I guess it’s not surprising that the Phoenix has joined everyone else in hurling a few verbal stones at Don Imus. I can’t remember the last time so many commentators from diverse points of view got together in a kumbaya circle.
I believe redemption has to be earned, but Imus has earned my forgiveness up front. He went to great lengths to make a face-to-face apology to the women he so egregiously slandered. I can’t vouch for his sincerity in that instance, but here’s some other pre-imbroglio evidence: the man who lost his soapbox for making a racial slur also used it to repeatedly call the government’s post-Katrina inaction racist. He has devoted countless hours of air time to campaign for family support and research funding for childhood cancer, SIDS, autism, and sickle-cell anemia, while accusing the government and the pharmaceutical industry of inaction and complicity. Plus, Imus and his wife run a ranch for children with cancer, where he spends his summer days working directly with young cancer patients; and he has railed against the Iraq War and its White House managers from day one.
Imus’s silencing serves the powerful people and institutions he’s attacked much more than the Rutgers women’s basketball team or the rest of us. It is not the triumph of reason and justice that so many have proclaimed.
Peter Hess
Newton
Faulty ground
David S. Bernstein’s story “That Dirty Water” is based on a false premise: that the Patrick administration doesn’t care about the problem of groundwater in Boston’s Back Bay, and the evidence of that lack of commitment is the administration’s bill to maintain the focus of Chapter 91 licensing on waterfront properties.
In fact, the administration is very much concerned with the loss of groundwater, which is exposing the pilings supporting historic buildings throughout the Back Bay to rot. That’s why I co-chair, with Jim Hunt of the City of Boston, the City/State Groundwater Working Group, which, as you note in your article, is properly addressing this important issue of historic preservation. But the governor’s bill on landlocked filled tidelands is not about regulating groundwater. It addresses the question of whether Chapter 91, a law that protects the public interest in the waterfront, ought to be applied to non-waterfront property.
Under a Chapter 91 license, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) preserves waterfront property primarily for water-dependent uses, and requires waterfront developments to observe restrictions such as height limits and to provide amenities that allow the public to benefit from the waterfront. Chapter 91 licensing has given us Harbor Walk, as well as the glorious arch through the Boston Harbor Hotel that opens Rowe’s Wharf to the public for ferry service and for sheer pleasure. These waterfront improvements are not available to the public in property that is not at the water’s edge. That’s why, since 1990, DEP has excluded from Chapter 91 licensing filled lands that offer no meaningful access to the waterfront — that is, land more than 250 feet away from the water and across a public way.
