Occum Pond ice sets record

A 100-year-old record was set March 7 when the ice went out on Occom Pond in Hanover. Records have been kept since 1914. March 25 was the previous early ice-out record, set in 1919 and 1921. April 10 is the average.

When “someone can swim from one end to the other” is the Occom Pond Neighborhood Association’s test for ice out. No one really swims.

We miss the deep freeze winters.

Bill Young

Hanover

Don’t waste your vote

Thinking of voting third-party in November because you disagree with President Joe Biden on some issues? Please consider the effect of your decision.

None of the third-party candidates stands a chance of being elected. You wouldn’t simply be throwing your vote away, however. You’d be influencing the election in a way that you probably would not want.

Consider the 2000 presidential election, when 4% of New Hampshire votes were cast for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, allowing George W. Bush to take the state by 1%, and with it the electoral college. No one who voted for ultra-liberal Nader would have dreamed of voting for Bush, who gave us wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2008 recession.

And consider the 2016 election. If voters for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in three battleground states had voted instead for Hillary Clinton, the electoral college would not have gone for Donald Trump, who gave us tax cuts for the rich, another four years of delay in combating climate change, and an insurrection in January 2021.

Find another way to protest. The very future of our democracy may be at stake in the election this year, and your vote really matters.

Stephen Dycus

Strafford

Another wallet found

On March 17 I dropped my wallet on the street in White River Junction. You can understand the panic. Someone returned it to the Hartford Police Department, that same day. I have no way to thank the person for their effort. It was returned intact, with all cash and cards. I have no way to thank you, though it meant so much to me. I will pay it forward; you sparked that in me.

I can’t say it enough. Thank you.

Liliana Paradiso

Hanover

Who’s a RINO?

Thanks to David Greenfield, who in his Forum letter of March 26 points out that despite Donald Trump’s disparaging use of the term RINO directed at others in his party, it’s Trump himself, rather than his targets, who is a Republican In Name Only.

Among the extraordinary things about our 45th president two in particular seem to me to be most important: First, that he consistently generates blatantly false information. Second, that he consistently accuses others of behavior of which he himself is obviously guilty. One could wonder, as I have, if it’s that Donald Trump is simply a liar, whether a compulsive or a strategic one, or delusional to the extent that he doesn’t know false from true?

Whatever is determined to be the case, what seems to me clear is that false information leads to bad decisions; bad decisions lead to bad policy, and bad policy leads to human suffering.

Chris Weinmann

Norwich