the ready but untouched.

The students from the Eugene Lang College of the New School were nervous because their team had lost here the previous year; in fact, the opposing team was undefeated in its two-year history, besting opponents like St. John’s University and New York Law School. The students were nervous because they were young and earnest and, as one of them put it, “afraid of offending someone.”

And they were, as one put it, “meta-nervous,” perhaps because they had to argue that the government should not finance higher education in prisons, right there at the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility, against a team of incarcerated men who could be seen as Exhibit A for the opposing view.

So the Arthur Kill team had the home-turf advantage, plus passion, not to mention direct personal experience — of the four debaters, three are currently special students at the New School, as are many of the two dozen inmates who were on hand to watch. Then there’s the advantage of general life experience, on the outside and in.

A spoiler: Arthur Kill won the debate. One wonders, how could they not? The prisoners clearly know a lot more about the need for education in prison than the undergrads they debated. And the undergrads had spiraled off into the world of Foucault, a world so ethereal, so theoretical that they couldn't have the resources to use it effectively. But I digress.

Arthur Kill is holding more than the four members of the debate team. In fact, it is a remote corner of Staten Island and has about 900 prisoners, who are classified "medium security." It's a prison. And it's not an educational institution. It has no aspirations to become an educational institution. How could it? New York claims to be in its worst budget crisis in decades, and despite the shortsightedness of it, cutting prison programs is a way to save money that does not create instant street demonstrations. Or angry lobbyists. Or strong public relations campaigns and denunciations. If New York can propose cutting funds from schools, how much easier is it to cut from prison programs?

Prisoners, lest one forget, are disenfranchised. They don't have an alumni association. Their loss won't be front page news. The front page is reserved for the corners of the prison gulag that succeed not because of programs, but despite the stringency of captivity.

Rockefeller Drug Law Reform

New York's legislature might reform the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws (again) this year. New York has been saddled with its harsh drug laws for 36 years, and change has been extraordinarily slow in coming. New York's prisons are still jammed at huge cost both to the state and to the incarcerated and their families with non-violent drug offenders. And the legislature, prompted by fiscal concerns, seems willing to tinker with the statutes, rather than tossing them out and starting over with a different, sensible plan. The legislature's proposed reforms, however, are a beginning of significant change.

What is the present law? An addict who sells $10 worth of crack to support her own habit and who is convicted of a B-felony sale MUST go to prison for at least 1 year and then be on post release supervision (i.e. parole) for at least 1 year. And she might be sentenced to a term of 9 years. Judges cannot sentence her to probation or to treatment even if they believe that's appropriate. She can go through "shock incarceration" or CASAT, programs that will require her to be released before her 1-year term is ended. A 1-year term is ordinarily reduced by 1/7 for good behavior and an additional 1/7 for completing a program, making it essentially a prison term of about 8 months. Prison is presently the benchmark for all B-felony sales, no matter the circumstances. Some DA's will reduce these sales to crimes that do not require prison. But some will not. The definition of the crime does not take into account whether the sale is made solely for profit or whether it is made by an addict to support her habit.

The legislation changes this particular mandatory prison sentence by providing diversion possibilities and additional sentencing options.

The State Assembly has passed a bill to begin to make needed changes in the statutory scheme. The bill states as its Purpose Or General Idea:

To significantly reduce drug-related crime by addressing substance
abuse that often lies at the core of criminal behavior. The bill would
accomplish this goal by returning discretion to judges to tailor the
penalties of the penal law to the facts and circumstances of each drug
offense and authorizing the court to sentence certain non-violent drug
offenders to probation and drug treatment rather than mandatory prison
where appropriate. The bill will also strengthen in-prison drug
treatment and reentry services.

The bill might also pass the State Senate, which now has a Democratic majority.

This legislation is an important first step toward reform, but it's just not enough to solve all of the problems. There remains no cogent state policy about drugs, and long term incarceration of both sellers and users remains a distinct possibility under the new legislation. While the legislation begins to make substantive changes, it doesn't really attempt to solve all of the most obvious problems with the old laws.

Put another way, I agree with the New York Civil Liberties Union that "while the bill represents an important step in overhauling the drug laws, the bill was nevertheless only one step":

The [NYCLU's] analysis found that in certain essential respects, the Assembly proposal does not fully realize the reform principles on which the legislation is based.

The NYCLU noted, for example, that the bill:

* Leaves in place a sentencing scheme that permits unreasonably harsh maximum sentences for low-level, non-violent drug offenses;
* Disqualifies from eligibility for treatment and rehabilitation individuals who may be most in need of such programs; and
* Creates an unnecessarily burdensome procedure for sealing a criminal record after someone has completed a substance abuse program.

The NYCLU also recommended that in order to realize the promise of alternative to incarceration programs, the state must develop evidence-based, best-practice models to ensure good outcomes for the individuals who enter such programs – and for their families and communities.

About this, I agree with the ACLU's Donna Lieberman:

"This is an essential first step, but we encourage Governor Paterson and the State Senate to authorize judicial discretion to divert individuals from prison in all appropriate cases; to expand and improve the quality of alternative to incarceration programs; and to provide long-sought justice to the thousands of families that have been torn apart by the Rockefeller Drug Laws,” Lieberman said.

If New York is really serious about eliminating some of the obvious problems with these statutes, it's going to need to go further than the presently proposed legislation. The present legislation is a start that has been a long, long time in coming. Let's hope it doesn't take another decade to complete the process.

An Environmental Success Story

Today's New York Times has this good news about bald eagles in the Hudson Valley of New York:

Bald eagles, among the largest birds of prey in North America, were once plentiful in New York. Before the 1900s, they used as many as 80 nesting sites, primarily in northern and western New York, according to the State Department of Environmental Conservation. But by 1976, only one pair of eaglets remained. Environmentalists blamed pesticides, particularly DDT (which was banned in 1972), for interfering with the raptors’ ability to reproduce.

In 1976, the state began its Bald Eagle Restoration Project in an attempt to re-establish a breeding population. Over 13 years, 198 nesting bald eagles were collected, mostly from Alaska, and taken to New York. They were reared in cages in towers in the mid-Hudson region and released.

Today, roughly 500 bald eagles winter in New York (they migrate here when the waters begin to freeze in Canada and Nova Scotia), and 143 pairs remain in the state during the summer. Dr. Koontz said that eight pairs had stayed year-round in the lower Hudson Valley.

This is good news. And I notice when I take the train from Hudson to New York City that the number of aquatic birds in the river is slowly increasing. You still cannot eat the fish from the Hudson River. And you probably shouldn't swim in it in many areas. There's a long way to go to restore this river to health. But this is a hopeful improvement.

The Night Of The Ice (With Update And Gratitude)

Chatham, New York, SE of Albany

If I had one of those Weather Channel jackets, right now I could stand in the yard and narrate this essay. Then you'd be able to see me looking into the camera, the rain falling falling falling sideways from the sky, hitting the earth and everything else, and freezing. Immediately. Everything glistens in its coat of ice. Trees. Houses. Grass. The dog has ice chunks on her tail. Wind and rain blow into the microphone making a whooshing sound. It's a special genre: Heavy Weather. Upstate, Eastern New York.

This morning was ridiculous, and the brunt of the storm hadn't even arrived. The car doors were iced shut. When I finally got them open, I had to scrape thick ice off the windows. That took a long time. Then the driving. I had to stop because the windshield was again freezing up. Why, I want to know, does the air conditioner go on in this car when you press defrost? It's a mystery. Why is the car fishtailing down the road, skidding happily along?

And, as if that weren't more than enough, tonight between 7 pm ET and 7 am ET, is supposed to be the heaviest accumulation of ice. The radio says that, ut oh, trees might fall down on power lines, so you, dear listeners, can freeze and sit in the dark. The radio says that you should stay off of the roads no matter what, as if we were some kind of idiots who want to drive around on roads that deserve to have their own Zambonis.

Strangely, this is not a drag. Not at all. It's just like this, Dar Williams's Southern California Wants To Be Western New York:

There's a part of the country could drop off
tomorrow in an earthquake,
Yeah it's out there on
the cutting edge, the people move, the sidewalks
shake.
And there's another part of the country
with a land that gently creaks and thuds, Where
the heavy snows make faucets leak in bathrooms
with free-standing tubs.
They're in houses that
are haunted, the with kids who lie awake and think
about
All the generations past who used to use
that dripping sink.

And sometimes one place wants to slip into the
other just to see
What it's like to trade its
demons for the restless ghost of Mrs. Ogilvey,
She used to pick the mint from her front yard to dress
the Sunday pork,
Sometimes southern California
wants to be western New York.

It wants to have a family business in sheet metal
or power tools,
It wants to have a diner where the
coffee tastes like diesel fuel,
And it wants to find the glory of a town they say has hit the
skids,
And it wants to have a snow day that will
turn its parents into kids,
And it's embarrassed,
but it's lusting after a SUNY student with mousy
brown hair who is
Taking out the compost, making
coffee in long underwear.

Sometimes southern California wants to be
western New York.

And they'll have puttering on rainy weekends,
autumn days that make you feel sad,
They'll have hundred year old plumbing and the family you never
had,
And a Hudson River clean-up concert and a
bundle-bearing stork,
And I hear they've got a
menu planned, it's true
It's western New York.

Except it's Eastern New York.

Update: (6:17 pm ET, 12/12). The power went off at about midnight. The ice apparently pulled down branches which in turn pulled down electric wires. Lots of them. I awoke at 6 am in the dark to see that there was no power. And silence in the house. I could hear the wall clock in the bathroom ticking. Otherwise, no furnace sound. No humming from anything. Cold and silent. Outside beautiful and chaotic. A glistening coating of corruscating ice on everything, but ice is heavy, so trees bend, evergreens pull in their elbows, many limbs snap off, you can hear the snapping, lots of trees fall and block roadway, many wires break and fall onto roadways. Out here no electricity means no heat, no pump for water, no lights, no Internet. And most important when there are huge rains, as we had last night, no electricity means no sump pump to drain the basement.

9 am. I walked down the road-- the road itself was fairly clear-- to the Spencertown Volunteer Fire Department. Lots of cars, only one truck still there, many people. Do I want a cup of coffee? No, I just want to get my basement pumped. Talk to him, pointing. A couple hours later, Steve showed up with a pump and sussed it all out. He said it was thousands of gallons of water. Just in time, the water was about 6" deep and slowly climbing toward the vitals of the aging boiler. Said Steve the Fireman, the infrastructure for electricity around here was last updated in 1974, and it needs to be completely overhauled. That's one of the reasons why I have half a foot of water in my basement, fear and dread that my boiler will die, fear and dread of the insurance claim.

9:30 am. I got a call on the only landline phone in the house that's working (cell phones don't work out here) that the County has declared a county wide state of emergency. That means everything is closed, stay off the roads, and there are shelters if you want/need one. I called the NYSEG hotline number. The animated voice told me that power would be restored by 10 pm on Sunday night. Not good. This, I thought, is going to be extra uncomfortable for a very, very long time. I looked out the window. It was snowing. It was really pretty.

The rest of the day. I spent the day near the fireplace. I hauled and split wood. My dog friend rolled on the ice and snow. The cats went in and out. I read. I fell asleep near the fire for about an hour. I awoke to a cold house and dull sunlight at the horizon. The ice on the weeping crab apple tree glinted.

4:30 pm. I realized I needed bottled water, because the pressure in my house was about gone and the tap was going to stop working. I drove to the supermarket. All the big water bottles were gone. But thank goodness, there was a deal, $3.99 for 24 small bottles of Poland Spring nicely packaged in plastic. Perfect. Only when I checked out, the cashier told me that I don't get that sale price without "the card." I said, "You gotta be kidding, right?" The guy behind me in line shrugged, handed the cashier his card. I thanked him.

5:07 pm. When I drove home, I noticed that various houses I passed now had lights. My house was still dark. I went into the house. I heard a sound. It was the aging boiler chugging along. The lovely sound of the boiler making hot water, making heat, burning expensive oil. How wonderful, what a great system. I turned on all of the lights, I reset the thermostat on the hot tub, I turned up the heat. I fed the animals. They were ravenous.

I am absolutely delighted that I have electricity. I know that there are literally tens of thousands of people who do not have it back yet. I notice the ironies. Moments before I got my electricity back, I was thinking that temperatures were supposed to fall this evening, and I was afraid that my pipes would all freeze tonight, making an even more colossal mess. And now, now that that emergency has vanished, I'm chagrined that the ice maker in the refrigerator hasn't been making ice (doh!) so the cubes are all stuck together. I pour myself a glass of fizzy mandarin orange Poland Spring (a treat I bought along with the 24 pack). This, I think, is wonderful. It has all of the excellent qualities of non alcoholic beer without the beer taste. Salud!

My gratitude goes out to Steve the Fireman, the Spencertown Volunteer Fire Department, the NYSEG lines people who were out all day, and still out now, trying to make a 34 year old system deliver reliable energy. My gratitude also goes out to all of the NY State Transportation workers, the Columbia County DPW workers, and the Town of Austerlitz DPW, all of whom spent the day clearing roads closed by downed trees mixed in with live wires.

Step Right Up And Beat The Mets

Why Is This Man Smiling?

How wonderful. Today is June 8, 2008. The Mets have lost 3 games in a row, each by the identical score, 2-1. And to what pitching juggernaut have the Mets' bats fallen so silent? To what Cy Young winners, to what fire ballers have the Mets yielded? The hapless Carmen San Diego Padres. How hapless you ask? After whipping the Mets 2-1 3 games in a row and setting up a sweep of their series with them (there's another game today at 4 pm if you can bear to watch it), the Pads are still, that's right, still 10 games below .500 and in next to last place in the Western Division. They stink. But we all know who stinks even more, don't we.

The Mets are now 1 game below .500 for this season. Did I mention that they've lost 3 in a row? to San Diego? My hero, a former slugger, the aging Carlos Delgado is now batting .237, which for him is a vast improvement over last month, but he still won't get his jersey dirty. Alas, there's no individual player to be blamed for this pathetic play. No. They all aren't hitting. They all are not contributing to the offense, leave aside whether it's "small ball" or "long ball." They aren't scoring runs. And they look simply awful at the plate.

By far the bigger problem for me is that the Mets are no fun to watch. They have no passion. They have no electricity. They are dispirited. There is no excitement. You watch until they find a way to give away the game. Maybe they give it up in extra innings. Maybe they give it up in the early going. They give it up. You can bet on it. They are the opposite of "scrappy."

If I owned the Mets I would fire a bunch of them. I'd probably start with Willie Randolph. I know, I know, it's not his personal fault, and he's a nice guy and he knows baseball. But he is the manager of this joke show. So as every baseball traditionalist knows, when you lose with a team that's not playing to capacity (that would be the Mets and that would also be a grotesque understatement), you lose your job. Why? Because nobody knows anything else to do when this lackluster lack of offense malaise creeps into a locker room populated by players who used to be able to hit. You fire the manager because you can. It's the one thing you have control over. It shows that you mean business.

Casey Stengel asked in 1962, "Can't anybody here play this game?" For the 2008 Mets, the answer is, after all, I guess not.

For Dr. King

I'm thinking about times almost forty years ago when I sang, "We Shall Overcome." I'm remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air. I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear. The song's purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done. I'm committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not. They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don't want me to be safe. Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.

Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts. I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Apalachin Crime Convention. My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different. I think about the person who ran over my dog.

I'm remembering singing "our song" in Port Gibson during the boycott trial and fearfully contemplating the long, dark ride home to Jackson on the Natchez Trace, an unlit, two-lane road that avoids all towns.

I'm remembering the Woolworth's lunch counter and the bus station in Jackson, notorious before my arrival, at which friends were seriously injured. I'm remembering the two unequal, racially labeled water fountains at the Courthouse in Laurel, and the three bathroom doors upstairs at the Mayflower Restaurant. I'm remembering a black man pumping the gasoline, that his boss won't let him touch the $5 I try to hand him.

I'm remembering a Mississippi judge hissing that he doesn't have to put up with Communists-- he's talking about me-- in his Court. I'm remembering the Neshoba County Fair and what it must have been like on the night Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were all killed, how everyone there must have known about it.

Awash in this flood of distant memories, my remembrance of my own feelings is more opaque. I was learning to be a good lawyer, and I was an optimist, believing that eventually, we would confront and overcome racism and poverty and oppression and violence. But I was also numb while my unworkable marriage was sliding slowly, unconsciously and miserably to ultimate dissolution by another southern Court.

Then, in 1973, I started to represent inmates of the sprawling Mississippi State Hospital because Barry Powell, an excellent lawyer and mentor, "discovered" it and convinced himself and me that the issues should be litigated. Most of the people warehoused there, it turned out, were safe to release, but the staff was too small to have any idea who was safe and who might be risky. For obvious cases, like the four older women who played remarkably skilled bridge using sign language to bid and hadn't seen a doctor in 7 years, release was accomplished simply, by my inquiry if they could go home and my veiled threat of a judicial proceeding if they couldn't.

The harder cases were like Mr. O'Reilly (not his real name), who also wanted to be released. Doctors thought Mr. O'Reilly might be mentally ill because he still believed that ten years before somebody, a relative most likely, stole a million dollars worth of gold coins from his trailer in rural Oktibehha County and he was mad about it. According to the doctor, Mr. O'Reilly didn't have any insight into his delusional system and his obvious anger made him dangerous.

Mr. O'Reilly was tall and sunburnt from years of taking major tranquilizers and being outside, and he walked with his back arched, elbows back, hands on the small of his back, another side effect of the drugs. I explained the situation to Mr. O'Reilly. I told him that the doctor didn't believe the million dollar story, and that frankly, I didn't either. In fact, I doubted there were ever $50 worth of gold coins in his entire county, and that when he acted angry about the situation, he was scaring the doctor. He laughed, "So is that what all the fuss's about? How come nobody told me this before?" I shrugged. He said, "Well, I guess I'll be going home then," and he shambled off, doing the phenothiazine walk.

At the time the Hospital Staff decided who would be released by individually interviewing all the inmates who requested release. When asked, Mr. O'Reilly said he came in complaining about the theft of a million dollars worth of gold coins, that he didn't blame anybody for not believing him, and that he doubted the story made sense. Was he mad about it? No, he said, just sad that he didn't understand the problem earlier. Could he go home?

After Mr. O'Reilly was released, the Mississippi Mental Health Commissioner, Reginald White, told me that he thought I was doing "litigation therapy" and that he was surprised that people who were so obviously disoriented when they arrived were now going home. Did I think it was because of the intensive attention I was giving them? Or was it just time, the drugs, spontaneous change, and "millieu therapy"? At the time I didn't have any idea. I just wanted inmates who wanted to go home to be released.

And this past January, almost forty years later, with my wife of almost 30 years and two of my three children, I attended an Interfaith Service commemorating Dr. King's Holiday in Hudson, New York. After wonderful gospel music by the Shiloh Baptist Church choir, a sermon, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, prayer and scripture, the time came at last to sing "our song." It had been a long time. My eyes grew wet. I could feel an aching in my throat and in my heart my continuous, decades long love of justice, fairness, and equality. And there was no fear. Instead, there was only my unbounded joy that now, at last, my kids would learn and experience the magic of "our song." It was their turn to inherit the possibility of accomplishing the unthinkable, and it was their opportunity to forge a deep, personal heart connection with the community and movement for human dignity and justice.

"We Shall Overcome" has never been sweeter to me. I can feel how very far I have traveled. Although there remains an enormous journey to complete, the holiday celebration brought me the gift of seeing for the first time that my kids will soon be able, by themselves, to carry the movement on. Forty years ago I never could have guessed how special, how complete and wonderful that would feel.

The New York City Marathon

An excerpt from The Dream Antilles:

Bardo is stretched out in the hammock. He is doing an exercise Swamiji told him about. He gets completely comfortable and relaxed. Then he thinks of something about which he has only positive thoughts. At the moment, he is thinking about how delicious it feels when he is in good physical condition and is running in the New York Marathon. He focuses on his enjoyment, his appreciation of the event, his excitement, the ease of it. As he thinks of these things, other positive thoughts come to him as well, thoughts about how his body is healthy, strong, light, swift, lithe, thoughts about how wonderful and efficient his breathing feels. Soon his mind has appreciated the running, and moves to appreciate something else. He continues as long as there is purely positive thought. At the first awareness of a negative thought he stops, pauses, and returns to the beginning again. Bardo is agog at how many negative thoughts arise in his thinking. Some, he notes are obviously comparative, critical, negative; others, implicitly negative; others, disguised as neutral are negative. He goes back to running down Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn in a sea of runners, enjoying the spectacle of it all, cradled in positive thought, and falls asleep with his mouth open and his jaw hanging relaxed.

Sunday is the day. Again, it's the start of Standard Time. If you're in Gotham, please go to the route and yell. It helps. It really does.

9/11, The Sixth Anniversary

There are three 9/11's worth our consideration. 9/11/01 in New York. 9/11/06 in India. 9/11/73 in Chile. Last year, I wrote about Chile and India. And now, six years later, I still don't want to write about New York in the same way that I never liked to write the obligatory essay about what I did during the summer. Frankly, I'd rather think about something else. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, here are the lyrics of the 1998 Cry, Cry, Cry song, The Kid:

I'm the kid who ran away with the circus
Now I'm watering elephants
But I sometimes lie awake in the sawdust
Dreaming I'm in a suit of light
Late at night in the empty big top
I'm all alone on the high wire
Look he's working without a net this time
He's a real death defyer

I'm the kid who always looked out the window
Failing tests in geography
But I've seen things far beyond just the school yard
Distant shores of exotic lands
There're the spires of the Turkish Empire
Six months since we made landfall
Riding low with the spice of India
Through Gibralter
We're rich men

I'm the kid who thought we'd someday be lovers
Always held out that time would tell
Time was talking guess I just wasn't listening
No surprise if you know me well
And as we're walking toward the train station
There's a whispering rainfall
Cross the boulevard you slip your hand in mine
In the distance the train calls

I'm the kid who has this habit of dreaming
Sometimes gets me in trouble too
But the truth is I could no more stop dreaming
Than I could make them all come true

I too am a kid with the habit of dreaming. And when it comes to the constant repetition of words and images and analysis about 9/11 and its aftermath, my mind goes out for a walk. It goes right out the window and it keeps going until it gets somewhere. To be honest, today I really prefer that.

Be well.