Beacon Hill Needs a Shower
To the Editor,
Imagine, if you will, that you are a German tourist on holiday in Boston. You know it’ll be chilly in the winter, but you’re European and can handle the cold, and are looking forward to seeing the pretty snow-capped trees. All the guidebooks and Reddit posts tell you Beacon Hill is Boston’s oldest, most charming, and most picturesque neighborhood, so you make that the first stop on your tour. As you and your group of fellow German-speaking tourists arrives to Pinckney Street, you are not greeted by the treelined cobblestone streets and historic brownstones that Google promised. Instead, your first impression of Beacon Hill is streets crammed with 4-foot-tall filthy rotting glaciers, choked with trash and feces every direction you look. This is not the old-world charm that you were expecting. This is basically 8th Avenue near Penn Station in New York City. Everyone said America is filthy, but you thought Boston would be different. They were right, America is disgusting, they can’t even keep their most historic neighborhood clean!
These rock-hard mountains of stubborn snow lining our streets arrived in late January and now, becoming an unwanted fixture in the landscape, refuse to leave. They no longer even resemble snow, but rather gray and brown open-air frozen dumpsters full of layers of old garbage, like some sort of unholy amber preserving it for future generations. As I walk to get my morning coffee at Blank Street I pass dozens of piles of dog poop just openly sitting on the sidewalk or against the snow, trash bags from weeks ago buried at the bottom, green poop bags placed on top of the snow drifts instead of in the trash can, loose wrappers and food waste clinging to the mounds, brown sludge oozing from the bottoms into the street. Beacon Hill, right now, is not charming. It’s revolting.
I of course do not blame the good people of Beacon Hill for the unusually cold and snowy winter, nor the snowbanks that won’t go away. I can, however, fault them for contributing to the current state of filth and griminess on our streets. What is it about the snow that makes people LESS likely to pick up their dog’s poop? Is it because they think it’ll be covered by more snow and somehow just disappear? Newsflash: the white snow makes the poop stand out more, and it does not disappear. As the weather warms and the snow melts, weeks-old dog poops and trash piles are beginning to surface, like Siberian perma-frost receding and revealing a perfectly intact wooly mammoth specimen. Indeed, the current dog poop situation in Beacon Hill is an epidemic that has reached crises levels. There is a loose pile on the ground every 10 feet.
Please, Beacon Hillers, do not be part of the problem. Be part of the solution. Pick up your dog’s poop and throw the bag into a trash can. Put all your trash in a tightly tied bag and leave it out the night before trash day. Pick up loose garbage if you see it. Please, try to think of our dear German tourist friends. Don’t let your dog’s huge poop be their lasting memory of Boston that they bring back to Germany and tell their loved ones about. Let’s make our streets pretty again, and clean up Beacon Hill.
Bodhi Boswell,
Beacon Hill Resident
Whose freedom are we defending?
To the Editor,
When I opened the BH Times and saw an opinion piece titled “Our brave soldiers once again are defending freedom”, I thought to myself “Exactly whose freedom are we defending?”. Since the onset of the illegal war started on February 28, I feel less safe than I did before. When it was verified that the US is the one that sent the strike that killed 165 schoolgirls, it did not make my freedom any more secure. When 1000 civilians were killed in the first 5 days of the air strikes, it did not make my freedom any more secure. When the secretary of state admitted it was roped into the war by Israel, it did not make my freedom any more secure.
Usually wars are justified by clear goals and have off ramps, but when asked by reporters or even unprompted, the Trump administration continually mixes up its messaging. At the beginning of the war, they claimed they wanted to effect regime change, but then Secretary Rubio told Arab foreign ministers that Washington’s goal is not regime change. Which is it?
Beyond the political instability, this war has already and will continue to exacerbate the cost of living crisis in the US. Gas prices increased by 10% in just the last week. Qatar warns that oil exports will end shortly, 1/3 of global fertilizer supply passes through the Strait for Hormuz, air travel is being log-jammed. War often causes contractions in GDP for belligerents and this one is no different. The only people that benefit from this war is the defense industry and US suppliers of oil.
Do not be lied to about the actual costs of war and do not believe people who tell you this was simply about taking out the Ayatollah. Don’t believe me? Take it from the president on March 2nd: “It’s always been a four-week process. As strong as it is, it’s a big country; it’ll take four weeks”
Tony Baez