The exponential curve of dumb days
Bullying organizers out of the library, heat islands and public transportation, pulling the nearest thread
Did something happen yesterday? I was busy taking care of this guy might have missed it.
Meet BEAR everyone!! The newest member of the Worcester Sucks team. He’s such a cutelittle\-=[ assistant I \p
What a perfect time for him to walk over the keyboard. Just gonna leave that as is so you see what I’m dealing with. He does not leave the desk when I’m writing. So cute I can’t take it but it has me hitting Command+Z quite a bit. A classic Worcester cat story: he was born a stray behind Vincents about 12 weeks ago, was taken in with the rest of the litter by a bartender, and then forked over to us where he continues to be a sweet little barroom brawler.
Anyway, time to get to business.
Missed my self-imposed and arbitrary Sunday morning deadline for this post obviously but it’s sorta good I did because this morning I was at the convenience store getting smokes and the first human being I see out in the world is a middle aged white lady wearing a niche MAGA hat and American flag sneakers. Didn’t quite catch what the text on the hat was, but it had the words “vote” and “outlaw” and “feeling” on it. She was buying two bags of ice telling the cashier she’s going to see Aaron Lewis tonight (at Indian Ranch, it turns out, the state’s unofficial Trump HQ). Then she said “hey you see what happened last night?” and they had a little chat about it and at the end she goes “even if that happened to Biden I wouldn’t like it.”
“Not the kinda country we should be living in,” she said.
But that is the kind of country we’re living in and has been for a long time and if you think about it, Biden’s doing a pretty good job of assassinating himself already. About 95 percent of the way there I’d say.
Any fed reading this can rest assured we here at Worcester Sucks understand that “political violence” is when violence happens to a specific American politician and there’s no other kind. We condemn it also by the way.
Order of events for today’s post:
Bullying community organizers, running for congress—waitin’ for the bus—pulling the nearest thread—28 vacant homes per homeless person—council preview—odds and ends
The exponential curve of dumb days
This section details a little local slice of the enduring reality Matt Christman captured back in 2017.
Every day dumber than the last, and Worcester’s no exception.
On Friday Steve Schimmel, director of the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, bullied a group of community organizers out of meeting up at the library.
Every day, dumber than the last.
The 508 Palestine Education Collective had a teach-in event scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at the library. A relatively new group, it’s made up mostly of young adults1 , led by the folks behind Racism Free WPS, as well as the Clark SJP and Worcester DSA. It was their first meeting, and had a clear objective: “we'll be talking about the history of apartheid and zionism, media representation and more. Our first meeting will be a warm and fun one focused on building community.”
But that wasn’t how Schimmel described it. In an email blast sent out an hour before the event, he said the event “could incite hate, or violence.” It was “unacceptable and deserving of condemnation,” he said. Here’s the full email:
Jewish Federation is aware of a Palestine "teach-in" scheduled for 2pm today at Worcester Public Library.
We emphasize and reiterate our calls to Worcester City Manager, and Mayor, and Worcester Library Administration to address our concerns related to this event
We are investigating whether the library's guidelines were violated, and we are concerned that inaccurate, inappropriate, and misrepresentative information will be distributed. We are deeply troubled that a tax-payer funded institution would host any program that could incite hate, or violence and we feel that the hosting of such events is unacceptable and deserving of condemnation.
ADL, law enforcement, and other entities are aware of the event.
Friday dumber than Thursday. Thursday dumber than Wednesday.
Rather than deal with any crazies, the Palestine Education Collective moved the meeting to Zoom. Smart move, I think.
“This morning we received notice that our event space has been disrupted by anti-Palestine agitators. Out of care and love for our community, we are moving fully to Zoom and delay our start time by 1 hour.”
It became “a thing” once the library put out a vague statement:
And the Worcester Public Schools sent an email out to reporters distancing themselves:
“The Racism Free Worcester Public Schools teach-in event that is scheduled for Friday, July 12, at the Worcester Public Library is not sponsored nor endorsed by the Worcester Public Schools (WPS). We are sharing this note to clear up any confusion or misunderstanding.”
Both are the kind of statements an organization releases when they’re getting a lot of angry calls. Schimmel said in his statement that he’s “reiterating our calls” to city officials meaning they’ve been making calls! It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. The director of the JFCM used his platform to make a small group of well-meaning organizers feel unsafe.
The exponential curve of dumb days in America.
This little exercise in bullying and fear mongering about hate and violence might seem out of pocket. But it becomes less so when you consider Steve Schimmel is currently gathering signatures to run against Congressman Jim McGovern in the fall. A little late in the game for that! Several people told me he and supporters have been out with the clipboards at recent events like WooSox games. He doesn’t have an OCPF page so it’s probably not a super serious effort. But then again what run against Jim McGovern has ever been serious?
If he actually runs, it’ll be an AIPAC style campaign, as a recent Tweet suggests, likely blasting McGovern for that one time a few months ago when he tepidly suggested we stop sending Israel so many bombs, and only after his celebrity chef friend was the aggrieved party. That, for a guy like Schimmel, is a bridge too far.
For someone so concerned that “inaccurate, inappropriate, and misrepresentative information will be distributed” his Twitter is full of insane agitprop (like this and this and this).
Absent from his feed is stuff like just off the top of my head possibly 186,000 dead in Gaza as opposed to the 30-40,000 figure we’ve been shown, Biden’s “aid pier” getting dismantled after seemingly being used only once for the purpose of an Israeli sneak attack that killed hundreds, and lets see most recently a massacre at a school used for temporary shelter in Khan Yunis. Etc etc on and on.
And you’ll remember his organization was the one that led a local event perpetuating the rotten ‘weaponized rape’ atrocity propaganda a la the New York Times—months after the veracity of the story had been called to question.
After the assassination attempt on Trump Saturday, Schimmel posted to Twitter “desperately asking that the temperature of our rhetoric be turned down, now.”
The same guy who just insinuated an educational event at the library had terroristic aims. Who reported it to the cops. Asking that we turn down the temp. Unbelievable.
Dumber dumber dumber every day.
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Waitin’ for the bus
So here’s a little slice-of-life tale from the hell that was the heatwave of the past week or so.
Long story short I took the bus from Katie’s work (Holy Cross area) to our apartment (Greendale) and the whole experience put into stark relief several of the major themes in the news of late: our piss poor and quite deadly pedestrian infrastructure, the urban inequities of heat, the state of public transportation here. And also a wider theme: it was an intimate little glimpse at what the introduction of I-290 did to kneecap this city for all time. And an even wider one: What would it take to build a world with fewer cars? And how much of that falls on city governments? And where should a city government so inclined even start?
Short story long, Katie and I were thrown briefly into the realities of a one-car household on Tuesday. It was the sort of humid sweltering summer day that is worse than any winter day in terms of getting around the city without a car in my opinion. Still, on any day, Worcester is remarkably shitty to navigate without your own personal vehicle available to you at all times. And it shouldn’t be that way, of course. I’d very much like to live in the sort of city that makes sharing a car better sense than owning multiple. But Worcester is not that city, and it’s not an accident nor is it hard to understand why.
Just like budgets, roads are moral documents. The way they’re designed, laid out, monitored, repaired—what sort of travel is made easy, what sort of travel is made hard—it’s all the consequence of decades upon decades of policy decisions at all levels of government.
Katie had an appointment for an oil change at 10 a.m., work at 12 p.m. Luckily the mechanic shop is right down the street from our apartment—a reality at least marginally better than most suburban situations. So we didn’t have to pay for cab/Uber fare or lean on friends. We dropped the car off and walked back to the house. It took all of 15 minutes, most of it down West Boylston Street, and at 10 a.m., the weather was nice enough, still. The real nasty heat hadn’t set in yet. The walk was fine—wasn’t torture, and we both treated it like exercise. Still, despite living right next to the road for a while now, it’s one of the few times we’ve ever walked it. Extraneous circumstances forced us to in this one instance when otherwise we would have driven. We noticed little things we wouldn’t have in a car—hey look at that, there’s a cool pattern of blood dripping down the bottom Halloween Outlet road sign. It was nice.
Then 11:30 a.m. rolls around and the shop wasn’t done with the car. So I drove Katie to work. It took all of seven minutes in that precious traffic-free midday window to zip from the I-190 interchange to the Holy Cross exit that comes up a bit too quickly after the highway swerves in a giant “S” for the benefit of Holy Cross’s Fitton Field.
She got to work just fine, and I got back home in a blink.
We made vague plans for how to get her back from work later that day—a tattooer, Katie’s day is done when it’s done. Could be 4 p.m., could be 10 p.m. I had a stream at 6:15 p.m., and couldn’t step away from that to pick her up once it started. It was a play-it-by-ear situation: 80 percent chance I’m able to drive down the highway and get her and drive back up the highway versus 20 percent chance she gets an Uber—paying someone who’s also alone in their car as I would have been to do the alone-in-a-car task I would have done. In either situation, it involves sitting in some manner of traffic on the six-lane elevated highway that cuts through the center of the city surrounded by thousands of other people doing the same as their little personal combustion machines bring about the heat death of the human race and before that happens to make asthma rates particularly high in urban neighborhoods adjacent to interstates. These were the two options most readily available to us: use the second car in the two-car household or pay a service fee for a temporary second car.
2:30 p.m. I get the text that the car is ready so I decide to walk back over to the shop just like the nice walk we had that morning. This time it is decidedly not nice. The hottest, most humid part of the day, I was dripping sweat in mere minutes. I noticed what I hadn’t on the earlier walk: there are absolutely zero shade trees on West Boylston Street, despite it being a relatively walkable commercial area serving a college campus and a large, dense neighborhood. Pissed off, I tweeted this…
…and it did above average numbers for a simple municipal gripe—clearly something people care about and want to see fixed.
The infrastructure choice made a walk that was pretty nice an hour prior into an unbearable experience.
Experts call what I walked through an “urban heat island,” and the deleterious effects have been well documented. In a 2020 Energy and Building study, researchers find that urban overheating puts undue strain on electrical grids, raises the concentration of ground-level ozone, increases the temperature inside low-income housing units, and as such increases heat-related mortality and suffering.
Increased ambient temperatures cause a serious impact on the cooling energy consumption, peak electricity demand, heat related mortality and morbidity, urban environmental quality, local vulnerability and comfort.
The local heat islands are similarly well documented. Researchers at WPI mapped it...
My walk was right up in the northern tip of the deep red.
You’ll notice the contours are remarkably similar to both the income distribution and the ShotSpotter locations—strange coincidence huh?
In short the way we designed our transportation infrastructure took for granted that the violence of it would be meted out to the poor and the non-white in a way that unfolds generationally, without a defining moment, and as such is not liable to elicit any sort of meaningful resistance.
Doing my best to not bring that negative energy to the front desk lady at the mechanic shop, I made a joke about how I was stupid to attempt that walk, “I mean just look at me,” I said nodding down at my sweat-stained shirt and the front desk lady half jokingly said “yes you are stupid.”
When I got to the car, parked next to the sidewalk I’d just traversed, the thermostat read 99 degrees.
Sitting in said car, unsure of what to do vis-à-vis picking up Katie and the stream, I had an idea: to hell with it I’ll just drive the car to her work right now and take the bus back. I’m already pissed off and miserable no better time to finally ride the WRTA for the first time.
The decision was based in part on the fact it would inevitably lead to some version of the piece you’re reading now, and it was also motivated by the fact a driver rammed into a 13-year-old girl as she was crossing Belmont Street a few weeks ago, killing her. Now is the time to be seriously addressing cars and the deadly environment we’ve ushered in on their behalf. As Greg Opperman highlighted in the last post, this was a murder of a sort we don’t often talk about. A social murder. Like asthma in young kids born into a circumstance that has them growing up next to a highway is a social condition. We made it this way, and we can unmake it if we want to.
Anyway.
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it back for my stream—honestly had no idea how long it would take—but that made the story better: Hey guys sorry I missed the first three hours of the show I tried to see if the WRTA was a viable choice for my lifestyle and it turns out it wasn’t. Next time I’ll be sure to use my personal heat death and asthma machine instead so I don’t shirk my little daily responsibilities.
When I got to the shop to drop off Katie’s keys she and her client and some other people were chuckling at me: “You’re taking the bus? You’re crazy, man.” “I know, I know,” I said. “This is so stupid hopefully I make it home at all ha ha. You’ll probably beat me,” I told Katie as she hunched over a half-finished piece. I half believed it too. The WRTA is free to ride and that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy to use, let alone pragmatic. It could be if we wanted it to. That it’s neither easy nor pragmatic is like asthma clusters. A social condition.
Leaving the nice air-conditioned studio for the sweltering asphalt hell on the other side of the door I punched my route into the “public transit” function of Apple Maps—take the 42 to the downtown hub, then the 30 or 31 to my stop up by the eerily dormant Amazon distribution center formerly known as the Greendale Mall. It was 3:47 and Apple Maps said the bus was arriving at 4:06. Easy. The stop was only a five-minute walk from the studio. When I got to the end of that short walk, I realized it wouldn’t be so easy.
Between my bus stop and my person was an extremely busy four-lane highway—cars zooming, swerving, honking as they rushed to get to the nearby I-290 onramps or rushed from the nearby offramps at highway speeds.
The nearest crosswalk wasn’t very close, so I decided to wait for my window and run across the street.
Had I opted to go out of my way and walk down to the crosswalk, it might not have mattered anyway. Neal McNamara at the Patch addressed the recent ‘just use the crosswalk’ criticism of the 13-year-old girl who died. As he reported, over 16 percent of pedestrian deaths in the state since 2019 happened at crosswalks, as did 32 percent of serious injuries.
Bystanders who witnessed Simoncini's collision say the girl waited until traffic was clear to run across the six-lane road, but the driver who hit her came "out of nowhere" possibly speeding.
Crosswalks do not change the fact that crossing the street is a roll of the dice.
Mildly in jest I took a video of my crossing and said my last words just in case. Making light of the miserable and humiliating experience of inconveniencing motor vehicle traffic to get your human body across a road. As I crossed, I thought about Simoncini. How I was doing the thing that she was when a driver killed her. A thing that should be so simple and safe but isn’t.
It is wild there is not a crosswalk at that bus stop. But everything about that bus stop is wild.
It’s across the street from the old dilapidated Rotmans and the new fancy Nokia gas station. It’s under a highway overpass and there’s no bench or covering save for the I-290 overpass—a welcome provider of shade in an otherwise shadeless and uncomfortable environment. Next to the bus stop sign was a shopping cart full of garbage but no sign of any owner nor personal effects. Trash was everywhere, and a foreboding chain link fence separated the sidewalk from a triangle-shaped patch of pavement that was actively crumbling into the Middle River.
At least there was some shade courtesy the highway overpass—spray painted purple for the benefit of Holy Cross.
Staring up at that poorly sprayed purple, it struck me as insane there’s a high octane college down the street and I was standing at the closest inbound bus stop connecting straight to downtown and everything about the stop and its relation to the general Holt Cross Area was so antagonistic to the idea that Holy Cross is in a city.
Passing drivers who noticed stared at me like what the fuck are you doing there and honestly good question. It took maybe 15 minutes to see a single other pedestrian. I was a hundred yards from a college on one side and a commercial corridor on the other. And there was no sign at all of an effort to connect the two.
One of the most recurring stupid questions in Worcester politics is “why do we have all these colleges but it doesn’t feel like a college town?” And the answer is that the road designs tell everyone involved in that dilemma to get fucked.
4:08 p.m. and the bus was two minutes late. No sign of it. I was reminded of Jo Hart, a city council regular who old heads may remember—always dressed in black, gray hair in an unwieldy bun, tote bag at her side, giving the council the business. I met with her a few times and she would always complain about the bus, how confusing and awful it was. She died after she was hit by a car last year. There wasn’t a news story.
A few more minutes passed and I spotted my first pedestrian. I tried to search around for a more accurate bus tracker than Apple was providing.
You have to go to the WRTA website and click the menu—not the route tracker that takes you to a Google map—you hit systems and schedules, then system-wide map, then you click on the little icon next to your stop and then it gives you the right time: 4:25 p.m. in my case, not the 4:06 provided by Apple. Add another barrier to Worcester developing a better transit system and culture: the online world of it is just as hostile and disincentivizing as the physical world.
The shade line from the overpass was like an hourglass as I waited there, cars zooming by, for twenty more minutes than I’d expected to.
Meandering around the stop with nothing to do, I noticed the river flows the opposite way of how I’d assumed2—up toward the center of the city. And looking at the canal and the bridge and the triangle of concrete between the canal and the chain link fence adjacent the sidewalk, I was struck by how beautiful that area could be. How it’s a waste of what could be a crucial junction of neighborhoods and business corridors.
It also happened to be the point at which the highway starts to truly cut through the urban fabric.
I recently finished Getting There, the 1994 book by Stephen Goddard detailing the transition from a rail-centered to a car-centered America in the 1900s. Relevant to the tiny patch of land I’m talking about, Goddard ends a chapter with an admission from then President Dwight Eisenhower I found fascinating (thank you Walter Henritze for putting this in front of me).
After the interstate-building program was well under way, the president also awoke to unexpected realities of the plan he had pushed. On a summer day in 1959, Eisenhower’s limousine was on its way to Camp David, Maryland, when the president noticed a huge earthen gash extending through the northwest section of the city. Asking the reason for this massive intrusion of bulldozers, he learned from an aide that this was his interstate highway system. Eisenhower recoiled in horror. His interstate concept, borrowed from the German model, had been to go around cities, not through them.
There I was, standing at this little example of the disaster Eisenhower feared. Still a disaster all these years later. Goddard continues:
Amazingly, he had been unaware during the lengthy congressional donnybrook that the only way the interstates could become a reality in this increasingly urban nation was to promise cities enough money to eviscerate themselves.
At that uncomfortable and desolate bus stop, it was hard not to imagine how different it would be—with this canal and the college and the neighborhood—if the powers that be at the time had not chosen, as Goddard writes, to eviscerate themselves.
The ability to zoom from seven minutes to one part of the city from another is a convenience for which we’ve made a litany of sacrifices, most going unchronicled.
The bus arrived right at the time that is the hardest to find online and 20 minutes after the time the phone told me initially. It was actually close to full and it’s nice to get right on and not pay. Just nodded at the driver. There was family and some old school people and young people. Latino, Black, white—a proportional snapshot of the city’s demographics.
We passed Polar Park and the gleaming windows of the new Cove development with its $4,000 rents.
I got off at the hub and it’s bumping with dozens of people and several buses. The ticker said my connecting bus was arriving and I was on it in minutes.
Once you’re on the bus, it’s golden, I thought at the time. Getting there is the real barrier. The road infrastructure. If it wasn’t so antagonistic to get to the bus more people would use it. The highway just renders a space like my bus stop a moot point. There’s no reason to correct it. Ceded territory.
Riding through downtown, there were no pedestrians at all. Passing Gateway Park, I noticed it in a new way. It showed no signs of being used as a park nor any inclination that the owner, WPI, wants it used that way. Just a big front lawn for no property in particular. Two benches and a few shrubs. Why would WPI even have it? To them, just a holding. Not a usable urban space. A little example of the way colleges are really just real estate companies.
Off at my stop and I was back at the tree-less hellscape where I started. Just as unbearably hot. The bus ride was a very chill 50 minutes in which I worked the entire time as opposed to what would have been a stressful and risky 10 minutes on a congested highway. I braced myself for the ascent up the classic Worcester hill on which I live, and it was then I noticed two newly planted shade trees on a small strip of grass between West Boylston Street and Barber Avenue—an unexpected bit of found poetry to tie the whole thing up. In those saplings, I saw that the current thing might be a victim of the past, but it needn’t go on that way into the future. All of this can be fixed if we just decide that fixing things is possible. Is it really such a silly idea, for instance, to get rid of I-290? Is it really fiscally irresponsible to double up the amount of money we throw at the WRTA? There is a plan awaiting council approval to plant thousands of new trees in Worcester and if it doesn’t get past the council if and when, shame on them yet again.
As I neared my house, my keys were hanging off my fanny pack, jingling as I walked past my parked car and all the short-term convenience that thing represents. I had a good long thought about how convenient it really is, how maybe just maybe I’d be better off without it. How a personal car can be at the same time skeleton key and albatross.
I arrived home at 5:03 p.m.. All told it took a little more than an hour. I was able to complete my silly little tasks just fine. Noticed the city in a new way. Participated in it more than I would have. Saw a glimpse of what it could be if we wanted it.
“Pull on the thread nearest to you”
Been watching Your Honor, the 2023 crime drama recently added to Netflix, and I was moved by a scene in Season 1 Episode 8, in which the young protagonist shares photography advice imparted by his dead mother:
So, my mom used to give people pictures of themselves they didn’t know she’d taken. I mean, all over the city, there are people with Polaroid pictures of themselves taken by Mom. And, you know, people would get pissed sometimes, and so Mom would talk to them or sometimes even go for coffee with them to try to persuade them she wasn’t after their souls. And, I mean, they would open up to her. And I’d be there listening. It was how I learned everything that I know and love about this city. I mean, obviously back then I hated it. Thought she was, like, embarrassing or… And she knew that, so, um, one day she explained it to me. “Go deep, not wide.” She said people make that mistake too often, thinking that going deep is going wide. “Stay where you are, stand still, dig.”
This put to words an observation I had about senior homelessness as detailed in my last piece that I couldn't quite articulate—it takes going deep on a specific place as opposed to wide on a national issue to see something like a city’s 29 percent increase in senior homelessness amid a housing shortage and insufficient SSI checks. You have to look deeply at the specific thing to notice the wide reality of seniors being spit out onto the street by this system we live in.
And then I read a post on local organizing in Ayesha Khan’s Woke Scientist newsletter, as recommended by the Worcester Sucks Instagram admin. And the going deep idea deepened.
The reason the unhoused folks in the encampments downtown are struggling is the same reason people in Gaza are being starved to death. The same settler colonial empires are behind both crises. I assure you there is a direct, very real, tangible thread that extends from a poor person in the city or town that you live in to the starving child in Gaza to the displaced, orphaned child in the Congo & beyond. That should be our focus. Pull on the thread nearest to you.
‘Pull on the thread nearest to you’ is my new mission statement I think.
And at the same time I was reading a collection of Lester Bangs’ rock reviews, and in his 1979 revisiting of Astral Weeks, a beautiful passage on homelessness comes out of nowhere:
Where I live, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. And I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves. There is of course a rationale—what else are you going to do—but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. ...
Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you’ve got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes’ problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that’s when you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. How much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about?
There are 28 empty homes for every homeless person in America. In Worcester specifically, there are 16 vacant homes for every unhoused member of our community—22,452 vacant homes, according to the United Way. Since Biden took office, the defense budget has increased by $212 billion, and social and economic spending dropped by $30 billion.
In a new study titled “The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams,” policing expert and organizer Alec Karakatsanis puts yet another thing into words that I’ve struggled with every time I write about body cameras or ShotSpotter or drones.
I studied a decade of public discourse about body cameras as well as the internal statements of police, prosecutors, and industry insiders to understand a simple question: how did a coveted tool of repression that police and prosecutors desperately wanted (but couldn’t get funded) come to be seen by the public—especially liberals—as an essential police reform? If we can understand the answer to this question better, we can begin to learn many of the most important lessons about how powerful institutions trick well-meaning people into tolerating a society that does not live up to its own stated values.
This body camera study pairs well with a recent local article by Neal McNamara at the Patch: “State Police Chased Worcester Afghan Refugee With K9, Helicopter Over Thefts.”
During the June 24 pursuit, the state police helicopter circled Green Hill Park for about an hour starting at 3:30 p.m., one of several "overwatch" flights state police used during the pursuit, according to flight records. On the ground, troopers used a K9 to track the 20-year-old through Green Hill Park and across the park's golf course.
"Troopers navigated wooded areas in the vicinity, periodically spotting the suspect and engaging in multiple foot pursuits," state police said in a description of the incident.
The pursuit ended after about six hours at 7:30 p.m. when troopers found the man hiding in a wooded area next to the golf course.
The man was an Afghan refugee who had been living homeless in Green Hill Park for months.
It makes me feel tired to point out how much more expensive this response was than giving a desperate young man a home and some money for food. Going deep on that idea will take you to a dark place. This young Afghan refugee may as well exist for the benefit of the state police helicopter.
Quick look at council
The city council is meeting on Tuesday at 6 p.m. and the agenda is massive. Far more on there than they could ever hope to accomplish but hey that’s just how we do things.
Human Resources is proposing a work program for seniors who can’t afford their property taxes.
Fire Department has a report on the Washington Heights fire including the grim detail that 1,108 residents have been displaced by fires in the past two years.
Inspectional Services with a report on so-called “problem properties” which apparently includes homeless encampments, by their definition.
A report on internet access and “digital equity.”
A whopping 26 orders from councilors.
Some good: Jenny Pacillo calling for the city to address the food desert issue that will emerge when the Lincoln Street Stop & Shop closes. Pacillo also calls for traffic calming measures on Lincoln Street. Luis Ojeda wants a similar effort on Piedmont St between Pleasant and Chandler, a common cut through. Thu Nguyen wants information on the demographics of people most affected by fees and fines. Etel Haxhiaj requests information on money problems preventing the installation of pedestrian safety measures. Haxhaij requests info on city programs for new refugees.
Some bad, pretty much all from Moe Bergman: He apparently plans to go after the Create 508 youth mentorship program on Tuesday, casting the same vague aspersions he did at the Knitty Council. Also Bergman: Combine the Major Taylor Museum and the Major Taylor Statue to one location (???). And he’s up in arms again about the brick sidewalks on Germain Street. Pressing issue.
All told I’d say we’re looking at another five-hour sludgefest. Come hang with the Worcestery Council Theatre 3000 crew if you plan on watching.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading yet another weird and wild edition of Worcester Sucks! Hope you liked it.
The High Command show on Friday was one for the books. I love my dumb friends.
A few more stray links:
The parents of the young man who died by spicy chip are suing the company.
A new development announced adjacent Polar Park, complete with a six bedroom penthouse suite.
Activists call for a state commission on local journalism and making sure it doesn’t completely die. Seems like a good idea to me.
And lastly...
When I initially posted, I used “kids” quite a bit in this section. I’ve removed the term because, as one organizer put it, “it can feel a little delegitimizing.” Not my intention, but on consideration, it’s totally valid—thus the change. They’re adults, and they’re doing righteous work.
When I initially posted this story, I incorrectly identified this waterway as the Blackstone Canal. It is the Middle River. Having received a Worcester River 101 crash course from both Colin and Tracy Novick, I now know that the Middle River is not the Blackstone Canal, that it is supposed to flow that way, and that it goes under the highway through a series of conduits and then connects with the Blackstone River. I also learned that Colin Novick once rode a canoe through those conduits and that “there's no point in paddling because the current takes you, so you hold the paddle up and out to collect spider webs.”