Archive for July 23rd, 2012

July 23rd, 2012

Lowell Folk Festival ~ Time To Volunteer

by Marie

This story appeared in the Tewksbury Advocate in July, 2006

At this time of the year, memories of Lowell Festivals past can’t help but be on my mind. I volunteered at the first Lowell Folk Festival – back when it was designated as the official national folk festival! I wasn’t new to either volunteering or to local festivals. Remember those Regatta Festivals up in the Boulevard under the inspiration and drive of Zenny Sperounis with Sue Leggat, John Green, John Machado, Dick Taffe, Angie Pappas and so many other? I – like Pauline Golec and others still active  - go back that far.

I remember being  in a tent in Regatta Field as an “ethnic” – with my mother Marie Kirwin, my great aunt Beatrice Deignan Willwerth, Fr. Jon Martin and other family and friends  - selling an Irish medley of my mother’s specialites – lamb stew and Irish soda bread and my specialty – Irish coffee. Framed by an artist’s view of the Lakes of Killarney we displayed Irish artifacts, clothing, books and family history. What a grand time! Little did we know it would lead to the iconic 25-plus year run of the Lowell Folk Festival.

This weekend – July 28, 29, 30 – the  26th annual Lowell Folk Festival kicks into high gear! While attending the festival and enjoying all it has to offer by way of music, ethnic foods, cultural experience and the sheer joy of sharing with the thousands of people who come to the various stages and sites in historic downtown Lowell – a unique and perhaps more satisfying way of experiencing the festival is as a VOLUNTEER!

Volunteer guru Janet Leggat wants and needs you! The jobs are many and varied – selling the Lowell Folk Festival gear, driving/helping as escorting the performers, set-up and take-down of the vast festival site, helping with the innovative recycling program, joining the famous “Bucket Brigade” collecting the dollars that help make the whole event possible!

If this grand festival is to continue as the largest free folk festival in the country, more than a thousand volunteers are needed and necessary. You could be one of them! Contact Janet or Erin at 978-275-1740. There will be volunteer orientation meetings on Tuesday, July 24th and Wednesday, July 25th prior to the festival at the Boott Mill. All volunteers are strongly encouraged to attend. Some paper work must be filled out then you’ll get a t-shirt, your assignment and instructions! Volunteer shifts are such that you can still enjoy the festival as a spectator as well as a volunteer – try it you’ll have a great time!

Will I see you there?

For more information: http://www.lowellfolkfestival.org/volunteer.html

CategoryCulture, Current Events, Lowell | CommentNo Comments »

July 23rd, 2012

Thoreau Refuses To Pay Back Taxes

by Marie

A reprise:

MassMoments reminds us that on this day – July 23, 1846 – Henry David Thoreau after walking from his Walden Pond cabin to do an errand – found himself in the Concord town jail for refusing to pay his back taxes. His was just an over-night stay – as someone unasked paid those taxes for him. This greatly annoyed Thoreau who withheld the poll taxes as a conscience protest against the institution of slavery. As he later wrote in his essay “”Civil Disobedience” -

“…it is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support.”

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist admired as an original thinker and a gifted writer. He produced an extraordinary body of work — journals, essays, poetry, and books – that included his first book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” published in 1849 and “Walden, or, Life in the Woods” published in 1854.

Read more about Thoreau here at MassMoments.com.

CategoryGreater Lowell, History, Politics | CommentNo Comments »

July 23rd, 2012

A Cautionary Tale: Stockton, Calif.

by PaulM

I lived in Stockton, California, for about seven months in 1967. My father had taken a job grading wool for the Cal Wool Co-op; the move didn’t work out, and my family was back in the Lowell area by the end of the year. Stockton felt a lot like Lowell in those days. The industries were related to farms and ranches in the San Joaquin Valley. Today’s NYTimes has an op-ed column by Paula Sheil, a community college teacher in Stockton who is living through the city’s current bankruptcy—it’s the largest American city (300,000 pop.) to go bankrupt in the Great Recession.

Read the column here, and get the NYT if you want more of this kind of writing.

CategoryCulture, Election 2012, History, Lowell | Comment1 Comment »

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July 23rd, 2012

Colorado shooting scares, saddens and stymies us by Marjorie Arons-Barron

by Tony

The entry below is being cross posted from  Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater is a terrible thing to do. Opening fire is a horror of a whole order of magnitude. Most of America is struggling to make sense out of 24-year-old neuroscience student James Holmes’ rampage, which so far has resulted in the deaths of 12 people and injured 59 others, some of whom may not make it. We want to do something to keep these things from happening, but what?

President Obama and Mitt Romney extended condolences and modified their campaign schedules for the day. But neither wants to risk losing voter support, especially in swing states, by making gun control part of the election debate.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg chastised them for not using the occasion to call for stricter gun control. He has a point.  Luke O’Dell of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, said that, if someone in the audience were carrying, the carnage wouldn’t have been so great. Now there’s a helpful solution, in the George Zimmerman style! But people are more responsive to O’Dell than Bloomberg. Please note the post-Aurora spike in gun sales reported by the Boston Herald’s Jessica Van Sack.

When you see the ease with which Holmes apparently purchased 6000 rounds of ammunition online and, from gun shops, a military-style assault weapon, a semi-automatic rifle and two .40 caliber Glock handguns, plus cannisters of gas, Bloomberg’s argument makes sense.   The pusillanimous cowering of most politicians in the face of National Rifle Association lobbying stands in the way of gun restrictions and is contemptible.

Criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern maintains that mass murder will not be stopped by gun control.  We remember the most notorious incidents: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Gabby Giffords,  Charles Whitman at the U. Texas tower. According to Fox, since the 1970′s, the number of such shootings, on varied scale, has held at about two dozen a year.  Fox says that gun control might reduce the overall level of gun violence but not eliminate the mass murderer,  often a twisted, premeditative, violent loner, who plans and executes the crime and often commits suicide afterward.  Such incidents, Fox maintains, are one of the “painful consequences of the freedoms we enjoy.”

I’m not willing to let it go at that. So great is today’s level of gun violence that Jessica Ghawi, one of the tragic victims in Aurora, had narrowly missed being shot just a month ago in a  shooting spree in a Toronto mall.  As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker after Virginia Tech in 2007, other countries (e.g. France, England, Scotland, Australia) have passed gun restrictions in the wake of mass murders and none has seen a repeat of the horrific incident which prompted the new rules. Yet here we go again.

Every time there’s a mass murder, we go into a frenzy of debating gun control (versus arming vigilantes), violence in the media- especially video games -, changing security at entrances to public venues. (See Ty Burr’s thoughtful piece in today’s Boston Globe about how violent movies feed the fantasies of people who feel powerless.)  We don’t want to live in an authoritarian environment, but isn’t it time to pass reasonable restrictions on gun ownership? What legitimate hunter or anxious homeowner needs an assault rifle?

Bringing back the assault rifle ban should be a minimum and immediate goal, even before we get to resolving the inadequacies of  the data base used to check potential gun owners, or  addressing the ratcheting up of violence that certain video games and movies are foisting on the public.  This time, can’t we convert the pontificating into action?

CategoryUncategorized | Comment6 Comments »