WHEN THE BAND STOPS PLAYING:
The Dark Side of PTSD
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Cape Charles resident Joe Vaccaro submitted this commentary with the request that it be published on Veterans Day. It is his latest article in observance of American Legion Post 56’s “Year of the Veteran.”)
By JOE VACCARO
American Legion Post 56
November 11, 2013
There are over 830,000 veterans residing in Virginia, and that number includes some 700,000 men and 130,000 women. Within those numbers are over 669,000 wartime veterans who have served their country in time of need. The Eastern Shore of Virginia lays claim to over 5,000 of those men and women living among us; also living among them is the dark potential of suicide.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans take their own lives every day. That data is from 1999 through 2011 and only contains information from 21 states, with large states such as California, Texas, and Illinois not reporting any information. Throughout the years combat veterans have been returning home seemingly unscathed by the battles they have fought, yet the suicide rate for our recently returning veterans continues to climb. The troops, especially the career minded, view any cry for help as a career blemish that could tarnish a record of valor and hard work, and halt an upward climb through the ranks. The attempt to gather facts to combat this national tragedy is too skewed to be of any solid value.
Part of the problem is that there’s no uniform reporting system regarding these deaths. So it’s up to a coroner or funeral director to enter a veteran status or note a suicide on a death certificate. This makes it extremely difficult to determine a veteran’s status unless the person is known to them, which begs the next question of how do they collect that data on homeless veterans? [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: Old School Gets Its Day in Supreme Court
By DEBORAH BENDER
October 14, 2013
Tomorrow the Old School Cape Charles civic group will get a second chance at justice. On Tuesday, October 15, the Virginia Supreme Court will hear an appeal of a lower court decision allowing the historic school in Central Park to be given to a developer.
Those who have been reading the Wave know the sad story of the Town’s secret negotiations and purported “sale” of the school for $10. One can barely buy lunch for $10, but our Town Council sold valuable town property –including the Town’s only two basketball courts — for that “price.”
But it gets worse: Not only did they sell the school for $10, they then gave the developer $41,000 in insurance money for earthquake damage not noticed until three months after the fact.
The Town bumbled about for several months trying to issue a legally acceptable rezoning and conditional use permit, which they were never quite able to do.
The Town signed a contract and enacted an ordinance to sell the school to Echelon Resources. But when Mayor Sullivan signed over the deed, it was to Charon Ventures — an entity that was never mentioned in the contract or the Town ordinance.
Town residents who value public property and care about the local children thought better of the school than to give it away. They formed a group and named it Old School Cape Charles. Old School set to work alerting townspeople through signs, leaflets, and petitions. In reaction, Town Planning Commissioners have spent months working on the Town’s sign ordinance to ban protest signs. [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: 26 Years Later, School Fight Continues
By LENORA MITCHELL
August 21, 2013
Looking through some old files recently, I reflected on how much time I had spent being a community servant, running up and down Highway 13 attending board and committee meetings in Northampton and Accomack counties. And then I found a file that documented the demise of the Cape Charles school system 26 years ago.
I was appointed to the Cape Charles School Board in 1982. As I looked at documents from the United States Justice Department Civil Rights Division, Northampton County School Board, the county superintendent, Cape Charles School Board, the town superintendent, the State Board of Education, and numerous letters from attorneys involved in the case, including from the Department of Justice, I remembered how long and intensive the battle was to retain the independent school system in Cape Charles, along with ownership of the building.
The battle started civilly, but then it turned into a major war. The Town was divided and there were heated exchanges wherever you went, especially at the Town Council meetings.
The Cape Charles School Board accused the Northampton County School System of violating a consent decree by allowing Cape Charles students to attend their schools.
The Town Council charged the School Board with malfeasance or misfeasance and demanded an investigation by the State Police.
Meanwhile, the Cape Charles School Board charged the Town with siphoning off funds earmarked for the school. These were just a few of the allegations and charges being thrown around during that time. [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: Does Bay Creek Control Town Council?
By DEBORAH BENDER
August 13, 2013
Several years ago I had a shop on Mason Avenue called Scarlett’s Closet where I sold women’s clothes. So I know how shoppers think. Let’s say someone wants to buy a linen top: One of the first things she will do is look at the price tag. She will consider buying two if there is a sale that offers a second garment at half price.
A shopper will consider how much money she has in her wallet — or if she gets out her credit card, what that will mean to the family budget.
But our Town Council jumped feet-first into building a new wastewater treatment plant without knowing for sure where the money to pay for it would come from. Now they want us to foot the bills.
In accordance with the 1991 Annexation Agreement, Town Council asked Bay Creek’s developer Dickie Foster to pay its share of the cost of the new state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant. But when he just said “no,” Town Council backed down.
Now, instead of demanding that the developers of Bay Creek pony up the money, Council is expecting the people of Cape Charles to accept two large increases to our water bills. In the last five years the cost of wastewater treatment has gone from $24 a month to $60.85.
Not only that – Council expects people to pay those bills whether their house is occupied or not. They get billed even if the house has the water turned off because the owner can’t afford to pay.
What are they thinking?
When a homeowner gets behind in paying his water bill he is hit with a $30 late fee. I wonder how much late fees Bay Creek has to pay for the $42,000 invoice they received in July 2008? Have they paid anything yet? Do they have any more invoices? [Read more…]
SHER: Art Through the Eyes of Those Who Love It
Marty Burgess gears up for Sunday’s Cape Charles Quick Draw. (Photos by Sher Horosko)
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
August 7, 2013
I came up in a world where everyone wanted to be like everyone else, which is to say, just the same.
It was a universe of perfect patterns: Carnation Instant Breakfast (always chocolate) for breakfast, Raymond and Glen throwing apples at me on my way home from school, a potato, some meat, and a vegetable at 5 p.m., a father who ate too fast and a mother who told him so every night without exception, religious school on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and best of all, hot rye bread from the Jewish bakery I devoured in the back seat of our white Galaxy.
It was an excruciatingly bland world for a little firecracker girl. I suffered it daily, and vowed to never acquiesce. For those who may be interested as to whether I succeeded at whistling my own sweet song: I did. And yes, I paid for it.
When I was growing up, art was something you hung from a six-penny nail tapped into a long tan wall. Art was a wall covering, really, that acted pretty much the same as a windbreaker on a Kansas prairie. It broke the wind and it broke the tan. It filled an empty space on a tan runway that stretched farther than my little eyes could see. That was art.
Last Saturday night I went to the IVir Danza performance at the Palace Theatre. There may have been 40 or 50 of us in that impossibly intimate jewel on Mason Avenue. Four men and four women from Italy danced on a stage in your yard. They moved like cougars and gazelles; their muscles pulsated with the blood thirst of the Kalahari. They went quiet, and turned into each other, like coils of smoke or butterflies finding each other through scent alone.
It is not often I wish I were young enough to start on a new course. I felt that on Saturday. And you will feel it too if you catch their last dance on August 16 at the Palace. [Read more…]
SHER: On the Shore Eight Weeks
Photo by Sher Horosko
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
July 31, 2013
The road to Custis Tomb is lined with snowflakes perched on arching green stems. I capture the beauty-burst and the swaying flowers filled with winged ones I cannot name.
Then comes the inevitable fading. Crocheted saucers fold into urns. Their time here is nearly done.
I have been on the Shore eight weeks. It is my spirit to watch closely, to be curious and to mark the comings and goings of life:
—the wheat fields trimmed and seeded with soybeans, tinkered with to withstand this concoction or that;
—the winged and petaled ones birthing and blooming and moving on or folding back into the sandy earth;
—how guts are transformed from expansive ripples of water where all may pass to bright white stakes marking territories like fences in the land-bound world.
I notice these things. They are subtle. The disappearance of what one loves happens slowly.
We get used to Beauty, fading, much like the lines streaking across our cheeks. Only when we see a photograph of what we looked like ten years ago, or even five, do we realize what is becoming of us: our bodies, our skin, our hair whiter and whiter. [Read more…]
COMMENTARY: $ewer $ystems — ‘The Rest of the Story’
By WAYNE CREED
July 27, 2013
As a kid, growing up with a dad that tended to tinker in the garage with the radio on, I remember lazy days, tinkering alongside him on a bike or Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine, all the while listening to the Paul Harvey show. I especially liked the section of the show “The Rest of the Story.”
As of July 22, Northampton County finalized the Southern Node commercial service area which will pump sewage to the Cape Charles treatment plan. The County’s PSA (Public Service Authority) has recommended a special taxing district for commercial property along Route 13. There is, however, “the rest of the story.”
Back in 2008 and into 2009, the Town of Cape Charles was faced with a dilemma: the wastewater plant was failing (although reports of its impending demise may have been slightly exaggerated), and without addressing the issue, harsh dealings from the Department of Environmental Quality were on the horizon. The Mayor, the assistant town manager, and the town manager should be commended for stepping up and getting in front of a serious problem.
The facts: Cape Charles, like all municipalities in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, had to meet a specified nutrient waste load allocation by January 2011. If we did not meet this date, our current waste load allocation, which was based on a projected discharge of 500,000 GPD, would be reduced by half (along with possible fines).
But there is still more to the story. There were actually two competing plans on the table at the time: the current system, owned and operated by the Town, and a public private venture to be funded and managed by Webtide Partners, led by the concerns of Furlong Baldwin and Sons, and Joe Corrado.
Floating about was also the notion of a regional system to service Northampton County. In 2009, the Town and County held a wastewater summit. Then-supervisors Dave Burden and Spencer Murray posited lukewarm approvals in favor of a regional system, but one that was made up of several smaller plants; Burden also added that effluent should not be pumped back into the Bay, and that a water reuse plant should be at the forefront. [Read more…]
SHER: ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’
Ryan Joseph Abraham, 8, waters plants at New Roots Youth Garden. (Photo by Sher Horosko)
By SHER HOROSKO
Cape Charles Wave
July 24, 2013
OK, this is the truth. In my whole life only two TV shows made me laugh so hard I doubled over: “Candid Camera” and Bill Cosby’s, “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Those of you who have dipped into this column probably get that I take the world rather seriously. I have been a muser since the age of four (maybe earlier).
As a child, I thought I knew more than adults in key areas. As an adult, I am sure I was right about this. Kids know things we have forgotten or buried or had drummed out of us. They don’t get stuck on the thorns that constantly separate us from each other.
The world misses the essential goodness of kids. We believe morality is learned. I see this differently: I think we come into the world (most of us anyway) with great and good hearts.
So like eight year old Ryan in the photo, our job is to water the love just like he is watering the plants.
But jumping back to Bill Cosby —
[Read more…]
