Category: Granite Views

I had breakfast this morning with a fascinating person. She is an architectural historian who has studied Notre Dame cathedral in Paris for many years and is now one of the experts regularly consulted as the 800-year-old building is being restored after the devastating fire of April 2019. For many years earlier, she studied the gradual process by which the cathedral had been built, noting that, over the course of 100 years, its walls had been constructed in stages as the mortar of each course of stone had to dry fully — a process that could take years — before the next layer could be added. In the end, thanks to the patience and skill of the builders, one of the most loved and iconic structures was completed. But it was a very slow process.

As my friend described that process, a comparison was forming in my mind. Our country, too, is a construction in progress, I thought. Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the “foundation” of the U.S. — we regularly refer to “the founding fathers” — but the rest of the work of realizing the vision of our forebears has been entrusted to subsequent generations. As American historians have shown us, this has been a trial-and-error process. We make laws to clarify or safeguard something only to see how it works out and perhaps repeal or modify it later. It’s a slow process. Just as for Notre Dame, each layer is added slowly, waiting and monitoring and then working on the next layer. My friend described the cathedral as a “building in dialogue with itself,” and perhaps that’s true for us as a country as well.

Today, especially in these times of polarization, many of us are impatient with the give and take of the democratic process, and instead would wish to “build it all” simply, with a change of presidential administration or a shift in Congress from one political majority to another. Our fast-paced world, instantaneous global communication, 24/7 news and compulsive social media all make difficult the more fundamental task of thoughtful conversations with our fellow citizens. It takes patience and courage to talk about such critical issues as immigration, abortion, voting rights or gun control in a way that respects difference of opinion while having that conversation based on a shared commitment to our country. Like Notre Dame, this is a slow process.

The elections this fall offer each of us, individual builders in the construction of this country, the challenge of being informed, of listening to one another, not just those in our echo chamber, and registering and voting intelligently. We may not see the completion of the perfect edifice, but we shall have done our part.

At a family picnic this summer we gobbled salads, pulled pork and pies. Lounging in the shade of a giant maple, we admired my cousin’s picture-book perennial garden and a flock of orioles flitting above. Later we cooled off in the swirling water of the Connecticut River. All the while, we swapped family news and stories, only once drifting over the line into politics. An idyllic afternoon.

Imagine my surprise when our host emailed me how disappointed she was in her teenage grandchildren. They were perfectly capable of conversation, she said, and hadn’t even tried. At one point, inexplicably, they had all marched out of the house, stood in a row holding pieces of bread, and intoned, “We found the toast.” (More on that later.) She had a mind to speak to them.

My advice: go easy. Their willingness to even show up at a family reunion testifies to the tug of kinship in a disconcerting world. While Boomers can draw on the confidence instilled in us when things seemedto be headed generally in the right direction, younger people have had vastly different inputs. Millennials grew up in the shadow of 9/11, war and recession; Gen Z in the slow burn of climate change and Covid-19. For better and worse, they are all digital natives. The pandemic has exacerbated normal anxiety and distress, and provoked serious mental health challenges.

All of these factors impact social behavior. The rules and skills used to interact in society are not inborn. They have to be identified, modeled, practiced. Expectations vary, but at the core are respect and empathy. Saying please and thank you are basic. Being able to engage in conversation in a way that shows attention to the other person and awareness of interesting events is more advanced.

Long before the pandemic, civility itself had been eroding. In 2010 Jim Leach, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, visited New Hampshire on a 50-state “Civility Tour.” Leach sought to raise awareness about the danger of inappropriate public discourse and behavior. “Little is more important for the world’s leading democracy in this change-intensive century than establishing an ethos of thoughtfulness and decency of expression. … If we don’t try to understand and respect others, how can we expect them to respect us, our values and our way of life?” he asked.

About that toast: It turns out the teenagers were reaching out. One of this summer’s trends on TikTok is “#RaiseAToast.” Inspired by a scene from The Little Rascals in which Alfalfa toasts his would-be sweetheart, it focuses on celebrating the people and things you love the most.

We grown-ups were the ones who missed the social cue.

Having grown up in America’s heartland, one of my fondest childhood memories is of the garden that our family planted every spring. It was huge by New England standards, average by Midwest standards. So many hours of labor and love went into the garden, but the rewards were well worth the effort. Early morning harvests (before the heat got too bad) led to bushels (literally) of tomatoes, green beans, corn, peas, potatoes, onions, lettuce, cabbage and anything else my mom decided to grow that year. After a few hours spent in the morning hauling in the goods, the afternoon’s tasks required my siblings and me to clean and prepare the harvest for my mother to work her magic. She would spend the afternoon canning and freezing the produce to be served and enjoyed in the cold of winter when it tasted every bit as delicious as the day it was harvested.

Today I am a pretend gardener here in New Hampshire. I have a vertical tower that utilizes hydroponics for my summer vegetables. My family loves the tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, and lettuces that our tower produces, but I am just playing at it. There is no canning or mass production going on, no feeding of the masses.

One wonders what type of garden the City of Manchester and Families in Transition (FIT) envisioned when federal funds were spent to purchase property, demolish buildings and address environmental concerns to create the Hollows Community Garden and Learning Center in 2018. According to a recent Union Leader article, the plan was for the garden to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to supplement meals served at Families in Transition Family Place Resource Center and Shelter. A grant funded a part-time garden manager until 2020, when funds were cut. Currently, the lot is vacant and overgrown. FIT is currently requesting permission from city aldermen to develop the land as affordable housing.

No doubt affordable housing will address a much greater need for Manchester than a community garden, and it falls into the wheelhouse of FIT. They have done it many times before and have done it well. Remembering from my Midwest roots what it takes to achieve a meaningful return from a garden, I think FIT is wise to pivot back to their core mission for this parcel of land. Unless there is funding, staff and volunteers, combined with experience and knowledge to drive the project forward, a community garden is doomed to end up exactly where it is today, a vacant and overgrown piece of land.

Even though I am a transplant who has lived in this state for more than 20 years, there are occasions when I am especially aware of just what it means to live in a state the motto of which is “Live Free or Die.” Such a recognition came recently. Although the details of the attempt on the part of certain residents of Croydon, New Hampshire, to halve the annual school budget, as well as the successful later counter to restore it, are well known, the lesson for me, as well for all of us, is one worthy of serious self-reflection.

Like many of my fellow Granite Staters, I live in a small town. I am fortunate that mine is one that has an efficient and useful website as well as a robust email alert system. My neighbors and I receive regular announcements of all town meetings as well as their agendas. These I read dutifully, but too often my engagement stops there and I fear I’m not alone in that regard. It is a rare agenda item that would draw me to attend a meeting in person. It must be some kind of utilitarian criterion that I’m applying in such situations, the logic of which would go something like this: “If it’s a really important issue for me that will be discussed or voted on, then I’ll go; if it’s not I won’t.”

What is lost in that logic, however, is the other, equally important aspect of democracy, namely a shared sense of responsibility for our community and a corresponding obligation to participate. Something akin to the latter is what I often feel on town voting day, when, standing in line with neighbors, friends and strangers, I feel a sense of solidarity that together we are doing something important and are seeing one another in the act of doing it, voting on issues of common importance. It is a sense of a common will for a commonweal.

This year will be my 13th serving as executive director of Leadership New Hampshire, an organization founded as a recommendation of the gubernatorial Commission on NH in the 21st Century. Its mission statement is “Building a community of informed and engaged leaders.” Every year, from a large pool of applicants from across our state, LNH selects 32 people to participate in a one-day-a-month intensive program that seeks to familiarize them with the needs, challenges, people and resources of our state, so that, being better informed about our state and its communities, the graduates — and now, in its 30th year, there are more than 1,000 of them — will get even more engaged in their communities, region or state. But the “special chemistry” of LNH is the sense of solidarity the graduates develop over the 10-month together.

It does truly take a community, precisely because the members of one need to feel a sense of community. The people of Croydon found that out the hard way.

by Jeff Rapsis

Look up! You just may see a student-built airplane in the skies.

Such a sight is likely to become more common in years to come thanks to an innovative program pioneered by the Manchester School District.

The program involves students at the Manchester School of Technology, the district’s Career and Technical Education Center. (Years ago, it was known as the “vo-tech.”)

The school is well-known for its home-building program: Each year, teams of students build an actual house, complete with plumbing, wiring and so on. When it’s done, the house gets sold.

Three years ago, the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, working with educational consultant Tango Flight, approached the school with the idea of doing the same thing but with an airplane.

A student-built plane? What could go wrong?

Three years later, the first student-built airplane — an all-metal Van’s Aircraft RV-12iS two-seat light sport aircraft — is now undergoing final inspection before taking to the skies. Later, the completed airplane will be sold, with the proceeds (about $100,000) to be used to buy the hardware and components for the next airplane.

The net cost to taxpayers: $0.

How is that possible? The nonprofit Aviation Museum raised about $350,000 in program start-up costs from the local business community, with most of the funds coming through the sale of Community Development Finance Authority tax credits. The program will continue to be funded largely through the sale of finished aircraft.

Manchester was only the fourth school district in the nation to attempt a student plane-building project on the Tango Flight model, in which mentors from outside the school district (in this case, volunteers from the Aviation Museum) work with high school students to complete a complex kit-based airplane.

Today, more than two dozen districts around the country are embarking on student plane-building projects using the method pioneered in Manchester. And students are getting hands-on experience essential to building tomorrow’s workforce, in aerospace and many other fields.

Bottom line: The student plane-building project at the Manchester School of Technology is a great example of what can happen when an area’s nonprofit and business community collaborate with local public schools on innovative programs.

Or, to put it another way: when we work together, the sky’s the limit!

Jeff Rapsis is Associate Publisher of the Hippo, and also executive director of the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire.

From war to climate change, gun violence to inflation, it can seem that everything is going wrong. A recent conversation with Becky Field, New Hampshire photographer and immigrant advocate, reminded me that there is something each of us can do: We can welcome the stranger. Caring for one another is the first, best step we can take to heal our world.

My parents demonstrated this years ago.

During the Balkan Wars in the early 1990s, Mum and Dad greeted an exhausted Bosnian refugee family at the Manchester airport. They hosted them in their farmhouse for a month while others worked to find them housing, health care and jobs. Tense and chain-smoking, the father finally began to relax while helping Dad “pick rocks” in a field.

Over the years, my mother chatted with the mother in the grocery store or at a local event. Mum delighted in sharing that the children were doing well in school, the mother was in job training, and their citizenship applications were in progress.

Decades later, my father spent his last months in nursing care. One difficult night I stayed by his side as late as I could, agonized at leaving. When the new LNA came in, Dad smiled, weakly but warmly. It was the Bosnian mother. As luck or God would have it, she was there to help in our family’s time of need just as my parents had been in theirs.
When I bumped into the older daughter, we talked about our parents’ encounter. She wrote on Facebook, “Saw [one of] the family that first welcomed my family to [New Hampshire]. They housed us and treated us like family. Years later my sister and mom cared for their parents. This is to say that no kind act goes unnoticed.”

Despite the enormity of today’s challenges, individual actions and interactions matter. In response to war, natural disasters and forced migration, we can make our state welcoming, whether by volunteering with or donating to New Hampshire’s two refugee resettlement organizations, International Institute of New England (Manchester) or Ascentria Care Alliance (Concord), or by supporting local public transportation, education and affordable housing. Simply offering friendship may be the most valuable effort, impacting newcomers and welcomers alike. Caring for each other makes a world of difference in how we face problems and offers surprising benefits.