Letters to the Editor - The Millerton News - 4-13-23

Recognizing occupational therapists at Sharon Hospital

In observance of Occupational Therapy Month, I want to take some time to recognize the importance of our team of occupational therapists at Sharon Hospital who work tirelessly to support our patients and our community.

Our OTs bring light to patient’s lives and answers and solutions to their biggest challenges.

They understand the difficulty of daily tasks as patients recover from injury, illness, or surgery.

You may call on an occupational therapist to help you relearn skills or discover new ways to accomplish them. The occupational therapy team is here to assist in overcoming barriers and help you return to a sense of normalcy and regular routine.

I am proud to lead this team of dedicated caretakers that approach each patient’s challenges and difficulties with individualized care plans and goals. Within our field, there is no one-size- fits-all approach. Each patient requires careful intake, listening, and planning to best meet their demands and properly prepare them to meet their presented problems. Our licensed occupational therapists work collaboratively to meet individual needs. We coordinate care, so the patients don’t have to.

I have happily worked at Sharon Hospital for almost 20 years, living and raising my family in our great community. I love calling Sharon Hospital home and working with such dedicated professionals that each care so deeply for their patients.

I kindly ask that you join myself, Nuvance Health and Sharon Hospital’s leadership teams, and the entire Sharon Hospital staff in recognizing April as Occupational Therapy Month and thanking our OTs for helping our fellow community members recover and return to everyday life.

Melissa Braislin

Director of
Rehabilitation and
Cardio-diagnostic Services
Sharon

Barrett’s climate bill without a cost?

If I understand Didi Barrett’s point in her March 30, 2023 letter—We Have Climate Goals . . . Now What?—we need to address climate warming somehow, but it shouldn’t cost anybody anything. It should especially not burden disadvantaged people or communities. (Hard not to agree with that part.) There are lots of interim steps we can take while the zero-carbon solutions ramp up. (True.) Moreover, there’s actually money to be made in the greening process and plenty of good jobs will be created. (Yup.) We can still keep growing the economy!

  On this last point, we part ways. I’ll come back to that.

  I admire Didi’s effort to please as many people as possible, and to soften the impact, but those gestures work only when the stakes are low. The present circumstances are serious—existential is not too strong a term.

  The real problem, Didi, is that everything is in place to attack global warming but the determination to do it.

  We all get that Americans are individualists and don’t bother much with the common good. We fell our own trees and let them fall where they may. This is especially true now, when Democrats seem bent on righting 500 years of social wrongs at once and Republicans won’t let go of their 1950s suburban paradise.

  National discord is a product of urgent times. But there is one thing we cannot lose sight of: Our behavior is the cause. The world is warming so fast science is afraid to tell us the real, accelerating pace of change. Yet car companies still churn out massively large passenger vehicles—the Yukon, the Denali, the Range Rover. Housing developers still fill sprawling acres with McMansions.  New 300-foot megayachts are too numerous to count.  Obviously, they are just shifting the burden to somebody else—while increasing the odds against success.

In this time of flawed heroes, lost gods, indeterminate futures, when people feel without purpose or meaning and life looks grim—there is a future we can shape and brighten.  Let’s make saving life on Earth the goal.

Growth, to be clear, is what got us into this mess. Growth needs to be recast. Since the first Reagan tax cuts, since the Clinton gutting of financial regulations, economic growth has benefitted the one percent (and spectacularly so). Most of us having been barely maintaining since then; many have lost ground. So let’s start there, a ready source of funds for the disadvantaged, the struggling farmer, the start-up with a novel way to capture greenhouse gases.

I hope you’ve noticed, Didi, that the weather is getting a little weird. Still, this part of the country has been spared the extremes that have been felt elsewhere. We haven’t been badly hurt yet. Which maybe explains why you think we—one assumes you believe your bill has enough support to pass—should be the first to crack, to cheat on our climate diet. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the people you’re trying to help get wiped out by the new weather?

Tom Parrett

Millerton