WHAT IS GISH?: Does anyone have a zamphone I can borrow? I’m serious. I need brief use of one to complete a challenge in the The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, which I’m playing in this week, at the urging of my friend, art instructor Kim Napoleone. Kim well knows my fondness for scavenger hunts, some of which I’ve designed myself, and escape rooms. She accompanied my wife and myself when we participated in Jason Eastty’s citywide “Find the Spy” game, which we placed somewhere near the bottom, but still had a great time exploring unknown-to-us corners of the city. If nothing else, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But while I’m a sucker for a good scavenger hunt – the weirder the better – this one really sold me when I discovered that every registration provides 15 meals to kids in need through Random Acts & No Kid Hungry. In this economic environment, with rampant unemployment, food insecurity is a paramount concern. Here in Worcester, organizations such as the Worcester County Food Bank, the Mustard Seed soup kitchen and St. John’s Food Pantry, which is set to receive a Smile Award at this year’s Harvey Ball, do amazing work, but food instability is still a serious issue. According to the Worcester Food Policy Council, 99,796 people received assistance from the Worcester County Food Bank in 2012, and 27,800 children in Worcester County who live in food insecure households, as do 33.5% the percentage of households with a disabled member. One imagines those numbers have not improved over the course of the pandemic. In 2018, 37 million Americans struggled with food insecurity, and while current numbers aren’t yet available, the organization Feeding America expects, at current unemployment levels, that number to raise by as much as 17.1 million. If having to track down a strange musical instrument helps make a small dent in those staggering numbers, well, that hardly seems like unreasonable pain and suffering.
STARING INTO THE SUN: Political reporter Peter Lucas raised eyebrows with a recent editorial in the Lowell Sun sporting the headline, “It’s not the cops that need oversight, it’s the press.” Writes Lucas, “On a given day, the left wing progressive ‘newsmen’ in broadcast and print commit more ‘crimes’ than the cops. But while the cops are, and will be, held accountable for bad behavior — fired, sued or jailed, sometimes all three — reporters get Pulitzer prizes.” The entire column is, as our soon-to-be president is fond of saying, “malarkey.” Lucas is basically using shock jock language to take a swipe at the Mueller Report, while pouring salt in cultural wounds that have emerged in the wake of the deaths of unarmed African-Americans, including George Floyd, who’s neck was snapped by a police officer stepping on his throat, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot by a police officer while sleeping in her own bed. In the former case, the officers involved were fired and are facing charges. In the latter, only one of three involved officers has been fired, and no charges have been pressed. These results constitute the bare minimum of accountability in the two most high-profile such cases in the country, and history gives us every reason to expect that there will be no convictions in either case. To even get that far took nearly unprecedented levels of public protest and press attention. What happens when police accountability isn’t as high profile? Usually, nothing but suffering. Police are armed, enjoy an immense insulation from the negative effects of their actions and, in Worcester, constitute most of the City’s 100 top-paid employees. When a police officer dies, they are quite rightly usually put on the front page of the local newspaper, and eulogized in glowing terms. Indeed, the overwhelming amount of press the police receive – and I say this as someone who’s worked in news for more than 20 years – is overwhelmingly positive. They have a difficult, dangerous job – everybody understands that – but accountability is not the same thing as victimization, and holding public servants accountable is the reason why the press is the only private institution directly protected by the U.S. Constitution. The very fact that Lucas is given a forum to spout his bile is a refutation of his very premise. In unrelated news, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette is still pursuing a 2018 lawsuit against the Worcester Police Department for access to disciplinary records.
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