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Two recent letters about the Mill River Greenway bike path being planned for South Main Street in Haydenville gave lessons on what a neighborhood is and to whom it belongs. I’ve lived on South Main Street all my life, in the house that has been my family’s for four generations. I am proud of my neighborhood and treasure the neighborly ways we live on our street. Therefore, I think I bring a legitimate voice to this discussion.

By KAREN GARDNER

It’s about cruelty. The sweeping new take from the poor and give to the rich budget bill, just passed by both Houses of Congress by the slimmest of majorities and signed into law by the recurrent guy, shows us just who matters in our vanishing democracy.

A correction is needed to the June 25 op-ed by Gary Michael Tartakov on antisemitism [“The two most important things to know about antisemitism”].  While it is incontestable that the Christian churches were historically antisemitic, it is simply not true that “the people who murdered more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust … were European and Christian, continuing 17 centuries of the European-Christian persecution of Jews.” Nazi ideology was profoundly anti-Christian. According to Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s closest associates, Hitler himself “hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” That is, “noble” as in vicious, cruel, and full of hatred. Hitler may have wanted to postpone a frontal assault on the churches until the war was won, given that more than 90% of his soldiers were Christians. Christianity was ultimately to be replaced by a “sanitized” state-sanctioned religion that denied its Jewish roots and glorified so-called Aryan supremacy.

A recent Gazette guest column regrading the proposed Haydenville South Main Street shared-use path (SUP) was misleading. The writer criticized the project as unsafe, and forced upon the neighborhood by outsiders. In fact, the plan for the SUP has been a townwide public process under the auspices of the Select Board for over 12 years. The process considered every concern raised for safety, legality and the impacts on private property in consultation with engineers and town counsel.

A recent guest columnist asked your readers “What if this were your neighborhood?” (Gazette, June 13). I can provide an answer to that question because as long as I have lived in Haydenville, I have considered that it is my neighborhood. Am I to understand now that I was wrong — that South Main Street is exclusive to those who live on that one block on a road my family and I walk or drive on everyday?

By GERRY SHATTUCK

On Monday, June 2, at the Williamsburg annual Town Meeting, Article 27: South Main Street Shared Use Path Easements, failed to pass by the required two thirds majority vote. This came as welcome news to South Main Street residents and abutters. The article was written extremely broadly; it specified neither dollar amounts nor spending limits, and it would have granted the Select Board sweeping authority to “acquire … by eminent domain, permanent and temporary easements, on and off South Main Street” as part of a project to build a shared use path through the neighborhood. It authorized the board to “raise and appropriate, transfer from available funds, and/or borrow a sum of money to fund the foregoing project and any and all costs incidental or related thereto …”

By KAREN GARDNER

2,400,000,000,000! In case all those zeroes makes your head spin, that’s 2.4 trillion dollars or you could say 2,400 billion dollars or 2,400,000 million dollars. My goodness, that’s a lot of dollars! And that, though the number might turn out to be even greater, is what the president, the recurrent guy, wants badly to add to our national debt according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It should be said that this increase to the debt has little to do with improving the lives of regular Americans.

By REV. MARK SEIFRIED

How safe are you? I ask that question because I met with church volunteers last week and we talked about the fact that it’s not just immigrants who are unsafe in our community, it’s also transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people who will likely lose their gender-affirming, life-saving health care if the Republican regime leading the federal government has their way. In short, the current administration in the nation’s capital wants to eradicate anyone who cannot or will not conform to white-dominant, heterosexual, able-bodied standards.

By KAREN GARDNER

The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution says, in part, that “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The April 19 letter [“McGovern’s complacency a reflection of our failing system”] had a lot of complaints regarding U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, and his alleged inaction resisting Trump and his transgressions. The letter was full of criticism, hand-wringing and attacks, but devoid of any constructive ideas. The writer believes Mr. McGovern isn’t doing enough.

The silly cartoon in the April 14 Gazette might lead unwary readers to assume that it is only Democrats and “leftist judges” who are shooting down Donald Trump’s executive orders. This is not true. To their credit, a number of Republican-appointed members of the federal bench have ordered temporary halts to those decrees. Some were appointed by Ronald Reagan, some by George W. Bush, and a few by Donald Trump himself. On the same day that the cartoon appeared Trump declared that he could deport U.S. citizens without trial to the infamous prison in El Salvador, which, according to him, is beyond the reach of American courts. This is in direct defiance of the recent rulings by the Supreme Court, which, the last time I looked, is not dominated by leftist judges. Perhaps the Gazette could use a bit more sense in the choosing the cartoons it puts on its editorial page.

By KAREN GARDNER

There were thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the streets on Saturday — in towns and cities in every state of our union. It was big! Not like the 11 people who showed up to demonstrate in front of Northampton’s City Hall on Inauguration Day, when the flood of illegal, unconstitutional executive orders began. No, it was bigger.

By KAREN GARDNER

This should not be happening. We have a constitutional democracy created nearly 250 years ago with the goal of serving the needs of its people by providing for their “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And for those nearly 250 years, it has worked.

We must once again come to the aid of our country, now threatened by chaos. Past leaders have led our country from some of its deepest and darkest times to grow and flourish. Now we are burdened with the arrogance of a man who thinks he knows more than all who have come before him.

By KAREN GARDNER

Why Rod, I’m so glad to hear from you. What’s up? I’m calling to thank you for referring me to your psychiatrist, Dr. Freud. Remember recently when you were losing what was left of your mind? That’s when you told me about him and how helpful he was. So, I called him up and have been seeing him ever since.

By JOHN CONNOLLY

By KAREN GARDNER

President Musk, he’s our guy. I remember voting for him in the November election, don’t you?I know you thought it was Donald J. Trump you picked for president, but it sure is looking like the Musk guy is running the show. Funny how that can happen....

I want to second letter writer Alan Kanner’s recent and excellent suggestion that we support former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz for president [“Why I am donating to Matt Gaetz,” Gazette, Dec. 30]. The recently released report of the House Ethics Panel...

By KAREN GARDNER

Dear former guy, now president-elect, please consider the following to be my application for the job of secretary of defense. I’m quite aware that this position is very important to you since you’ve stated many times that this country’s greatest...

The Broad Brook Coalition board of directors would like to thank the many firefighters whose quick work helped contain the brush fire that broke out recently in the Fitzgerald Lake Conservation Area. Given the dry weather and warm conditions, this...

By KAREN GARDNER

Voter fraud! Those satanic Democrats are bringing in millions of illegal immigrants and registering them to vote against the former guy! How could he possibly win with so much voter fraud and corruption going on against him?But we’re going to be ready...