Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Governor injured


This is pretty scary — and not just for Gov. Jon Corzine. Anyone who has driven a major highway in New Jersey knows the danger we are in nearly every second we are on the roads.

The picture above is from The New York Times. Look closely and you can see the governor’s SUV perched on a guardrail, hanging over. Other shots in other papers show that the damage was pretty bad.

I can only go back to my own accident a year and a half ago at the intersection of Deans Rhode Hall Road and Cranbury Road. We collided with a pickup truck at the intersection and banked off it into a telephone pole. Luckily, no one was hurt, but I remember the whole thing unfolding in slow-motion and the airbag deploying. My wife was driving and she said I was sort of chanting “no, no.” It was a horrible experience.

I can only imagine what went thorugh the governor’s mind and the mind of the other passengers and I wish him well in his recovery.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Separate and unequal

Read this story and explain to me again how the state’s new civil union legislation offers gays and lesbians the protections my wife and I enjoy.

Relevant paragraph:

Nevertheless, residents who work for companies headquartered in other states, and those whose insurers are based outside New Jersey, have found it difficult if not impossible to sign their partners up for health insurance. Unions and employers whose self-insured plans are federally regulated have also denied coverage in some cases. Staff members in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms have questioned partners’ role in decision-making. Confusion abounds over the interplay of state and federal laws governing taxes, inheritance and property.

Timothy Zimmer, a computer programmer in Newark quoted in the Times story, offers this:

“Apparently the civil union law gave us all the rights of marriage, except the ones we really need.”

And here’s what Steve Goldstein, chairman of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, said in the same story:

“How can you call it equal protection when you have to go through hell maybe to get your civil union recognized?”

Seems a fair question.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Brief thoughts on Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, silencing a champion of humanistic values and a critical intelligence who was never afraid to pole a stick at the grizzly bears who hold power in this country.

Vonnegut was a hard writer to characterize. Ostensibly a science fiction writer, he was far more — a caustic social critic, a religious skeptic, a humorist.

He was, as the novelist Norman Mailer said in a statement (published in the Associated Press story to which I’v e linked above), ”a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. … I would salute him — our own Mark Twain.”

While “Slaughterhouse Five” gets most of the ink, my favorite novel of his is “Mother Night” (it’s the least sci-fi of the bunch). It a book that challenges our easy conceptions of the world — an alleged Nazi spy is on trial in Israel, but we made to consider his actions and question his guilt. It is one of those rare books that forces you to read it cover to cover in a sitting, but challenges you, drags you into questions you might not wish to ask leading to answers you might not wish you’d learned.

I’ll close this with a comment from The Washington Post’s the Achenblog:

Why did we love him so?

Because Kurt Vonnegut told us the truth about living in a world gone mad. And he somehow made us laugh along the way. That’s winning the perfecta.

Yes, it is.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog

E-mail me by clicking here

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.