On a recent Friday, the local soup kitchen where I attend, Loaves and Fishes, served 490 meals - a record high!
Included in this reckoning was food for 40 children at an adjacent day-care center, plus meals for them and their families for the weekend. The rest was a larger-than-normal demand by walk-in clients plus their own take-outs, for this early part of the month.
We also had to explain to those attending something not entirely made clear by the feds or the state of Vermont: that the state had anticipated the government shutdown and did a good thing to ensure food stamps for February.
The state drowned that message in bureaucratese about how if you had signed up late, you'd have to be sure of getting food by calling a certain toll-free number - where, it turned out, you could wait for 45 minutes or more to be so assured.
It's been a rough year down in the soup kitchen. Three of our staff people have died, we have been flooded in our basement, the walls fell in in our cool room, and most recently in the cold weather we have suffered an inexplicable lack of meat for two...
The Commons' Letters from Readers section [Voices, Nov. 25] was recently flooded with the plight of the homeless and hungry. This is a good attention - and I am happy to inform any reader of the state of ground-zero hungry in Brattleboro. In the four years I have been...
I recently was in a store, and a guy came in wearing a Marine Corps hat carrying a child of about 2 years old. The child’s face had about 30 stitches from forehead to throat. I won’t mention the breed that did this, except to say that the dog was known to the child, and that 2 million such adult animals are put down per year in the U.S. Including puppies, that would make about 10 million. Of course, people...
My name appears in the first half-dozen words in the first sentence written by Jeniffer Kozlowski [“No bull,” Counterpoint, July 18], who continues, apropos of nothing, to say that “random citizens with no scientific credentials whatever” are reported in media to evolve or generate pit- bull statistics. She continues, saying a national veterinary association says that ”[dog bite] statistics are not really statistics,” and that media reports are not accurate. This is as if I had written that they were...
A recent letter [“Stop attacking all women,” May 16] was brief, but her words cut through to something about the War on Women which is not much noticed in the media. I think the writer was probably of Republican sentiment. On my deck discussing issues of how women are presented and perceived in mainstream media, a very liberal film director raised this very issue. Whether Republicans are waging a war, he said, that is no reason for liberals in media...
A big fuss emerged in both local newspapers recently about a police shooting of a pit bull. What constitutes identifying a pit bull? Was it dangerous? Was the dog out of it? How come in the reported instance it was in a children's playground off its leash with no owner around? Lots of questions. So are pit bulls actually dangerous as a breed? I like dogs, and recently I encountered a handsome pit bull in our neighborhood, one who was...
I should like to alert you to several errors in your reporting in a column by Jeff Potter [Editor's Notebook, Feb. 29]. You cited my magazine as vermontviews.com, which is actually a blog for a Burlington PBS station, and since the topic was on reporting rape perhaps they will not like it. Instead, I wonder if you will make these corrections to fact and to detail in print: a) The correct URL is vermontviews.org. b) I know it is usual...