Codfish Press

Even On Old Cape Cod: Sex Never Gets Old!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

Sex is no longer a four-letter word. Even a stuffy numerologist knows that. Shattering taboos like they were your grandmother’s fine china, adults into their mid-eighties are enjoying sex, according to a University of Chicago study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week to orgasmic reviews. “The nationally representative survey of more than 3,000 U.S. adults ages 57 to 85 found that more than half to three-quarters of those questioned remained sexually active, with a significant proportion engaging in frequent and varied sexual behaviors,” The Washington Post reported. Yikes! Must be lots of smirking down at the Council on Aging socials. Praise the Lord, and pass the Viagra.

Sex among seniors, says Stacy Tessler Lindau, who led the University of Chicago study, is a good toning exercise, releases special happy hormones, and offers obvious psychological and health benefits to those looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. It seems that some of our elders are wearing sunglasses.

As a kid, I always knew parents were into sex. My Irish Catholic mother was pregnant 15 times and my godmother gave birth to 16. I never realized sex in the city or out in the country was for the 80 something crowd. But why not?

There are a lot of myths about sex, so I thought I ought to brush up on a Live Science sex quiz (livescience.com), covering a range of misnomers. See how you do. “The sex lives of our prehistoric ancestors were likely similar to: monogamous penguins; promiscuous, no-commitment bonobo chimpanzees; or polygamist, harem-loving gorillas?” The answer, monkey brain, is: promiscuous, non-commitment bonobo chimpanzees. Here’s another one. “Based on artifacts and cave paintings, Ice Age women were likely to: be submissive and dragged around by their hair; to have sex only to make babies; to enjoy sex as much as their male counterparts?” The answers is: they appear to have enjoyed sex as much as their male mates.

On the subject of known aphrodisiacs in the food world, Live Science asks, what is the most potent: oysters, strawberries and turkey; oysters, chocolate and spicy foods; or chocolate and figs?  The answer is oysters, chocolate and spicy food, but beware, consumed in one sitting, the above will make you too sick for sex.

And finally, on average how much sperm do we chest-beating males produce a day: 100 million each, 300 million, or 500 million? The answer is 300 million, but don’t get too cocky about it. Most are rejects, like the fanciful tales of our sex lives.

Not that anyone cares, but I bombed the quiz. Easy to say for a sheltered guy who attended a parochial prep school in White Plains, N.Y, and all-boys Catholic college in Connecticut before transferring to sun-drenched University of Arizona in Tucson where halter tops outnumbered the prickly bear cactus. I was overwhelmed and unprepared for it, but then there’s always my 80s to anticipate.

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Serving Two Masters: A Spirit Divided

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

I met Neda the other day. She says she’s one of the “lucky” ones. “I have two dumb presidents,” she declares in a thick Persian accent.

Born and raised in Tehran and now living and working in Boston with a dual U.S. citizenship obtained in a coincidental twist of irony on September 11, 2005, Neda Ahanin today finds herself straddling the balance beam of two polar opposites, her two presidents— trenchant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and unbending George Bush. Loyal to the ancient and founding principles of both countries, Ahanin is a study of wrenching conflicts and contrasts, and yet she embodies the notion that the people of a nation often do not reflect the leadership du jour. A member of a traditional Persian sect who has attended an evangelical church in America, a woman who is as at ease in a chador as she is in a sundress, a nationalist of both an Islamic republic in Bush’s Axis of Evil and the foremost democracy in the world, Ahanin rebuffs our collective penchant to stereotype, bluntly stating, “the world is too quick to judge.” Her eclectic views defy political profiling.

On this peaceful Sunday morning, she sits in a small office in the Stony Brook section of Brewster, the air outside heavy and moist, and recoils at the headline of the day, threatening Armageddon in the Middle East—AHMADINEJAD: ISRAEL SOON DESTROYED. “Ahmadinejad is a nut,” winces Ahanin, who works as assistant to Boston Metro publisher Stuart Layne.  “He’s not a civilized person. He’s dangerously dumb.”

Ahmadinejad, she says, rules out of fear, and draws power from a country paralyzed by apathy, economic pressures and widespread drug use. “Iranians are good, family-centered people, but many of them feel trapped, and take a course of least resistance,” says Ahanin, 27, who lived in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War and speaks fluent Farsi and Arabic. “It’s easier and cheaper for a person in Iran to buy opium or heroin, than it is to buy books. It’s a purposeful decision by the government, I believe, to keep the country sedated. If a person can’t think, they can’t resist and make decisions.”

Ahanin doesn’t mince words about her other president, either—reproving Bush, as she does Ahmadinejad, for using religion to maneuver a nation in his narrow political footsteps. “And Bush is not very smart, as well,” she says. “I’m still learning English, and my sentence structure is better than his. His aides write it for him, put it in front of him, and he still can’t read the cue cards. It’s embarrassing. I feel so sad when he talks that he’s the person speaking for this country.” Both Bush and Ahmadinejad, she notes, do a dreadful job of representing the various cross-sections of opinions in their countries.

Locked in what appears to be an unending identity crisis, Ahanin insists she has not lost touch with her values. “I am Persian,” she says, an obvious reference to an empire that no longer exists. “I am proud of that. My only identity crisis is to make others understand the difference between my people and its government.”

As to smart presidents, Ahanin says she would be happy with two presidents who had a half brain. “Then it would be one brain, and that would be a good start!”

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Warming Trend: Baking The Planet!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

With apologies to Harry Truman, if you can’t take the heat, get off the planet! Two generations from now, in time for our grandchildren, the icy moons of Saturn may have the summer appeal of Cape Cod and the Jersey Shore. Scientists now predict that average summertime temperatures in several East Coast cities will rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated, according to recent findings of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The temperature swell is expected to create rolling blackouts, an unprecedented rise in sea levels, crop failures and famine, the extinction of certain plant and animal species, and record deaths among the elderly from heat prostration. Anyone for lollygagging on Rhea in July where temperatures are a nippy –281 degrees F in the sun and –364 degrees in the shade?

Realtors take note: for those choosing to stay, with anticipated coastal flooding, the water views of tomorrow are today’s cottages ten blocks from the beach!

Hyperbole aside, what we have here is a failure to communicate, as the captain of Road Prison 36 barked in the movie, Cool Hand Luke. In spite of all the dire predictions, all the hand-wringing, all the gratuitous political statements, all the drop-dead statistics spilling out of official reports, gas prices sliding to $4-a-gallon, polar ice caps melting faster than a popsicle in August, and an alarming increase in killer storms and tornadoes, we collectively seem to have taken on the spirit of Alfred E. Neuman: what, me worry?

Sure, many of us talk a good game, myself included, but the rhetoric falls flat against the facts. “It was probably always too much to believe that human beings would be responsible stewards of the planet,” Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine noted two months ago in a cover report. “We may be the smartest of all the animals, endowed with exponentially greater powers of insight and abstraction, but we’re animals all the same.” The feverish planet Earth “needs a cure,” he wrote,  “There’s a role for big thinkers, power players, those with deep pockets—and the rest of us.”

For the rest of us, the time to act is now, in our day-to-day lifestyles, in the choices we make, and in the positions we take, and the policies we support—some of them symbolic, others more life altering. Acting together, one person can slow global warming.

“People have to take it upon themselves because the governments are not going to do it.” Rick Healy, co-author of the WHOI report, said Monday in a Cape Cod Times interview.

Something to ponder as we think about the future and about our grandchildren.

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Have You Hugged Your Wallet Today?

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

Ouch! Pay your taxes last week on time? There goes money for that kitchen renovation, new deck, boat repair, or perhaps the college fund. If you were one of the privileged ones, you paid it out of an executive salary package, a year-end bonus or cashing in company stock. And if you had a good tax lawyer, proportionately you paid much less than the rest of us, or maybe nothing at all. Congratulations for profiting off our nickel. “A lot of taxes will go unpaid at the top of the income scale,” David Schizer, dean of the Columbia Law School and an attorney who specializes in tax law wrote in The New York Times.

Pity the poor CEOs these days. For they shall inherit the planet! The medium 2006 compensation for chief executive officers at 50 of the largest U.S. companies, according to a special USA Today report last week, is $17.7 million—more than $1.4 million in salary, $4.1 million in bonus, $426,918 in perks and other compensation, and more than $9.6 in stock and option awards. And the heads of Wall Street’s choice financial firms, the paper reports, noting new disclosure rules, got some real money: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein skipped off with $54.3 million in salary, bonus, options and restricted stock. Second place was never so sweet for Merrill Lynch’s CEO Stanley O’Neal, who was paid $46.4 million and exercised $16.7 million worth of options, the paper reports.

And how about getting paid for showing up! EMC Corp. CEO Joseph Tucci’s 2006 executive pay package cost the company $20.2 million in salary, bonus and company stock, The Boston Globe reported. While it represents a $9.6 million reduction from 2005, “Tucci’s lofty compensation didn’t sit well with corporate governance critics who say that the lackluster performance of EMC shares doesn’t justify Tucci’s income,” the Globe notes. 

So what is it about these guys that justifies the colossal pay? Last time most of us checked, none of them had cured cancer, reversed global warming, raised the quality of inner city schools, quelled terrorism, pitched a shutout or hit a home run. Hey, they don’t even take out the trash!

And yet they pine for excessive, almost to the point of dissolute, salaries and tax breaks so some of the surfeit can trickle down to us—that is, if you subscribe to the waning principles of Reaganomics. A few of these titans also get “tax gross-ups,” code for corporate reimbursements for tax liabilities. The term is appropriate, a pitiable insult to the worker bees. Think about it next time you or a friend gets stung with a pink slip.

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Fighting Cancer, Battling Perceptions

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

Stereotypical perceptions to the contrary, cancer is not a disease, awaiting a bolus of drugs or miraculous hope; it’s a category—a class, simply put, of malignant growths or tumors caused by abnormal and uncontrolled cell division. And categorically speaking, in spite of what you might have read recently about impressive celebrity testimonies and earnest reactions to them, the war on cancer is in full prosecution, and we’re still getting shelled. If you have a family history of cancer, if you still enjoy sitting out in the sun or scorched off layers of skin as a teenager or young adult, if you smoke or have an appetite for all the wrong foods, you better duck!

Cancer has touched most of our lives, or the lives of family or friends. My 85-year-old father, my brother and brother-in-law are all survivors, expanding their lungs every day in a symbolic gesture just to see how long they can hold their breath against this killer, as the diseases of today morph into the monsters of tomorrow. The death rate from cancer is high, accounting for at least 20 percent of deaths in this country, although on an encouraging note, says a report Sunday in the Baltimore Sun, “about 40 percent of the million Americans who are diagnosed with cancer each year get early treatment and live for many years after the diagnosis.”

But you gotta ask yourself one question, Dirty Harry would say: “Do I feel lucky?”

This punk doesn’t. As a kid, my dad—a street-wise Bronx boy—used to tell me that good offense is a strong defense: drive defensively, think before you speak, and don’t assume anything, or take your health for granted. We should listen to our parents more! I’m a dangerous driver, multi-tasking like a short order cook; I choke regularly on my ankles with both feet in my mouth; and I haven’t seen a doctor for a full physical in years.

Frankly, I don’t think I’m alone in this. The lesson of Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of presidential candidate John Edwards, and Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, however gripping their personal circumstances may be, is early detection—regular screenings for breast, prostate, colon, skin and other forms of cancers.

“Why is it that Americans speak of trying to whip cancer, show courage in the face of it, and die after a long battle against it?” David Brown wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post. “It’s because what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the rich (‘They are different from you and me’) is true of cancer among the multitude of bodily afflictions.”

While hope springs eternal in the fight against cancer, nothing beats a basic checkup. Do you feel lucky today?

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A Jarring Report On JFK's Autopsy

In a modest, unassuming home on a Cape Cod country lane, with a front window insulated with weather stripping to conserve heat and a frayed American flag out front waving in the stiff March breeze, sits a man who lives with a history that haunts a nation and the world.  Francis Xavier O’Neill, Jr., a retired FBI agent, one of two agents who oversaw the grisly autopsy of John F. Kennedy forty-four years ago, is surrounded by a lifetime of memorabilia, photographs, medals and official reports worthy of a museum. He is one of the last surviving members of the preliminary criminal investigation team that probed the Kennedy assassination.

Recently released 8mm footage, previously unseen in public, of Kennedy’s fateful motorcade–taken less than 90 seconds before the deadly shots were fired–has further agitated conspiracy theorists and has jolted our collective memories. “The footage is sure to be new fodder for conspiracy buffs who have long maintained Kennedy was the victim of a sinister plot orchestrated by shadowy elements in either the government, the ‘military-industrial complex,’ the Mafia, or communist Cuba,” Reuters reported.

X-Rays, viewed by Humes, O’Neill, Sibert and others, revealed dozens of bone splinters and several bullet fragments. Two of the fragments were retrieved, and later matched to an M-1 rifle linked to Lee Harvey Oswald. “Parts of the brain were still there, but not much,” writes O’Neill. “It would seem that no one could survive such an injury.” Three shots were fired, investigators say—the first sounding like a firecracker that entered the upper right rear of Kennedy’s back. O’Neill in his official report said agent Kellerman, now deceased, told him that Kennedy cried out, “My God, I’ve been hit, get me to a hospital!” The second bullet hit then Gov. John Connally, sitting in a jump seat behind Kellerman. The third was the fatal wound to Kennedy. O’Neill said last week in an interview that Kellerman insisted, when pressed how he knew it was Kennedy’s voice, “I was with the man for three years, and know his voice like I know my own. And he was the only man in the back seat of the car that day who spoke with a Boston accent.”

(Greg O’Brien is a freelance writer and editor living on Cape Cod, and is editing Francis X. O’Neill Jr.’s manuscript on the Kennedy autopsy and O’Neill’s life in the FBI and other branches of government service.)

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Tale Of Two Murrays: Sen. Therese Murray—Poised To Most Powerful Woman In Massachusetts Politics

(Sen. Therese Murray of Plymouth, whose district includes Bourne, Falmouth, Sandwich and parts of Barnstable. Murray is the odds on favorite to replace Robert Travaglini as Massachusetts Senate President. Travaglini is expected to leave his post for a job with the Massachusetts Council of Community Hospitals. A recent profile in the Boston Irish Reporter (reprinted below) provides an intimate view of Murray, her politics and accomplishments

 (In a tale of two Murrays, Boston Cod blog offers a detailed profile of Lt. Gov. Tim Murray, who recently took on some of Gov. Duval Patrick’s responsibilities when Patrick announced he was temporarily cutting back on his schedule to spend more time with his wife, Diane, whom he said was suffering from exhaustion and depressions.

 (The two Murrays represent yet another changing of the guard in Beacon Hill politics.)

 By Greg O’Brien, Boston Irish Reporter

Ask anyone who knows State Sen. Therese Murray—the multi-tasking chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Ways and Means and one of the most influential women in a state dominated by powerful “Y” chromosomes—and they will tell you she is a font of energy that can compete with any power source in Massachusetts. Her drive, passion and verve light up Beacon Hill. The long-time Plymouth resident, a single mother in her seventh term representing the diverse towns of Plymouth, Pembroke, Kingston, Plympton, Sandwich, Bourne, Falmouth and three Barnstable precincts, has an indefatigable capability for analysis, compassion, compromise where it is justified, and confrontation when it’s not. The 14-year veteran of the State House, who gives every indication she will seek the Senate presidency one day when her close friend and mentor Robert E. Travaglini steps away from the leadership dais, can in political terms not only walk and chew gum with the boys, but she can pick up the loose wrappers with ease, the frayed ends of government.

Over the years those loose ends have included championing welfare and education reform, financial assistance for children with catastrophic illnesses, critical assistance for seniors who want to stay in their homes, protection of the environment, shoring up the state’s economy, and other challenges.

On many days, it is hard to tell Murray’s desk from a file cabinet. Mountains of memos, newspaper clips, pending legislation, and proposals in a $26 billion budget that she oversees in the Senate and directs like a traffic cop obscure the view of a worn, scratched surface. On this cloudy day in October when the first chill of fall penetrates like creosote on new decking, Murray is in her second floor office suite overlooking a bleak Boston Common juggling the realities of her position. “The biggest challenge of the job is trying to fund all the needs. It’s impossible,” she declares to a visitor.

Within seconds, the phone rings with another need. President Travaglini is on the horn with a question. The two talk numerous times a day, with Murray adroitly fielding queries about a particular bill, issue or individual. Routine business this morning, but the point is made. “We can interact as much as 200 times a day,” she says, with slight exaggeration. “He’ll call often to ask my opinion. We were both elected in ’93 and quickly bonded. We were city kids. It’s a strong working partnership.”

She pauses, then adds with emphasis, “But he’s the boss!”

What has made Murray a survivor in a trenchant male world up at the State House is her self-discipline, impressive intellect, zeal for politics, fairness, and gut sense of the pecking order—all hand-me-downs from her parents, both second generation Irish Americans who knew the worth of personal integrity, care for others, and a hard day’s work.

Murray was raised in Dorchester, and while she has lost much of the accent, the staccato pace is still there. Her stereotypical Dorchester independence, family values and street smarts are still with her. Born at “St. E’s” (Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital on Cambridge Street in Boston) and after living briefly in Roxbury’s Mission Hill projects, Murray’s family, five girls and a brother who died in infancy, settled into St. Matthew’s Parish, then moved on to St. Mark’s where Murray and her sisters attended parochial school under the heed of the nuns. Her father, Richard Hollum, whose Irish roots hail from Cork, worked three jobs to support the family—an office supervisor for a now defunct Boston book company, a night catering job and weekends at a South End hardware store. “My dad was never home,” recalls Murray. “He was always working, but so were all the other fathers in Dorchester in those days.” Murray’s mother, Helena (“She hated the name and called herself Eleanor), also worked a full-time clerical job, starting when her youngest child was eight months old. “It was unusual in those days for a mother of five to be working, but we needed the money,” says Murray, noting her mother’s family came from Dublin and Limerick. “She taught us to be self sufficient.”

It was a trait imbedded in the girls, who learned to carry their share of the family load at an early age, with the older ones watching out for the younger ones, and all in time taking turns cooking meals. “I remember when my older sister Eileen was 12, she would take all of us in the summer on the train to the beach in Revere,” recalls Murray, the middle child. “We were always a close family, and the church was the center of it. My parents were loving, strict and devout Catholics. I never heard them say a bad thing about anyone, but the English. You know how that is with the Irish!”

After grammar school, the girls attended Cardinal Cushing, and then to lives of achievement. The oldest, Eileen, now retired, was head of nursing services at a County Hospital in Los Angeles. Second in command, Kathleen, is a certified public accountant and a treasurer for an international charity headquartered in the South Shore. Murray’s younger sister, Rita, is an administrator at Boston Medical Center, and the baby of the family, Virginia, is administrator of St. Francis Xavier Parish in Weymouth.

So how did Murray fall into politics?

“My parents were staunch Democrats, but never had time for organized politics,” she says. “They must have passed the fascination on to me.” As a young girl, when most kids her age were collecting baseball cards, Murray was gathering political cards, those sepia handouts from the candidates. “I’d hang out at the polling places. Politics in Dorchester was a contact sport for me. There was always an opinion to discuss, always someone whose politics you liked or disliked. I was baptized in it.”

At 12, she got her feet wet in her first formal campaign—working the phones for Ted Kennedy’s initial Senate run. Her uncle, active in politics in Allston, got her the summer job. “I remember getting an invitation to the campaign event on Election Day,” she says. “I was so excited, but it was at night and my parents said I couldn’t go.” Over the years, Murray worked on numerous campaigns, including the gubernatorial bid of Michael Dukakis—volunteer work that ultimately landed her a post as Director of Mitigation for the Massachusetts Highway Department. The job offer came after attending college and holding hospital and human service positions and a job selling franchises for American Cablevision. “Mass Highway needed someone to do community relations for the Southeast Expressway project that was under consideration at the time,” she says.

Murray—who in the 1970s had moved to Plymouth with her husband (they are now divorced) and early on had declined several solicitations to run for public office— held the Mass Highway post until the early 1990s when she was summarily fired by incoming Republican Governor William Weld for being the wrong political color. “I made the hit list,” she says. “I lost my job, was a single mother at the time and had to find work.” So she sold real estate, and answered the call to politics, running for the state Senate in 1992 and beating a 20-year Republican incumbent her first time out—a time when the local economy was in the tank and incumbents were losing jobs and homes. Political payback is sweet and Murray has never looked back, only to reaffirm her roots and her instincts to help others.

“I was raised at a time of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War,” she says, noting the turmoil had an indelible affect on her. “I saw horrible things on television at night. Blacks being hosed, beaten and attacked by dogs, and thousands of soldiers killed in war. I will never forget it. I have an innate sense of caring and fairness from my parents. If I’m off balance on it, it makes me a little crazy.”

Her feral nature has been a great blessing to Massachusetts residents, who have benefited from the many welfare reform and human services enhancements she has successfully advocated through her work as chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Welfare Reform and on the Long-Term Care Committee—among them the Catastrophic Illness In Children Relief Fund and the Choice Bill that offers essential human services to seniors who want to say in their homes. She also has made significant contributions in the areas of local aid, public safety, transportation improvements, and law enforcement issues.

On balance, life has been good to Murray. There are few regrets. “I wish at times I could have been a better parent,” she says in a moment of candor. But don’t we all. As she sits today in her corner office overlooking the Common, surrounded by photographs of family, politicians (Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry, to mention a few), she talks about her future, always looking forward to the next challenge.

“I like my work,” she says, noting her days often begin at 7 am in Plymouth and can run past midnight in Boston. “I think I can bring people together to get to ‘yes.’ It may take a while, but I usually can get there.”

Asked about the senate presidency, she replies, “If Trav decides to leave one day, I certainly would like to be considered. I think I have the same kind of openness that he has. If the position was available and the timing was right, I’d ask my colleagues to support me.”

“But one day at a time,” she adds.

Murray has lived one day at a time since her days in Dorchester, and understands the fragile, fleeting and changing nature of life. She carefully ponders a final question about that day in the future when she finally packs her boxes and moves out of the State House and on to another mission, perhaps private philanthropic work.

“When you’re out, you’re out,” she says, looking up from a conference table. “When you’re gone, people forget you quickly. I guess I’d like to be remembered as someone who cared and was a fine and decent person.”

In today’s self-centered, self-seeking world, that’s something hard to forget.

(Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/strategy company based in Brewster. The author/editor of several books, he is a regular contributor to regional newspapers and magazines, a political columnist for Boston Metro newspaper and a television scriptwriter. He is currently at work on a book on crisis communications, and contributes regularly to his two blogs: Boston Cod and Codfish Press.)

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Special Attention For A Special Need

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

Grasping the emotionally charged subject of special needs, to most, is as amorphous as the study of autism. In the 1988 movie “Rain Man,” staring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, we were sensitized to the plight of Raymond, an autistic savant, and his obsession with the routine.

“Gotta get my boxer shorts at K-Mart,” Raymond, played by Hoffman, tells his yuppie brother Charlie Babbitt, played by Tom Cruise.

“What difference does it make where you buy underwear,” Charlie protests. “Underwear is underwear…whether you buy it in Cincinnati or wherever!”

“Boxer shorts. K-Mart!” Raymond insists.

“I’m gonna let ya’ in on a little secret, Ray. K-Mart sucks,” Charlie rails.

What is happening to the funding of special needs education throughout the nation and in Massachusetts (ranked tops in the country) is worthy of a Charlie Babbitt invective. “The cost of educating special needs children in Massachusetts public schools has increased by more than $400 million since 2001 and totaled $1.6 billion for fiscal 2004, the latest year for which a total is available, or roughly one-fifth of school spending,” Peter Schworm reported in the Sunday Boston Globe. Special needs students, he wrote, presently make up 16.3 percent of total enrollment.

Meanwhile, state appropriations to keep pace with the swell are detoured in discussions of conflicting agendas—a diversion that also is placing great pressure on the general academic programs of schools throughout the state. A case in point is the Nauset Regional School District on Cape Cod. High-achieving Nauset High School and Middle School are ranked among the ten highest in the state in MCAS scores, and the district’s elementary schools are in the top 15 percent. At Nauset, special needs budgets are increasing annually at a rate of ten to 20 percent, while general academic programs are held to annual increases of three percent or less, barely covering the cost of inflation and diminishing the quality of general academic programs.

Education today should not be a Hobson’s choice; both programs need suitable funding. Toward that end, school superintendents met last week with top lawmakers to seek changes to the state funding law for special education—an adjustment that should be a top priority of the new Deval Patrick Administration and the Democratic-controlled legislature.

‘This nation is founded on the premise that every individual matters,” says Nauset Superintendent Michael Gradone. “And that’s what special education is all about.”

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Fr. Robert Drinan: Man Of Conscience In A Time Of Fleeting Principles

Priest, Politician, Peacemaker

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

There was nothing secular about Robert Frederick Drinan. He was a Catholic priest from his clerical robes to his Roman collar—a model for the church today in its disordered times, a man of great obedience who spoke from his heart no matter the consequence. While his critics often argued that his heart was misplaced, bowed to the left, the Jesuit scholar forever stood firm in his conscience and in his resolve. Difficult to stereotype, Fr. Drinan understood the principles of a higher authority, and conceded to a Vatican ruling in 1991 after representing Massachusetts’s 3rd District in Congress for ten years—resigning with “pain and regret” after the Chair of St. Peter had ruled that no priest, not even a human rights activist of Drinan’s ilk, could hold elective office. The silencing of independent thinkers would come back to haunt the church.

This nation has lost a clear, challenging voice that compelled one to think. Politics de jour from the left and the right seize on ideologues; Drinan spoke to edify and, like the law school professor he was, to cause us to confront our demons and reflect in logic. He was “a man without rancor” whose deeply held personal and political beliefs never prevented him from viewing every person as “deserving respect and possessing dignity…Few have accomplished as much,” Georgetown University Law Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff told The Washington Post shortly after Fr. Drinan’s death Sunday at 86.  Former dean of Boston College Law School, Fr. Drinan had taught law at Georgetown over the last 16 years.

Drinan’s political and academic accomplishments have been a subject of note in media across the world: author of a dozen books, recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees, a visitor to 16 countries on human-rights missions, founder of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, honored in 2005 with the Congressional Distinguished Service Award, and recipient in 2004 of the American Bar Association Medal. The ABA called Fr. Drinan “the stuff of which legends are made.”

Far more than his accomplishments, it was his ethics that drove him. Fr. Drinan was a man of firsts when it wasn’t popular to be at the front of the line: the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress; one of the first clergy in Boston to speak out against the desegregation of the city’s public schools; one of the first to condemn the Vietnam War as “morally objectionable”; and as a fixture on the House Judiciary Committee, the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

I met Fr. Drinan about 17 years ago as a political reporter for the Boston Herald American and continued the source relationship as a writer at Boston Magazine, then publisher of The Cape Codder. His devotion to his personal convictions was stirring. I didn't always agree with all is positions, but I always respected the man. Respect for an individual, many would agree, is better than a life with sycophants. Concur with his beliefs or not, his death marks the passing of a true legend, a person of conscience who was never reticent to show it.

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Coming To Terms With Christmas: A Soul-Searching Journey

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

Ah, that Chrismas spirit! Resembles modern day Bethlehem more than anything else, with its violence and mayhem, and shoving in line. What is it about this time for soul-searching peace that turns us into Antichrists? It is the greed, festering materialism, or are we just victims of the hard sell? Mea culpa. I’m Irish Catholic, and guilty as sin on two of three counts. Oh, holy night, just one of them left to shop. And with apologies to author Chappeau de Roquemaure, as “yonder breaks a new and glorious morn, fall on your knees, oh hear those” cash registers rejoicing!

Call it what you want, but Christmas today has as much to do with a nativity as cloning; it has morphed into the politically correct “holidays,” a celebration in tinsel and bright lights, washed down with plenty of good red wine or dry chardonnay. I had dinner the other night over a fine cabernet with an associate who even suggested that Christmas had evolved into a paean festival. She thought it was a good thing. Now isn’t that special!

U.S. News & World Report earlier this month created quite a festive buzz with its front page cover, “The Gospel Truth: Why Some Old Books Are Stirring Up A New Debate About The Meaning Of Jesus.” Citing the usual suspects—The DaVinci Code, Gnostic principles and the newly discovered Judas Gospel, the betrayer’s come-to-Jesus memoir—the magazine plays on modern interpretations of the scriptural life of Jesus as more of a “symbolic event.”

“To the Gnostics, or at least to many of them, Jesus was not the son of Yahweh sent to redeem fallen humanity through his death and Resurrection; he was an avatar or voice of the oversoul sent to teach humans to find the sacred spark within,” observes the magazine.

If that were true, Christmas by all counts should have about as much meaning to the faithful as it does to the masses today: Jesus Christ, Superstar, but not the Savior. Excuse the digression here, but in a Boston Herald American interview many years ago upon the death of John Lennon, I asked a bishop of the Boston Archdioceses, who was then an ardent Beatles devotee, what he thought about Lennon’s humanistic statement that the Beatles were more popular than Christ. The bishop paused in answering the question, then replied, “I wonder what John is thinking now?”

What are we all thinking now? Christmas, in the moment, is indeed about Christ the Lord, and last Sunday morning I sat elbow-to-elbow with fellow sinners squirming in the hard pew as our pastor lamented from the pulpit that the Christmas spirit was now defined in terms of our self-inflicted stress, and by what we want, what we get, and what we don’t give in terms of meeting the needs of others.

There are numerous books and tips to deal with this stress. For starters, he recommended Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Most, however, gravitate toward the self-help websites and paperbacks to get a grip. The American Psychological Association, for example, suggests the obvious: identify the factors for “holiday” stress; recognize how you deal with stress; change one behavior at a time; and take better care of yourself.

“Pay attention to your own needs and feelings,” the association offers in self-absorbed counsel that appears ambivalent on the role of the Almighty.

No surprise, the Anxiety Recovery Centre advises “more sleep,” “better financial planning,” and a deep, extended breath. “Stress, anxiety and depression are common during the festive season,” the Centre notes, giving correct emphasis to the cold reality that many are foundering in deep emotion turmoil during the Christmas season for a variety of personal reasons. “If nothing else reassure yourself that these feelings are normal.”

Wouldn’t it be edifying if “normal” at Christmas meant greater peace. No need to scavenge under the tree for it. John 3:16 is a far better place to look—Bethlehem as it was meant to be.

Merry Christmas!

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