Forum for Oct. 5, 2024: Skate parks
Published: 10-11-2024 4:07 PM |
Skate parks have not always had a reputation as friendly places for newbies and if you didn’t belong, you didn’t belong. But the times have changed and most parks (like Rusty Berrings in West Lebanon) are a welcoming place for all skaters, as well as bikers, rollerskaters, rollerbladers and scooters.
But they also involve a high degree of risk and so each person is responsible not only for their own safety, but for being aware and courteous of others. Parents need to understand that they are not playgrounds for children to run around, play tag, shoot water guns or play any other games. They are not for remote-control cars or other toys and the features themselves are not places to “hang out.” They are not day care centers where you can drop off your child and then go sit under a tree on your phone or go grocery shopping. When you do that, you make your child’s safety the responsibility of other adults and you put others, and your child, at risk of injury. It’s not my responsibility to come to the skate park after work or on the weekends to monitor behavior and teach safety, that is your job as a parent. You need to be monitoring your child at all times and if they can’t skate, scoot or bike safely then they shouldn’t be there. I follow the rules when I skate and do my very best to help keep others safe. But I am also a 185-pound man and when I’m moving fast there’s not much I can do to prevent a collision if a small child on a scooter is chasing a friend and cuts right in front of me. If we collide, it’s going to be ugly and the responsibility for that accident rests with the parent who wasn’t supervising their child.
So teach your children the rules and if you don’t know the rules, just ask one of the skateboarders to help explain. If not, there’s a playground right next door.
Chris Lord
White River Junction
Thanks to the Valley News and reporter Clare Shanahan for her story on Good Neighbor Health Clinic’s petition to the Town of Hartford for the harm reduction access point proposed for our clinic in White River Junction.
This important project, similar to others around Vermont and New Hampshire, will go before the Hartford Planning Commission on Oct. 7. It will provide essential health supplies as well as the overdose reversal drug naloxone to those in our community who may not be able to obtain such items otherwise.
The primary source of support for it comes from Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid organization active across the country and the world, with a mission to improve the health and lives of people affected by poverty or emergencies.
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This latest initiative is another example of the leadership, vision and experience that Elizabeth Austin has brought to our organization since she joined as executive director in May 2023. We’re grateful to Elizabeth and her entire team at Good Neighbor Health Clinic and Red Logan Dental Clinic for their outstanding work in meeting our public health mission of providing members of our community with “access to the health resources they need to reach their potential for mental, physical, and social well-being.” You can learn more about this great work at goodneighborhealthclinic.org
Todd Allen
Chair, Board of Trustees
Good Neighbor Health Clinic & Red Logan Dental Clinic
White River Junction
“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a-na-tion.” So might a modern American giant tweak the chant made familiar to us as children in “Jack and the Bean Stalk.” Giants are predatory, anti-social, malevolent beings: they always are. It matters not whether they are the cannibalistic Monster of Mont Saint-Michel whose disdain for law and order (i.e., duly constituted political authority) is recounted in the fourteenth century Death of King Arthur or the provincial big man whose threat to social stability is decried in the Song of Roland.
Giants (aka Titans) are the embodiment of self-indulgence — of beings dominated by urge and impulse, by feelings of envy, greed, and lust. Reason, moderation, adherence to law, cooperation, and compassion are foreign to their being. In the Bible and Greek mythology alike, an age dominated by giants is an age of chaos — symbolized both by war between the elements and incessant conflict among humans. It is only with the establishment of law and reason — by Yahweh on the one hand and Zeus on the other — that order, prosperity, and peace prevail.
We have in 2024 a presidential candidate who rants and raves, who, apparently identifying self-worth with the accumulation of power and wealth, seeks to persuade American voters that their self-esteem and well-being will be enhanced if they belittle and punish certain groups of people as professional wrestlers appear to do in Saturday Night Smackdown. In the Republican Convention, the gigantic Hulk Hogan was in effect presented as the candidate’s alter ego.
The literary record (both the Bible and world mythology) shows that sooner or later the Giants lose — if not slain, exiled. Interestingly, those who defeat them are often not of superhuman strength but of modest stature and status. Three cases in point are the shepherd boy who slew Goliath the Philistine, the “puny” warrior who slew the giant who threatened Charlemagne’s rule, and last but not least, the boy Jack. Perhaps the average American voter will, in November, put an end to the titanic bluster of the candidate I have not named.
Christopher L. Chase
Hanover