Rights vs. lives

By SKIP MENDLER

Let’s face it: every once in a while, an entire country can go, well, crazy. The People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, say. Nazi Germany. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Imperial Japan.

Or, it might just get a little maladjusted for a while, a little neurotic, mildly self-destructive but not entirely suicidal or psychotic. The United States during the McCarthy era, for example. Various Central American countries during the 1980s.

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Castellanoville: the beginning

Today was the first day of my last semester at NYU film school. Endings have become times of reflection and I am reminded of the moment I decided to go to NYU.

It all started when Richard Castellano came to town. In Narrowsburg, his is a name that’s only spoken in backrooms, whispered amongst friends, a dark patch in the town’s history.

He dressed well, in dark Italian silks, and was good looking in a Hollywood kind of way, with silvered brown hair. He spoke loudly in a raspy Brooklynized voice.

Castellano was the closest thing to a movie star I had ever seen. Right before he showed up in the Chatterbox Café on Main Street, he had had a role in the movie “Analyze This,” starring Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal.

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Deliverance from the doldrums

Another gray winter day dawns. By 5:30 p.m., the light is gone. The ground is mushy from strange rains that washed away most of the dingy snow, sunken to sagging slumps that mimic how we feel inside.

It’s cold. We’re cranky.

We find ourselves plopped on the couch, propped on pillows in bed, blankly staring at televisions and computer screens. Stale dry air enters our bodies with every breath. More food than we need passes through our lips. A lazy torpor takes over as our clothing tightens almost imperceptibly. The winter doldrums have descended.

Why do we allow this tepid state of affairs to develop when it’s well within our power to alter such attitudinal despair? The prescription for healing this seasonal affliction is simple:

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Our vision—economic and environmental sustainability

By VIRGINIA KENNEDY

Upon being asked to write this column “Visioning the Upper Delaware River Corridor,” that particular word—“visioning”—lodged itself in my mind. How do we see this land where we live? How will we see it in the future?

The seeing I refer to is more than a function of eyesight It is a function of meaning. What does this land mean to those of us who live on it and live from it? What is our relationship with it? How deeply do we think about those two vital questions, as we drive our winding rural roads or cross our lovely Delaware, the river the Lena’pe people call Lennapewi Sipo—river of human beings?

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