About 200 people marched in Easthampton, Massachusetts on August 1. The goal was to cut the police budget and use the money to help people of color in the city. Easthampton borders Holyoke. Easthampton is home to about 16,000 people. Three groups organized the march. They have web pages at:
www.facebook.com/groups/395051324734167
www.facebook.com/groups/413staywokestayactive
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There will be a march for campaign finance reform on August 8 at 1 p.m. The march starts in Keene. More information is at:
www.facebook.com/events/378612773129145
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There will be two peace marches. The first is August 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Turner's Falls, Massachusetts. Turner's Falls is a village in the town of Montague. Montague borders Greenfield. The march starts at Peskeomskut Park.
The second peace march will be in Easthampton, Massachusetts on August 9 at 7 p.m. It starts at the library. More information about the marches is available via www.MassPeaceAction.org.
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In Springfield, about 30 people attended a rally to protest federal troops being used against protesters in cities in the USA. Two groups organized the July 30 rally. They have web sites at:
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Daniela Lamas is a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In an article in the August 4 edition of the New York Times, she wrote that Covid-19 patients admitted to small hospitals are more than three times more likely to die than patients admitted to bigger hospitals. Lamas wrote, "As the video visit with my patient ended that day, she reminded me that she had been transferred to us from a small hospital in the western part of our state. 'If I hadn’t been transferred, I would have died,' she said.... She might be right."
The spokeswoman for the Greenfield hospital did not respond to an email and voice mail seeking comment.
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On August 5, the Valley Post received the following letter to the editor:
On August 6 and 9, it will be 75 years since the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives in the immediate blasts or years later as a result of radiation poisoning. These bombings were ordered by then-President Truman to, as is popularly misunderstood, force the Japanese into surrender, thus ending World War II and preventing a ground invasion of Japan by U.S. troops. However, there is another version of events, according to the late historian Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States" and Joseph Gerson, author of "Empire and the Bomb". The U.S. had broken the Japanese code and, through intercepted communications, knew beforehand that the Japanese were ready to surrender. Nearly all of the top commanding U.S. generals were opposed to the atomic bombings. Yet, Truman went ahead with the bombings for various reasons, but predominant was that they would be a demonstration to Joseph Stalin of the "bomb's" potential in the newly emerging cold war with the Soviet Union.
So, having the distinction of being the only nation to detonate nuclear weapons on a civilian population, where are we today? It's 100 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. As the nuclear danger worsened, they went from minutes to seconds. The leading intellectual on the left, Noam Chomsky, states that the gravest threats of human extinction are nuclear war and climate change. The U.S. has committed to spending $1 trillion to upgrade its nuclear weapons, refuses to abide by the requirements of nuclear disarmament and control provisions of treaties that it has signed, and has a very unstable and dangerous president with his finger on the nuclear trigger. The anti-war and nuclear weapons movements, of which I was an active participant in the '80s and '90s, today do not seem to be much on the minds of the younger folks that will be required to keep them going. But I have not given up hope, since they can still be revitalized by arising out of the change that will be necessary to address our climate and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Daniel Sicken
77 Mountain View Road
Putney, Vermont 05346
phone 802-387-2798
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