Hates Becoming Heroes, and On Forgiving Your Enemies (to annoy them)

"Difficult to watch how haters become heroes." - poet Joy Harjo

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - poet Oscar Wilde

I've got friends and family posting things like "I am Charlie Kirk."

I grieve for them in their grief.

We must stop elevating hate speech. It is way past time to recognize that speech is itself an action. Speech can kill, and violence is never a solution.

Hate speech is not just an opinion. It inflames anger and resentment, leading toward further violence.

This is why we have libel laws, and laws that restrict hate speech: to limit the type of political violence that threatens the First Amendment.

Hate speech-in-action killed Charlie Kirk.

Not because progressives turned into violence our disagreement with the racist, homophobic, sexist world view he described.

Because there are even greater and more violent extremists, such as Nick Fuentes, who thought Charlie's hate of others was not enough. He didn't hate Jews or immigrants or queer people or women enough.

My best self wants to believe that those who say "I Am Charlie Kirk" just don't know. I want to believe that our ridiculous social media feeds keep all of us from really understanding the whole situation unless we educate ourselves and work at it.

That for those who identify as Christian conservatives, or nationalists, or on the right -- your feed was full of Charlie sounding like the charismatic young leader he was.

It didn't include his hateful comments against everyone other than white men like himself.

Then again, if you really followed him -- you would know.

I want to believe that education and the arts and media literacy are solutions.

Perhaps the question of our time is: why are white men, and those who support them, so angry?

One answer is that this is the legacy on which this nation has been built. Angry white western men who were themselves oppressed by the ruling powers and religions of the European continent and turned their rage and resentment into its own genocidal and enslaving force on this new continent. One only has to glance at the history of U.S. colonization to see the violent, brutal rage on the surface of this culture.

Is there anything to be done about white male rage other than to restrain it as best we can with the rule of law? 

Last Saturday, we climbed into the truck and made the drive north to tekakapimek -- the new contact station at Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument -- to be transported into the magic of this place we live and its thousands of years of stewardship by Maine's indigenous nations.

The word tekakapimek is from the Penobscot language and means "as far as one can see."

This is a "contact station," and not a traditional "visitors center," because it is "designed to foster contact and connection with the land, its Wabanaki stewards, and the wider community, facilitating a collaborative approach to understanding and caring for the monument." The station represents a collaboration between Maine's four sovereign tribes who together make up the Wabanaki Alliance: the Penobscot, on whose current and traditional lands the Monument exists, and the Passamaquoddy, Mi 'k maq, and Maliseet nations.

Accessible by dirt logging roads, the station opened to the public this summer.

Please go.

The Monument encompasses some of the great canoe trails in Maine, which Wabanaki peoples once used to transport themselves across the state. All in the shadow of the great mountain, Katahdin, herself.

The space is a treasure of indigenous art that helps bring one into the spirit of these cultures, which successfully stewarded this beautiful place as part of themselves for thousands of years before white colonization.

And there lies the giant difference between white western culture and indigenous cultures here and throughout the world: this land's tribal peoples belonged to the place. Our white European cultural heritage has and continues to see ourselves as separate from and above these places, with the "right" to extract from the land whatever we feel we need to increase our wealth.

Standing within or outside of the contact station, you will, hopefully, want to cry.

To cry for our beloved places. To cry for the fact that we as peoples are "saddled with an addiction to disposability so deep that tackling it will require a wholesale rewriting of the rules that have governed business and consumption for the past 70 years." (Saabira Chaudhuri, writing in the September 6, 2025 NYTimes).

To cry for how difficult it is to remove ourselves from the stream of daily toxicity and destruction.

One small step, one starting or building place, might be to visit places such as tekakapimek, to immerse oneself with respect and awe in the knowledge and ways of being that treat this place differently.

Also: get in your canoe.

#newblogpost

#indigenouswaysofknowing

The Importance of the Raspberry Patch

I spent a couple of hours in our garden yesterday, picking raspberries, digging potatoes, re-homing milkweed...

My mother, Mae, always said she found God nearest in her raspberry patch. When she tired of the faux-knowing ways of men and their man-made institution of the church, she still had faith that this planet and these lives are gifts to us for which to be grateful and to be treasured. She found and practiced her faith in her raspberry patch.

Now I do, too.

Today is September 1, and Labor Day. I've always been energized by September. It's my birth month. The New England weather is perfect, with bluebird sky days and warm ocean waters and crisp dry air.

Plus, I was a kid who loved school. I loved the bigger world, apart from my family -- the different people. The teachers, even those who were mean and unskilled as educators. And the learning! So much to learn about this world. New books. New challenges. New frameworks, from geometry and physics to history and biology.

I was one of the lucky ones, for whom my curiosity and hunger for this world was not squelched by school but rather deepened by it.

I was loved and supported in a stable home. This made keeping this curiosity alive possible as well.

Today, all around us and especially in leadership, we have people who think they know things yet who exhibit no curiosity, no questioning, no desire for collaboration and learning.

They make pronouncements and executive orders on things about which they clearly know very little -- yet feel entitled to damage others' lives willy-nilly with their lack of understanding, empathy, and compassion.

I so very much wish for leaders who act from gratitude and grace in their privilege. That humility, of serving others and not only yourself, is to me a primary characteristic of leadership.

Yet we are now a culture that votes for individuals who display the opposites.

We believe the acquisition of wealth is due to intelligence, when more often it is due to exploitation of others.

We need so many things to be a great nation again.

On my list:

An education president, who believes that we are all learners and not knowers and that everyone deserves equal access to education.

The values that take us and our children back into our raspberry patches, in gratitude and generosity and thanksgiving, in respect for and care of this beautiful world and lives each have been given.

Today, let us give thanks to the workers and to the unions that have fought against exploitation of selves and planet for a humane, compassionate environment in which to work: the 8-hour day. Health care. Disability. Retirement.

Let's lean into and protect our many blessings, and offer our kindness and privilege and excesses to those who do not have as many.

#newblogpost

Mansions and Mobile Homes: the Fate of Our Communities?

The Pell, or Newport, Bridge under construction
in 1968 with aircraft carrier U.S.S. Wasp
passing beneath.

The Claiborne Pell Bridge, named for the Senator who founded Pell grants to make college affordable for more students and rising above the mouth of might Narragansett Bay, opened in 1969.

It is by far the tallest bridge in southern New England and by the time I got my driver's license a mere 44 miles away in 1977 the bridge represented a big temptation for thrilling teenage escape.

In the summer twilight of late evenings, we'd cruise Route 1 in our rattletrap pickups and motorcycles and Beetles through the gathering fog past the broad ocean beaches we loved: Misquamicut, Quonnie, Matunuk. Poetic remnants of the indigenous past slaughtered and chased from ancestral fishing grounds, about which we learned nothing in our local schools.

Up into the sky we would soar across the bridge, having saved our pennies to pay the toll.

On the other side, we imagined ourselves to be in a Planet of the Apes where we wandered freely what is now the Cliff Walk and across the grounds of the famed but then-abandoned and deteriorating Newport mansions, "summer cottages"of the robber barons. Many of the mansions were demolished in the 1960's and 1970's due to the combination of declining fortunes and high maintenance costs.

The 70-room Breakers mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Our personal favorite was The Breakers, built by a grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt in the late 19th century. I have ghostly memories of peering in the windows at the black and white checked entry floors, smoking weed on an embattled veranda.

Newport is a grander version of Maine's Bar Harbor, also a site of gigantic "summer cottages" built by and for wealthy summer residents. Unlike Bar Harbor, Newport, founded in 1639, was at one time one of the most important port cities in North America through the 1700's, trading in whale oil, rum, and yes -- enslaved persons. With the decline of this commerce during the Revolutionary War, Newport -- also a site for religious freedom, home to one of the first synagogues in North America -- became a fashionable summer resort.

The transitions of communities to summer resorts when commerce fades -- from money-making machines to playgrounds for the wealthy, with the majority of United States' workers in service to one or the other -- has been or is becoming the fate of many U.S. communities. It is painful to observe and even more so to experience.

So many have so much, and so many more have so little.

The U.S. has been great at the creation of wealth but far less than great in the equity of its distribution, a trend continuing all-too-obviously today.

From the very beginning, during which southern planters enslaved and traded in human beings to create wealth from the land they stole from the continent's indigenous peoples, North American colonists have been on a quest for wealth. The "Christian nationalism" we are again experiencing is built into the foundation of this nation, on Calvinist doctrines in which wealth accumulation is seen as both a spiritual duty and sign of god's favor, i.e., a "prosperity gospel."

Meanwhile, nearly 8% of all housing units in Maine are mobile homes -- many of them representing "substandard" housing in terms of warmth, utilities, etc. Many times, these units are the only housing full-time workers can afford. For instance, my brother, who holds a commercial drivers license (CDL) and drives full time, lives in a trailer circa 1980's in a 150-unit "land lease" mobile home park developed in 1960. The unit is extremely difficult and expensive to heat -- and a stable, wonderful neighborhood. We were lucky to get him in there.

We can witness and understand this nation's patterns of inequity in the histories and lives all around us.

We only have to want to understand, and then to act.

What is Rural Resilience, and How Do We Strengthen It?

We’re hearing the word “resilience” tossed around a lot these days, especially since the storms of December 2023 - January 2024. These unprecedented storms brought unexpected southeasterly gales, ocean surges, flooding and heavy damages to Maine’s coastal and inland communities from which many are still recovering.

“Resilience” is the ability of individuals and communities to withstand and/or to recover from challenges both expected and unexpected.

Resilience is a kind of combination of toughness and flexibility. Like nylon fabric or line (or Play-Doh!): can we be stretched, return to our original shape, and last a long time?! Like a rubber ball, do we have the ability to “bounce back” after a natural disaster or economic downturn, or to continue to thrive in the face of ongoing economic pressures?

We know Stonington is tough. A community such as ours, the fabric of which is based on an island isolated from mainland resources and on the difficult manual labor of granite quarrying, construction trades, fishing, and shellfish harvesting, one that has survived as long as the nation itself, is resilient by definition.

An important tool for sustaining this resilience is our shared ability to look to the future, envision the challenges that are coming at us, and plan for how we will address these.

Emergency planning for public safety is a great example of building resilience. What is our plan if a storm cuts us off from the mainland not for a few hours, but for a few weeks? You may have a plan for yourself or your family, but what is the plan for the community, and especially for those most vulnerable amongst us?

As demonstrated by the recent Governor’s Commission on Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience which I was honored to co-chair, we can plan for the resilience of our essential infrastructure as well. How do we rebuild our working waterfront to withstand sea level rise and southeastern storms? What improvements do we make to expand and/or to protect our drinking water and waste water treatment systems?

The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world. This is already causing changes to what we catch and harvest here. How do we as a community, with generations of deeply invested fishing families, plan and  prepare for these changes? How do we hold onto our access to the rich ocean resource? Stonington’s working waterfront, across three harbors, is larger than any other north of Portland. We’ve built and maintained this access through long time policies and continued investments.

What about the two pillars of social resilience: education and housing? Are we actively coming together to identify, FUND, and take action on the changes we need to reverse the demographic trends making Stonington one of the oldest towns in the state of Maine? To make our schools more competitive, and retain and to attract working age families for our schools and businesses? What plans do we need to address the development pressures that have us at a tipping point of being a year-round vs. seasonal community? 

The Town of Stonington has a lot in the works in the struggle to sustain our year-round fishing community. We urge you to join us on August 11 at our Resilience Roundtable to learn and offer thoughts and solutions to strengthen our island’s historic resilience to face new challenges. The future is in your hands. Watch for details.

Contact the Town of Stonington at any time, via email at econdev@stoningtonmaine.org; by stopping by the Town office; or by calling 207-367-2351.