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By Rosalie Tirella

It is disheartening. L.G. Tim Murray wants more commuter trains coming to Worcester. He’s been harping on this for years. All the yuppies in the Canal District agree with Timmy because they, like Murray and Green Island carpet bagger Allen Fletcher, have rich fantasy lives! Boston artists jumping on the train to fly to Worcester! Worcester artists hoppin’ on the train to zip to Boston! Thousands of ideas cross-pollinating! Money flowing into Worcester. And the dream streams on … .

But getting what he wants from CSX has been tough: Murray and pals have been working on making Worcester a true suburb of Boston for years!!! Usually to no avail!

So, what finally happens? CSX says “yes” to more commuter trains for Worcester IF (and only IF) they can turn the bottom of Grafton Hill into their own personal toilet: a huge freight yard. Doubling the size of what’s already there! Which, for the Grafton Street folks, means: Lots more freight trains, lots more noise, lots more pollution, lots more ugliness.

For what? More commuter trains? Some fantasty of hundreds of people from Boston and Worcester riding into each other’s cities for art/work? Come on! We will never have that kind of exchange - the kind of exchange TRUE suburbs of Boston have with Beantown.

Illusion #1: More Boston folks coming to Worcester for less expensive housing and then commuting to Boston to their regular jobs.

These folks are in the minority!! My sister did the opposite for years - lived in Worcester and commuted to her job in Boston. Exhausting. After an 8 or 9 hour day, it was a drag to spend 45 minutes to an hour getting home. And let’s not forget the almost 1-hour commute to work in the morning! Not a whole lot of Worcesterites did this back then. I can’t imagine thousands doing it now. A few yuppies? Maybe. But hundreds of worker bees, like my sis? No way. The 5-day-work-week commute is simply too exhausting/time consuming.

Let’s remember: Most Bostonians do not want to leave their cool nest in Boston for digs in Worcester. They may make the transition only if they can trade in their Boston condo for a real house in Worcester (costs way less $$ than house in Metro Boston). But then again, there is the extra two hours (a day) to be tacked on to EVERY WORK day. No fun.

Oh, but that’s gonna work out, everything is OK because CSX is giving the City of Worcester more than $20 million in “mitigation” dough and $1 for every train that rolls into Worcester (this is forever).

We agree with District 4 City Councilor Barbara Haller: Things are challenging for Worcester in these tough economic times, and any new partner/partnership is welcome. Especially a relationship with a deep-pocketed partner such as CSX.

But come on, folks! We are dumping on a working class neighborhood! We don’t know how all this pollution is going to affect nearby workers/residents. We guess everyone and their mother will have asthma. Maybe cancer rates will rise.

The buck always rules. It is always poor/blue collar folks and neighborhoods who get dumped on (sometimes literally). What happened to the old Italian neighborhood in East Boston? Razed to make way for Logan Airport. Locally, what happened to the good folks of Quinsig Village who struggled for years to close the (some said toxic) landfill in their neighborhood? City officials, DPW head Bob Moylan and let’s-leave-my district-in-the-dirt District 3 City Councilor Paul Clancy allowed for the landfill to be reopened - reopened to TOXIC shit from Boston. For money, of course. Money that was to go to Quinsig Village - more mitigation dough, I guess. Yeah, there’s a playground built with the funds, but, the God only knows what’s in the landfill.

And, I guess, God only knows what’s in store (on the health front) for the people of lower Grafton Hill.

But, hey, the rich have always gambled with the lives of the poor.

Can’t Mayor Joe O’Brien - who seems to really want to get more city swimming pools up and running next summer - talk with Holy Cross or Clark University and CONVINCE them that their PILOT payments can go to (besides our public libraries) opening pools in our inner-city neighborhoods?

There is no reason in the world for the colleges - especially Holy Cross - to balk at paying PILOT.

- Rosalie Tirella

By Rosalie Tirella

It seems so! District 4 City Councilor Barbara Haller has always given City manager Mike O’Brien his highest grade during yearly evaluation time. This is a good way for me to guage how the manager is treating Worcester’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, our inner city.

If we have foreclosure problems in Worcester, blight, lead paint, abandoned cars, murders, theft - you name - most likely it’s gonna happen in the parts of town I grew up in and hold near and dear to my heart.

The fact is: I agree with Haller. O’Brien has been good to District 4. While definitely keeping his eye on the big down town development projects, he’s never forgotten Main South, Green Island, Piedmont, etc. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

So, there we were, last night, my guy and I, at a book reading/signing in a bar. We had been eating crackers, listening to music and talking (believe it or not) about zombies, and then I turned to the booth to my left and saw the real thing: Dianne Williamson!

The Telgram and Gazette’s columnist, Dianne Williamson! Zombie alert!!!

If my readers - or hers - don’t already know: Dianne and I hate each other’s guts. It’s a very genuine feeling - one of the purest I have! Click to continue »

By Steve May, executive director, Fund for Genetic Equity

Scholars call this the information age. Truth is we all seem a little numb to titles like that. However, there is no disputing that in our lifetimes we all are bearing witness to the greatest expansion of human knowledge since the Renaissance. The amount of information available to each of us is stunning. A growing percentage of the information in the digital universe is privileged communications. Things like medical records, personal health information, and lab results. We all expect that this information is handled with care. We expect that the most intimate details of our health records are safe and secure.

Beyond this expectation, we think little about them. After all, they are numbers and statistics, family histories, dates of immunizations and x-rays. Suppose however, that someone or maybe many someone was very interested in the details of your personal health. Imagine that they had an interest in gathering as much information about your health as possible. Would that change how you would see the contents of your medical records? Click to continue »

By Christopher Horton

There’s an old saying which fits the moment: “Words butter no parsnips.”

During the Special Senate Election this past January I went door to door asking my neighbors to vote for Martha Coakley – the same neighbors I had asked in December for their vote for Mike Capuano, and in October for their vote for our new Mayor, Joe O’Brien. I took my time and really listened to what they were saying, and by January the ones who hadn’t gotten sick of me were getting used to talking to me. By the morning of Jan. 19, I knew that Coakley would carry my precinct – she did, barely – but would lose the election, because so many Democrats and former Democrats were planning to vote for Scott Brown. Click to continue »

Everybody Knows

Song by Leonard Cohen

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows Click to continue »

By Kathy Guillermo

Two years after Eight Belles’ fatal breakdown during the Kentucky Derby, many of us still remember the heartbreak of seeing that beautiful filly lying in the dirt at Churchill Downs, her ankles shattered beyond repair.

The thoroughbred racing industry would have us believe that Eight Belles’ tragic death was a “freak accident,” but it wasn’t. Every single day, three horses, on average, suffer catastrophic injuries while racing and must be euthanized. This is no rare event. It’s business as usual.

At least 2,000 horses have died on U.S. tracks since the Eight Belles tragedy. And every month, 1,000 racehorses who don’t “measure up” are sent to other countries to be slaughtered for human consumption. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

FYI, Dianne Williamson, T & G hack, you lie! Just ask some of the people you have interviewed! (a few of them have given me an earful)

More lies you wrote in your column about me:

* Former Telegram and Gazette Harry Whitin never called me and asked me “politely” to change the article I had written about you. He was nasty, a bully - my anwering machine filled with threats from Whitin (which I kept on my teeny cassettes). I thought: Well, who does this guy think he is? I dug my heels in and thought: Fuck you, Whitin. Like hell will I accommodate you. Take it to the New York Times Co., bup. Let’s make this a bloodbath.

Harry Whitin and the Telegram and Gazette went away.

* Advertisers are never “enablers,” Dianne. If anyone should know this, it’s you and the rest of the T & G staff. Look how few ads grace the pages of the Telegram and Gazette! Sometimes there are three itty bitty ones on an entire page! Which is why the Telegram and Gazette has stopped publishing all its editions (down to one wretched edition which tells you nothing about Worcester!); 2. there have two huge rounds of layoffs at the Telegram and Gazette; 3. the Telegram and Gazette newsroom has only a handfull of reporters to cover New England’s second largest city; Click to continue »

By Jim May

POINT ONE: EMBRACE THE BLACKSTONE.

To a geographer, the most compelling aspect of greater Worcester is the Blackstone River. It’s our river. We ain’t got much else, really. Farming was so bad here that Worcester County was the last county populated, and even then, the town of Sutton surpassed Worcester’s own population until the mid 1840s.

But people aren’t farming here anymore. Still, the Blackstone River remains the dominant landscape feature no matter how many Walmarts surround it. The Blackstone River is the thing that singularly most identifies our place in the terra firma, our place on Mother Earth.
And because it’s a river, it’s water. And water represents Life. And Life is what we want in our downtown.

We have long stopped embracing the River. To be blunt, we shit on it. We have almost polluted it beyond recognition. The intense industrial usage of the Blackstone left a legacy of pollution. Click to continue »