Other Voices

GUILDERLAND — Bill Batt is a man of ideas — big ideas.

Right now, he’s organizing the annual Council of Georgist Organizations conference to be held this year in Albany, from July 15 to 17.

Batt’s signature sign-off on his emails is a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog one big one.”

“I tend to see things in very global perspectives,” says Batt in the week’s Enterprise podcast.

Over his lifetime, he has embraced three paradigms to explain the world.

The first was the cognitive developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, understanding the stages of learning and moral development that people go through.

Soon after graduating from college, where he studied political science, Batt was among the very first Peace Corps volunteers. He lived in a small village in northern Thailand and didn’t speak English for two years.

“Their ways of thinking were very limited by their own experience ….,” he said of the villagers. “That led also to their cognitive limitations. But of course, those people who were more sophisticated were the ones that had exposure to cities and literature and history.”

In his thirties, Batt found a new way to look at things through the integrative psychology of Ken Wilbur. Wilbur’s integral theory maps human experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of “individual-collective” and “interior-exterior.”

The paradigm that currently enthralls Batt is a modern take on the 19th-Century political economist Henry George. Batt became enamored of George’s theories after he stopped teaching as a university professor to serve for a decade on the New York State Legislative Tax Study Commission.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04012022/bill-batt-says-wed-have-fairer-taxes-and-richer-economy-if-we-followed-henry-george

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The four track-and-field athletes who were named All Americans at a national competition this month most often used the word “love” — not “pain” or “discipline” — to describe their relationship to their sport.Sophomore Kendall Barnhart and senior Kate Sclanlan both used the phrase “falling in love” when they described the joy of track.

“When I was younger, I was forced to run by my parents,” said Scanlan in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Her mother expressed the belief, “You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

“I think that’s very true,” said Scanlan. “You have to get past the pain and you’re going to be like, OK, this workout is going to feel awful, and I might vomit afterwards. But it is a feeling like no other, like when you finish a race … and you go, wow, I just did that.”

Barnhart, on the other hand, said, when she first started track, her parents knew nothing about the sport.

She started as a student in Coach Christopher Scanlan’s gym class, she said, and, with his encouragement, decided to give running a try.

Once Barnhart got into track, she said, her parents did, too, and then her younger sister “fell in love with jumping, which she’s very good at,” Barnhart said.

The team of four girls — Barnhart, Scanlan, Maeghan Hickey, and Parker Steele — placed third in the 4x55m Shuttle Hurdle Relay at the New Balance Nationals, held in New York City from March 11 to 13.

They finished the relay in 34.99 seconds, placing them fourth in the United States and first in New York — while also breaking their school record and the Section 2 record.

This is Scanlan’s third time, and Barnhart’s second time being named All American.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/03252022/all-american-athletes-have-deep-love-their-sport

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Trevor Burnside knows that doing the small things right leads to doing the big things better.

In this week’s Enterprise podcast, Burnside describes the sound of each member of a platoon pulling forward the bolt on their rifles at the exact same time.

“You can only hear one sound … It is awesome,” he said.

Burnside recently competed with the Shock Platoon of Norwich University at the Mardi Gras Drill Competition hosted by Tulane University in New Orleans. His squad got perfect scores and placed first both in the Color Guard and Squad Basic competition.

He’s in the Shock Platoon, Burnside said, because it gives him a sense of discipline and order.

“If you can’t do a right face correctly, you’re not going to be able to go through and lead a group of people. If you can’t hold yourself accountable to not move when you’re told to not move, you’re not going to be able to go through under pressure … to focus and lead people,” said Burnside.

He concluded, “Do the small things right and then you do the big things better.”

Burnside, who graduated from Berne-Knox-Westerlo in 2019, knew from a young age he wanted to be in the military. Both his father and uncle served in the Air Force. He spoke with a recruiter at the age of 16.

He is a member of the Corps of Cadets at Norwich, leading a military lifestyle. Founded in 1819, Norwich University – The Military College of Vermont is the oldest private and senior military college in the United States.

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Patricia C. Bischof, as an adult, sat in a room in her mother’s house, crying, as she listened to the story of her mother’s life — a story she had never heard before.

Her mother, Ruth, was being filmed in the next room in an interview, which Bischof had set up, for the Shoah Foundation.

Bischof has spent her life trying to piece together her parents’ past and has spent 10 years writing a book about the experience.

“This interview, I now understand, was a way for her to accomplish her healing is a safe environment and to let people know what the Nazis had done to demolish and totally change her life; it took away her life as she knew it,” Bischof writes in her memoir.

When Steven Spielberg was filming “Schindler’s List,” he heard stories from Holocaust survivors and decided they should be recorded. The Shoah Foundation has recorded the stories of genocide survivors from arond the world.

Neither of Bischof’s parents — her father was a concentration camp survivor — would talk about what had happened to them before coming to the United States.

Bischof’s mother was born in 1910 in the Prussian Empire and became Polish in 1918. Bischof, in her book, describes her mother as a tall, beautiful woman with olive skin and dark hair who spoke a half-dozen languages and sang with a lovely soprano voice.

As a mother, she was strict and made clothes for her daughter that did not show her shape. The family listened to opera on Sundays and the four children — Patricia was the oldest — weren’t allowed to listen to rock and roll.

“Sometimes I just felt lost,” says Bischof in this week’s Enterprise podcast. She didn’t fit in with her classmates at school. “I couldn’t relate. Sometimes even today I can’t even relate, if you really want to know.”

Bischof writes in the introduction to her memoir, “We all need connections to our past.”

Read the full story: https://altamontenterprise.com/03132022/memoirist-bischof-pieced-together-her-parents-past-and-found-her-voice

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“The United States has denied the existence of its own empire,” says Ryan Irwin.

Irwin is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany and has written books about the shifting world order.

“Gordian Knot: Aparthied and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order” explores how African independence altered the international system at the height of the Cold War, and “Vast External Realm: America and the Invention of the Free World” probes some of the assumptions that underlay American world power.

Irwin spoke to The Enterprise on Friday, the day after the Russian army started its attack on Ukraine.

When African states first joined the United Nations, Irwin posits, the United States was challenged in profound ways. South Africa was an “unapologetically racist state” and so was thought to have no place in the United Nations yet the United States itself was practicing Jim Crow.

The United States has expanded its influence over the course of the 20th Century while denying its existence as an imperial power, Irwin says. He sees liberal institutions equating freedom with certain rights, like the right of expression, the right to life, and the right to property — and thereby naturalizing and extending American power.

Even decolonization fits this pattern. “We’re going to take apart these old European empires, grant self-determination, but then make sure that those states have a seat at the United Nations, which happens to be located in New York City,” says Irwin.

“We’re watching that argument fall apart,”said Irwin in this week’s Enterprise podcast. Today, far fewer Americans than in the 1990s or early 2000s are willing to see the United States as something other than an empire, he said.

Read more at https://altamontenterprise.com/03032022/historian-irwin-notes-no-empire-has-expanded-forever

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Beth Davis has fulfilled a lifetime dream.

She was one of just eight school librarians from across the United States to serve on the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award Committee for 2022.

When she applied for the post, Davis thought she wouldn’t be chosen, reasoning, “Nobody’s going to pick … a librarian from a small library and I haven’t done anything so phenomenal.”

Many would beg to differ with her modest self description. She has been Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s secondary school librarian for 26 years where she fulfills a wide variety of roles and is now serving students who are children of students she originally served.

When she got the letter asking her to be on the committee, Davis screamed with joy.

“I did not realize the amount of work involved, but I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

The committee was chaired by Patty Gonzales Ramirez who lives in Texas. The other members besides Davis were Kit Ballenger, Rebecca Caufman, Michelle Cheng, Kara Hunter, Beth Kirchenberg, and liaison Ellen Wickham.

Davis and her counterparts each read scores of books written by first-time authors for readers age 12 to 18 and then met extensively, through their computers, to finally winnow the selection to five finalists and ultimately a first-place winner.

Davis herself read over 200 books up for the award. And 200 new books are being donated to the BKW Secondary School library because of her efforts.

The Morris Award, first given in 2009, is named for a beloved publisher who promoted literature for children and teens.

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Erick McCandless is returning to the place where he started. 

He grew up in Slingerlands, was trained in forestry, and now — after a sometimes far-flung career in environmentalism — he is the new project manager for the Bender Melon Farm Preserve.

McCandless says a bullet was dodged when a grassroots uprising prevented a mega-mall from being built on the rural land, which is now undergoing development on its perimeter.

In December, the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy paid $1 million for the 176-acre former Bender Melon Farm, near the corner of routes 85 and 85A in New Scotland.

To help pay for the purchase, the conservancy sold 20 of those acres along Route 85 for about half-a-million dollars to Ron Kay, who plans a hamlet-type development with retail and residential spaces.

At the start of the 20th Century, Charles Bender’s farm was famous for its melons, which were served in New York City’s finest restaurants. The farm was sold to William Taylor in 1939 as public tastes and farming itself changed.

McCandless, from his childhood, remembers the Bender property as a dairy farm, seeing cows wandering around in the fields.

He is interested in preserving its history and says in this week’s Enterprise podcast that there are still remnants of the famous Bender melons in the old barns on the property. Preserving the viewshed and the open space is also important to McCandless.

Read the full profile at https://altamontenterprise.com/02182022/come-out-and-enjoy-it-and-support-it-says-new-manager-bender-melon-farm-preserve

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In 2015, John Haluska took it upon himself to start sprucing up Guilderland’s historic markers.

His work caused a bit of a stir when the late Guilderland town historian, Alice Begley, learned that Haluska had already painted 22 markers when she saw a photo of him posing before a half-painted sign in the Sept. 8, 2016 Altamont Enterprise.

Begley had been, said Town Supervisor Peter Barber at the time, in charge of an ongoing process of repainting signs, as needed; signs were picked up by the highway department, Barber said, and taken back to the department’s shop for sandblasting, followed by repainting with paints provided by the state, in the correct colors.

Haluska is now working with the town as highway crew members have repaired broken signs. He continues to spray paint the signs in place, using Midnight Blue and then highlighting the raised letters in Sunburst Yellow.

Haluska considers Begley’s booklet, “Historic Markers in the Town of Guilderland,” published in 1994, which shows an image of each sign and tells the story behind it, to be “a treasure trove of information, information so well researched.”

He is hoping for “triple-digit attendance” when he speaks, through Zoom, to the Guilderland Historical Society on Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m. about his project.

Haluska explains in this week’s Enterprise podcast that he was inspired to paint Guilderland’s markers after he drove into Greenville more than a decade ago and “was greeted with these wonderfully freshly painted signs.” He learned it was an Eagle Scout project and said to himself, “I’d like to do that for the town.”

Read the full article here: https://altamontenterprise.com/02132022/john-haluska-have-brush-will-emblazon-history

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Jessica Perrin Barcomb was in her twenties, she fell through a stairwell and landed on her head. She was in a coma and had to be resuscitated several times.

It made her angry then when people told her that things happen for a reason.

But now she realizes she learned so much, especially on the road to recovery.

Barcomb has just published her first novel, which opens with the description of a terrible car accident. The book’s central character, Rebecca, at age 7, survives, after a coma, but her beloved mother, a healer, dies.

Barcomb, who has wanted to be a writer her whole life, stresses in this week’s Enterprise podcast, that the book is not autobiographical. Even so, she has drawn on many of her real-life experiences to make it vivid.

Read more: https://altamontenterprise.com/02062022/barcombs-first-novel-tells-story-healing-and-hope

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Terrice Bassler, a leadership coach, says that, when she is coaching someone, “I look for the red thread. I look for that thread that runs through somebody’s life story, even if it looks a little disconnected and wild.”

Bassler’s own red thread may be providing service to others.

Raised in the Helderberg Hilltowns, where both sides of her family had lived for generations, she says, “I was the first grandchild on either side of the family so I benefit from a lot of attention and love and teaching, which is with me still today.”

She describes, in this week’s Enterprise podcast, a series of seemingly small encounters that became life-changing events. “Small opportunities are what big opportunities look like when they’re young,” she says.

As Bassler has worked with visionaries “at extreme emotional edges,” she said she learned how to keep herself whole and support courageous others to stay whole.

Now, she said, international organizations are “more clued up about what needs to be done to support people at extreme emotional edges — and COVID has pushed that even further.”

Bassler calls this the mainstreaming of trauma.

When she was shaken by the death of her father, she stumbled upon a class in neurogenic shaking, which is used to release trauma and tension.

She practiced what is known as TRE — tension or trauma release exercise — that helps her stay regulated. With the shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Bassler became a certified provider and now teaches TRE online.

She has supported health-care workers and first responders. “A lot of folks are struggling …,” she said. “They’ve gotten to that edge where they can’t make meaning of what’s happening. There’s a continuous state of dread and uncertainty or discomfort.”

Bassler says she helps people in a few lessons learn how to keep themselves regulated.

Noticing the way society has become fragmented and divided — even in the town where she was raised — Bassler has found it useful to look for the wounded place — for her, that may be despair about the state of democracy — in the person with whom you are trying to connect.

“That’s going to make it easier to find common ground,” she said.

One of the things Bassler remembers about growing up in the Hilltowns was that it was completely normal to drop in, “to just pop by.”

“I’ve lived all over the world. Never anywhere I’ve lived since is dropping in as normal …. It was a queue of safety. It was a daily symbol of trust,” she said.

“And here we get back to the red thread,” said Bassler, “because one of the things I think I became able to do from my work in hotspots, in places of conflict … instead of holding all the suffering in me, with a sense of helplessness, somehow, I cultivated an ability to see the people who had the vision to move through … who were going to be courageous despite suffering, who were going to be both vulnerable and brave.”

Although for the last two years Bassler hasn’t traveled — not on a plane or even in a car — through the internet, she said, “I am able to support leaders who are doing courageous things.”

Read the full article on our website: https://altamontenterprise.com/01282022/terrice-bassler-helps-leaders-who-are-both-vulnerable-and-brave

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