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Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
The Boyd Home is Really the Mann Home
To the Editor:
A long-time Chester-residing friend was kind enough to give me a copy of the July 9, 2008 Village News. She did this because a photo of my grandparents’ house is featured on the front page. My mother, Martha Mann Cowan, grew up there and our family lived there briefly during the 1960s. My family visited there frequently during my childhood, when my grandmother, Cora Alma Mann, lived on the second floor and rented out the ground floor. Several of us have visited the house since the Phareses purchased it and have provided them with photographs of the house, some from several decades ago. What surprises me is your reference to the house as the “Boyd house”. This is the first time I have heard or read of it by that name.
Mary Cowan Sollog
Lets Focus on Sustainability
To the Editor:
There was much to think about in your July 9 issue. Greta Shefers letter (“The Dangers of Consuminism”) and Dr. Robert Owens’ column (“How could this ever go Wrong”) were both gracefully written meditations on where we are with overconsumption as well as how we got here.
I did think that Dr. Owens could have mentioned the role of a Republican Congress in deregulating the financial markets- that was a major cause of today’s mortgage meltdown. It seems to me that the true lesson of the past ten years, beginning with Enron, is simply that financial institutions will make any mistake that they are allowed to make, as greed and the pressure to keep up with competitors are always going to trump their common sense. Deregulation inevitably results in disaster when they live by such values. Owens’ main point- that there is blame enough for all- is true enough.
As to Ms. Shefers’ letter, certainly a movie theater lobby is a great place to witness American overconsumption. Yet I wish that she could be equally open to the negative consequences of our overconsumption of fossil fuels- namely the threat posed to our grandchildren by global warming. I seem to recall her calling that entire topic unscientific rubbish. I also wish that she were more open to taking the mortgage mess seriously.
The steeply rising home prices in Chesterfield are another side of the mortgage disaster “coin”: unrealistic expectations of profit driving a market into pricing out the lower middle class. American greed and folly are not limited to popcorn and supersized soft drinks. We want it all, we want it now, and we want to pay “later”. Poor diet, looming environmental threats, mortgage foreclosures, and people priced out of the housing market, are all symptoms of the same disease. A focus on sustainability is the cure.
Chris Wiegard
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