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Why it’s wrong to focus on differences
I recently read Natalia Zuckerman’s very moving account about attending the 80th anniversary ofthe liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.Some years ago I was part of a week-long, Buddhist-ledretreat at these two camps set three miles apart. The retreat was called Bearing Witness, and still takes place annually.About 200 people of different faiths and nationalities spent the days bearing witness to theatrocities committed, reading the names of the dead, saying Kaddish and other prayers, sitting in silence in areas where unbearable suffering took place. A fewattendees were children of survivors, a few children of Nazi soldiers . Our nights were spent in discussion and communion.
If you have spent any time at these concentration camps, your life view isforever changed. Therefore, It is unimaginable to me that VP Vance would visit Dachau in the morning, only to meet with the leader of the far-right German party in the afternoon. Vance’s belief in some version of white Christian nationalism“trumped’his ability to understand where such ideology, based on the supremacy of one group of people over everyone else, led in the past and could lead in the future.
Making one group of people into “the other”, as Trump has done with the undocumented, with transpeople, and other groups, is therefore right out of the Nazi playbook in which anti-Semitism was used to bind together and blind the German people. The astonishing fact about the Nazis was that after their extermination of the Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, the Romani, the disabled, they planned to double the size of Birkenau, already 10,000 acres!, to kill all the slavs, a vast group of people that numbered hundreds of millions. By this means they would gain world domination.
I am not making any direct analogy to the present, only suggesting that using an Us vs. Them mentality as a political tool, and focusing on the differences in people, be it skin color, origin, status, religion, is a tool that can be used to gain domination and bring suffering. We must recognize it as such in order to stand against it.
Barbara Maltby
Lakeville
Venturing out into snow and ice? How about some thoughts on staying put
Of course the huge majority of car crashes are mishaps, unintentional, inadvertent or inattentive, but then the car can’t crash itself, most often the drivers look for other conditions or circumstances that contributed. “Not my fault’ Unfortunately for them, minor or severe, Isaac Newton, who has been helpful and even fun can be suddenly, ‘All of a Sudden!’, unforgiving, unsympathetic.
Venturing out into snow and ice conditions? Sometimes the better judgment is to stay put, rather than yielding to the pressures of convenience, expediency and promptness. A building storm is worse than a clearing storm! Driving is an individual enterprise and often requires social interaction, often ignoring the increased risk and hazards of your momentum on reduced surface-traction handling; longer braking (if any traction is available) and trajectory maneuvering. The weather is inconsiderate of what your car’s manufacturer proposed as increased capability, all cars (!) and tires (!) are subject to the very nearly the same skidding, maybe at only a slightly different distance and speed. And if you perceive yourself as a superior driver (?)…this can be punctuated by the big damaging, crunching noise at the end of a fearful moment! Predictable phenomena, in this case, is not an accident.
I wrote this paragraph for the AAA magazine many years ago, equally as true today.
Robert Green
Lakeville
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Lakeville Journal and The Journal does not support or oppose candidates for public office.
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Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.