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ACROSSTIME O PLACE
RETROSPECTIVES FROM THE ARCHIVES
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HYANNISTRAIN DEPOT, 1906 - It was mostly horses and buggies that met those disembarking
the train in Hyannis in the early 1900s.
Wonder what we have In the archives? Drop us a note with a request for some past Barnstable scene
and we'llsee what we can find. P.O.Box 1208, Hyannis, MA 02601 or by fax: 508-790-3997 or via email:
(editor@barnstablepatriot.com
Seatbelt shuffle is a real hang-up
By Ed Semprini
columnist@barnstablepatriot.com
The exchanges came near the end of the
dinner party.Verylikely,they willcontinue at
the next party and perhaps another because
there wasno agreement and there never will
be among the "pros"and the "antis"on the
controversial seat belt legislation.
The outspoken graybeard kicked off the
give-and-take. He's strongly opposed to
legislation that gives police officers the
authority to stop a car solely because the
motorist was not wearing a seat belt. "No
way will I be told I must wear a seat belt,"
he bellowed. The younger guests, all pro-
legislation, fired back in staccato fashion
all about safety, saving lives of not only the
driver but the passengers. "And it's the
law,"one spouted. "But laws,you know, are
made to be broken , " came the response.
"Look around you when you're left in the
dust while tooling along at 60 to 65 in the
55-mile speed limit."
Then the graybeard shifted into high.
"You characters howl about safety. I'll give
you safety to think about -driving while
yakking on a cell phone. One hand on the
wheel, concentration on the conversation
instead of onthe madness alongthehighway.
Now there's a red flag safety problem. How
about a law banning driving while holding
and talking on a cell phone? Oh, no! You
guys would never consider that."
Graybeard then asked for a half-glass of
wine, and said, "I'm not finished yet. Be
honest,just how much of that yakkingwhile
driving is absolutely necessary? Maybe 10
percent?"
It didn't take long for one of the "pros"
to cut him short, firing back: "Hold it! It's
2006 and that'show much of our business is
conducted today, on the road," he argued,
but not too convincingly. Graybeard merely
shrugged.
There was, however, one point of com-
plete agreement: Americans love to talk!
Anywhere. About anything. It's a macho-
American thing. On that note,the harmony
ended. At dinner'send there waslittle doubt
there would be another fun-filled go-around
on seat belts and cell phone driving- with
no agreement.
As good-byes were exchanged, Graybeard
wasloudly informed: "You're walkinghome,
buddy, unless..."
And that's when the dream came to an
end.
LETTERS
Cold coffee, bitter taste from
home delivery
I read last week's Patriot (Jan. 27) and
learned we would receive the paper on
Friday morning via delivery to my home
enabling you to push back your deadline
and allowing us to read the paper in the
morning instead of when the mail arrives.
I suspect it is more a cost cutting move
since the new owner, Cape Cod Times, is
delivering anyways. Either way I was unaf-
fected until not receiving the paper.
In a call to your office Friday afternoon
I learned this was not an uncommon oc-
currence (not getting a paper), that I was
not special, and was assured to receive
the paper on Saturday a.m. You guessed
it, still no paper.
Changing things for the "first time in
¦
your history" and promoting it as some-
thing that is for the readers benefit (and
not a cost cutting move) back-fires when
the execution is so poor. I have enjoyed
your paper for a number of years and the
"new ownership"is off to a rough start.
Perhaps I will be able to enjoy my coffee
hot next Friday.
Douglas Bentley
Cotuit
Celebrating another Kings life
Let's celebrate the meaning behind Cor-
retta Scott King's life, and that of all the
world's activists.
Let's start a network that will become
known as The URHR or TJRHDR... The
Underground Railroad of Human Democ-
racy & Rights.... an organized railroad
that spans world wide, its purpose to
introduce Protective Laws for the Human
Being and our way of life.
If you aren't moved right now or you
haven't been moved by the struggle for
human rights in the past, or at some time,
then I have to think that spells...in my
book of life ... a hidden cowardice within
the average human being... who just
doesn't think, feel or care about human
rights.
Of course, folks, it also means most ac-
tivist people aren't booking flights all over
the world to stop all the carnage ... hu-
man, animal and planetary ... If they don't
start it, who will ...? We know the answer
to that now, don't we.
Let's meet , today, on campus, at home,
at your meditation or other center, your
church, perhaps ...
Really!
Eric Ekstrom
Harwich
Helping those with ALS
Last Thursday night, many Cape Cod
area residents were captivated by actor
James Woods' portrayal of a man battling
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou
Gehrig's disease) on the NBC television
drama E.R.
Woods superbly brought to light the
suffering that this terminal disease brings
as it progressively weakens muscles to the
point of total paralysis. ALS can also take
a person's ability to breathe, speak and
eat, but leaves mental function intact.
For some Cape Codders, ALS is more
than just TV drama: it is their everyday
reality. However, help and hope is avail-
able to them from the Muscular Dystro-
phy Association, the world leader in ALS
research and services.
Along with its research seeking treat-
ments and a cure for ALS, MDA provides
top-notch health care for people with
ALS at Rhode Island Hospital. MDA also
provides financial assistance for pur-
chase and repair of assistive equipment
like wheelchairs, and for communication
devices for those whose speech is dimin-
ished by the disease.Support groups are
another vital MDA service for people with
ALS and their loved ones.
We hope that all of those who were
touched by Woods' performance will
support MDA's efforts to eradicate this
devastating disease. Learn more at www.
als-mda.org or by calling 508-821-1533.
Jim Sharland
Cape Cod District Director
Muscular Dystrophy Association
.t-rt
F^
i
_i
CORNER
By Paul Gauvin
pgauvin@barnstablepatriot.com
Arrrggghhh!
Vermont Insurance Co., which res-
cued some Barnstable homeowners
from distress a few years ago when other
insurers pulled out of the Cape market, is
cutting loose its roughly 5,200 customers. It
won't renew home policies beginningApril1
-ironically, Fools' Day -but maykeep some
commercial accounts.
This after other insurers such as One
Beacon over several years fully or partly
abandoned Capehousehold clientsasifwild-
fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes,
house-eating Godzillas from Japan, locust
swarms and floods of Biblical proportions
were about to simultaneously descend upon
the peninsula and devour it.
Insurers say they possess persuasive
information from computer models of an
approaching Cape Cod doomsday event of
such proportions as to pre-empt the usu-
ally avaricious industry from gambling on
a Cape profit .
Pray tell, what kind of wind and what
degree of damage is actually expected? Is
there a precedent on Cape? Enlighten the
premium payers as to exactly whytheir past
payments have been for naught.
Is God-fearing, unsuspecting Barnstable
in the path of a pending apocalypse? Are
none of us going to survive to spend Social
Security and the good ole 401K?
QUESTION: Is the computer model any
match for historical experience?
Let the past be prologue. Many Barnstable
houses were here before and after the 1938
hurricane and a number of hurricanes and
violent nor'easters since and survived. Ad-
mittedly,afew recent trophy homes propped
up smack on the beach are vulnerable to
nature 's violent whims, but the majority of
homes several hundred yards from water
have been safe from flooding of any per-
manency.
We are ia an ebb and flow situation unlike
the below- jea-levellowlands of New Orleans
requiring levees to hold back the waters, or
river basins where flooding is expected now
and then.
Insurers worry less about flooding here,
I'm told, than they do the wind. Before pull-
ing out altogether, some insurers offered a
wind deduction policy by which if your roof
was blown off, the deduction was enough
that you had to pay for it out of pocket.
Evidently, even this isn't good enough to
decrease liability.
Is quitting the Cape the answer? Isthere a
deeper rationale than what is being shared?
Are insurers in the final analysis simply fed
up with the politics of the industry in this
state?
What isoverlooked concerning the degree
of potential damages is that Cape houses
are not attached to the grass with a few 10
penny nailsas are the manufactured Florida
houses and assorted trailers sitting on ce-
ment blocks, as though they were sacrifices
to the god of *and.Because of building codes,
Cape houses are substantial and can take
a major wallop when they have to without
crumbling. The proof is all around us. How
many houses, even on the waterfront, have
already withstood nature 's repeated on-
slaughts, some for about a century?
What's vulnerable here are boats and
trees. The loss of either would not reach the
threshold of abillion dollar disaster warrant-
ing a departure of the insurance industry
from our shores.
The computer models, which get into the
detailsof hurricane activity due to warming
and cooling oceans, may generate a believ-
able catastrophic scenario, but historical
evidence and experience does not corrobo-
rate the prediction.
The Bowery Boys would look at this and
probably say they smell a rat.
Regardless of computer predictions -and
that's all it is, a prediction -insuring Cape
housing has been a historically decent
gamble. There must be something more to
all this but don't expect state legislators to
figure it out. Duh.
Vermont's escape puts more homeown-
ers at the mercy of the not-so FAIR plan. It
means if your premiums were about $700 for
a policy from Vermont on a $320,000 house,
look forward to shelling out from $1,300 to
$1,600 per annum at current prices to FAIR,
the catch-all planlegislated intoexistence to
protect mortgage holders from losing their
shirts. It is a safety net administered by
the Mass. Property Insurance Underwriting
Association (MPIUA) . That's not all. FAIR
- acronym for Fair Access to Insurance
Requirements - is already fighting for a 25
percent premium increase.
Insurers have adopted the BS (Bush
Strategy) of pre-emption: Act before any-
thing happens no matter how it befuddles
the people. .
,
History refutes insur-
ers' model of upcoming
weather disasters
BY ELLEN C. CHAHEY
D
ietrich Bonhoeffer would have
been 100 years old this Feb. 4.
Instead, he died on a Nazi gallows
at the age of 39, just a few days before
the war in Europe ended in 1945.
Bonhoeffer is my hero. He believed so
deeply in the same faith that I do that he
was willing to give his life for it. Involved
in a plot to assassinate Hitler - even
though he always maintained that kill-
ing is sinful - he paid the price just days
before Hitler committed suicide.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer earned a Ph.D.
in his early twenties for his work on the
sociology of the church. His interest in
the relations between people must have
come naturally, because he was not just
one of eight children -he was a twin, and
so had grown before birth with a sister
by his side. The idea of people living in a
community seemed to have been planted
in him literally at the moment of concep-
tion.
I treasure a few little threads of touch
with Bonhoeffer. My professor of lit-
urgy at the Boston University School of
Theology knew Eberhard Bethge , one
of Bonhoeffer's dearest friends from the
time that Bonhoeffer attended Union
Seminary in New York City.
I know a clergyman here on the Cape
who at one point was the pastor of the
woman who was engaged to Bonhoeffer,
who never got to marry him because he
was arrested just days after their engage-
ment.
And I have spent a good amount of
time walking around the Union Seminary
area on Manhattan's Upper West Side,
walking sidewalks he must have walked
past Grant's Tomb, the Hudson River,
and the buildings of Union and Colum-
bia.
While he lived in New York, Bonhoeffer
learned to love the worship and music of
Harlem. He took great sustenance and
courage from the example of African-
Americans, and he loved their Gospel
music.
It was the African-American Christian
music that told Dietrich Bonhoeffer that
he had to go home to a Germany that
had gone mad with fear -fear about their
economy, fear about "foreigners," fear of
Jews, fear of Gypsies, fear of women who
strayed beyond the kitchen, fear of gay
and lesbian people , fear of people with
mental illness, fear of outspoken clergy,
fear, fear, fear....
Bonhoeffer at last decided that if he
did not go home to Germany while it was
in the throes of such fear that he would
have no right to go home after the war
was over, after the fear was over.
Bonhoeffer did many things when he
went home to his benighted nation. He
taught seminarians, those who wanted
not to be of a religion that accepted
the Nazi world view. He demanded that
Christians learned to pray from the
Psalms -which were politically incorrect
at the time because they were "Jewish"
and therefore unacceptable to the Nazis.
He planned with some friends and rela-
tives to kill Hitler.
He went to prison for his part in the
plot against Hitler, and learned there to
experience prison not as a time when he
was separated from reality but as a time
when the reality of his faith was all he
had. He learned not to kick against his
incarceration but to embrace it as the
place in which his faith could express
itself in the fullest, deepest way.
Reports from the day of his execu-
tion indicate that the prison "physician"
(had this person taken the Hippocratic
Oath?) who attended Bonhoeffer 's hang-
ing had to note that Bonhoeffer spent his
last hour ministering to others until his
own name was called, and that he took
the hangman's rope calmly and fearlessly.
At every funeral that I do, I read a
thought from Bonhoeffer that death
must be allowed to claim "the limited
rights" that it does yet retain in the
world, and also that the power that has
overcome death does shine in this world
of death.
A reading like that could be interpret-
ed as just a paragraph of inspiring words.
But when you know the story of the life
- and death - of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you
know much better.
The Rev. Ellen C. Chahey is Minister of Spiritual Care at
Federated Church of Hyannis.
INOTHER
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