Larry the K's Lineup

I ran my fourth race and second 5K since races have been allowed again on Saturday, the Franklin Farm 5K in Cumberland, R.I., and it was another welcome breather from all of the nasty COVID-19 chaos swirling around our lives thanks to the 70 million people who prefer to make a non-sensical political statement by not getting vaccinated instead of keeping themselves and others safe by getting vaccinated. (How getting vaccinated became a political issue is beyond me. If Americans acted as foolishly as this during the polio outbreak, that disease would have never been eradicated in the United States. And don't get me started about the 675,000-plus deaths in the United States from COVID-19 having exceeded the death toll from the 1918-20 Spanish flu outbreak; that development is as absurd as it is tragic.) The race was a fun run/walk to raise money for the farmland, which is situated in a rural part of the town that has been preserved, and it was held in conjunction with a festival held ...

 Julian Kadish,  an emergency medicine physician who has served on the Norton Conservation Commission for about 40 years, wrote this guest column for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA on Thursday, Sept. 23. His column is yet another plea for the millions of unvaccinated Americans to do the right thing and get vaccinated for the sake of everyone else, if not for themselves. He writes: "From my perspective, the decision to not be immunized against COVID-19 is equivalent to driving into the intersection when the light is red. Most of the time you will make it. But the times you don’t make it, it’s bad for you, and worse, it’s bad for other people. "Not getting immunized against COVID-19 is definitely bad for you but it is also bad for the whole community because it stresses our medical community treating all those people who get seriously ill, it prevents people with normal medical problems from getting access to health care because of the overload of hospitals caused by those ...

  This column --- which I wrote on Sept. 11, 2001, and which was published Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001, in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA --- was headlined “A taste of what our parents felt with Pearl Harbor.” I’m posting it today on my blog, not only to commemorate the 20 th anniversary of the terror attacks, but also to give people a sense of what people were thinking at the time of the attacks. What we couldn't foresee then was that 20 years later, after trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost in a war fought by American soldiers who had to in many cases serve several tours of duty in Afghanistan, the war would end with the Taliban --- the same militant-terrorists who had harbored Osama bin Laden for years --- returning to power. Twenty years later, our unity in the days after the attacks proved ephemeral, with the result that now, at the 20 th anniversary of the attacks, the country is more polarized, divided and on the verge of civil war than it’s been since th...

  With the outlook for the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spiral downward after an optimistic June and early July, it’s been hard to retain any kind of optimism about our ability to ever rid ourselves of this horrible pandemic, especially given the millions who stubbornly refuse to get vaccinated. That feeling of dread prompted this column, which was published in the September 2021 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, R.I. The two races mentioned were clearly the highlight of my summer --- and the last 18 months. This column was published in the September 2021 edition of Jewish Rhode Island in Providence. THE LINK, as it appears on the paper’s website: https://www.jewishrhody.com/ stories/a-frightening-roller- coaster-ride-for-my-psyche, 13629 ? September is here, and if the last few weeks of summer were any indication, the outlook for getting the pandemic under control, and regaining our old lives back, remains highly uncertain. The weeks leading up to the f...

This guest column by Dr. Brian Patel, the c hief of Emergency Services & Associate Chief Quality Officer Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, appeared Tuesday, Sept. 7 in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA, and it's a powerful argument in favor of vaccinations as a way to protect yourself and others from COVID-19. And it's also a powerful argument in favor of getting vaccinated to actually try to get the pandemic under control, if not to eventually wipe the damned thing out altogether. Here are some of his arguments; read the entire column at the link provided: * The science has been clear. The most effective way to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and to keep our community safe is to get vaccinated. * Massachusetts remains one of the highest vaccinated states in the country. As a result, hospitals in the state are not seeing the same overwhelming numbers of COVID-19 patients which other, much less vaccinated, states are currently. * However, Bristol County, ou...

  The Jewish New Year of 5782 starts tonight (Sept. 6) with the two-day Rosh Hashanah holiday. Here are some wishes for the new year, the second straight year that the high holidays are being held in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. (This column was published Monday, Sept. 6, 2021 in The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA). Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5782, will usher in the High Holy Days or Ten Days of Repentance on the evening of Monday, Sept. 6, with the New Year being observed on the next two days. That will be followed by the holiest time in the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur, an intense 24-hour period of fasting, prayer and reflection, from sundown Wednesday, Sept. 16 to sunset Thursday, Sept. 17. For the second straight year, this solemn period will be occurring during the modern-day biblical plague that we’ve been dealing with for the last 18 months. The coronavirus pandemic has so far killed more than 642,000 Americans and more than 4...