Here are some brief thoughts on recent happenings in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region.
It’s worth celebrating: The news about COVID-19 is no longer just about testing. Now, it has moved on to vaccination clinics, the first of which is up and running at the Jon Zon Community and Senior Center. Approximately 600 first responders have already received their first dose of the vaccine to fight COVID-19.
“They are on the front lines,” Mayor Roxann Wedegartner said last week, “and we have to keep them safe.” First responders will each get their second dose in a few weeks, at which time “a broader and wider” range of people will receive their initial vaccinations, Wedegartner said.
This is good news for a change and bodes well for a return to normalcy.
Before there were clocks in every parlor, watches on every wrist and smartphones in every hand, church bells announced the time of day and the call to worship to all within hearing. The bell tower is still extant in churches of a certain age and even today, church bells are an audible sign of its members’ presence in their community. For example, local churches rang their bells on Sept. 11, 2001.
Thus it seems inevitable that a national call to ring bells in memory of those who have died from COVID-19 would resonate in New England. Locally, Trinity Church in Shelburne Falls, the First Congregational Church of Montague, Second Congregational Church in Greenfield and First Parish Unitarian Church of Northfield, with its newly renovated bell tower, were among those that rang their bells and lit candles and luminaries last Tuesday evening to honor those lost to COVID-19 over the past year.
“Together, we ring out in sorrow,” Trinity Church Pastor Marguerite Sheehan said.
Try doing that with an app!
Our local legislators felt blindsided by Gov. Baker’s veto of the Massachusetts Rural Growth Fund that promised to provide $100 million in economic development money to rural communities.
Baker contended that the tax credits would help corporate investors more than rural communities. He also said the credits could go to communities that are not truly rural.
In response, Sen. Adam Hinds, D-Pittsfield, said programs like this have worked in other states, and Rep. Natalie Blais, D-Sunderland said, “This administration is leaving rural communities behind, again and again and again.”
Baker said he is committed to making a greater direct investment in rural communities.
Blais said she takes that as a promise to directly invest in rural Massachusetts. “I’m going to make sure he follows through on that promise,” Blain said.
Baker could make good on his promise by supporting the Rural Growth Fund legislation and by creating an Office of Rural Policy. As Blais said, “There needs to be a better understanding from the administration about what’s actually happening on the ground in our rural communities.”