Guest Commentary

In articles covering the June closing of the Materials Innovations and Recycling Authority (MIRA) plant in Hartford and in a recent editorial, The Lakeville Journal rightly identifies an imminent crisis with the disposal of Connecticut’s garbage.

A friend telling me she is reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” gets me thinking about an iconic photo of Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, sitting on a couch with cigs and drinks before them, when people did those sorts of things.

Authentic. Who is?

And who can write or paint or sing about whom?

If you are a Black gay man, can you write about a teenage Black straight girl losing her virginity, as James Baldwin did in “If Beale Street Could Talk”?

At the turn of the other century, when our nation’s second-largest export was ice, behind cotton, our area was (literally) on the cutting edge of the industry, filling boxcars with ice bound for New York City and points south as far as Cuba.

This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series of columns that will offer some of my ideas for our future in Northwest Connecticut and solicit your ideas on those subjects.

Workers in America are rethinking who they are and what they want. For the first time in decades, the stars have aligned to give the labor movement a much-needed lift. Will this prove to be a flash in the pan or something more lasting?

Katie Worth, “Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America”

New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2021

Hidden Histories is a new column that highlights little-known stories, lives and places that contribute to the richness of our community, revealing sometimes surprising aspects of our shared local heritage.