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T’nette Kuzminski was a prodigious gardener, of plants and of people. Her love, labor and imagination brought “The Life of the Land” column into being three years ago. Her idea was to write about small family-run farms applying innovative agricultural practices to grow healthy food, and, importantly, affording the farmers a living—something difficult in today’s world of corporate agriculture.…
We’re All In This Together There’s No Doubt, Vote Out Trump I am deeply uncertain about our world. Our larger one, as in the entire planet – and our smaller one, the United States of America. Every day I read the papers and online news, and the news is unbearable. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that human beings are responsible for climate change. Ice caps and glaciers melt, fires ravage the parched West, and record numbers of hurricanes…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Praising Justice Ginsburg …With One Reservation We mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Born in Brooklyn in 1933, she taught at both Rutgers and Columbia, and became Columbia’s first tenured female professor. She was director of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU during the 1970s, and argued six important cases on gender equality before the Supreme Court, winning five of them. President Jimmy Carter appointed her to…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Non-Violence Worked For Revered Trio Does anyone remember how Mahatma Gandhi changed the world? How a slight Indian man, a lawyer who never carried a weapon, defeated the strongest empire in the world and rewrote the future of billions of people? Does anyone remember how Martin Luther King changed the world? How a Black Southern Baptist preacher, a man who never carried a weapon, changed two centuries of oppression of Black Americans and opened new…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Compared To Elsewhere, No Exceptionalism Here By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com The world population is 7.8 billion people. The U.S. is 330 million people, making us home to 4 percent of humanity. The world’s total COVID-19 cases is 20 million and climbing. The U.S. is 5 million and climbing faster than most of the world. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s COVID-19 cases. The…
WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER Slavery America’s Original Sin Eighty million native people of color lived in the Americas in 1492; 65 million primarily white people lived in Europe; 46 million people of color lived in Africa. In December of that year, Christopher Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Haiti, which he then named Hispaniola, or Little Spain. It was the first recorded contact between Europeans and the indigenous Americans who called themselves the Taino. The Taino were divided into…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER It Isn’t All Gloom And Doom By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com The title of this column is, “We are all in this together.” It’s a statement of a simple reality, but it’s also a dream about working together that I wish to be true for everyone – from our town, to our state, to our nation, to our world. Now that the world is all in this together with the COVID-19 nightmare, it’s…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER The Question Of Out-Of-Towners By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com FOR: First is the idea that all have the right to remove their family from a place of apparent danger to a place seen to be safer. Second is the economic idea that second-home owners have the absolute right to relocate to those homes, which they own and pay taxes on. Presumably that is also true if a city resident can afford to rent…
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER This Is What ‘Worst’ May Look Like By LARRY BENNETT • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com According to the CDC, from Oct. 1, 2019, through March 7, 2020, an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 Americans died from seasonal flu-related illnesses. That’s out of 36 million to 51 million total flu illnesses. It appears that seasonal flu vaccines have mitigated the numbers, as have some people’s immunity, as well as having fully staffed and equipped medical facilities at the…
We’re all In This Together Otsego County’s Allocation Of COVID-19 Testing Kits? 3. Reports about the coronavirus offer hugely differing opinions. That the facts are in dispute isn’t surprising, since this is a novel virus that health systems around the world are fighting for the first time. Still, some facts are agreed on. As of March 1, the World Health Organization reported 87,000 confirmed cases, 2,989 deaths, and cases in 60 countries. 80,000 cases are confirmed in China with the…