Today at the Editor’s glance: The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. This is the annual meeting when the commission discusses and considers approving its annual social services grants. Those include agreements with: the Early Learning Coalition of Flagler and Volusia ($63,200 to be used as local 6 percent match for federal and state funds to subsidize child care services for eligible at-risk children and children from low income families; the Family Life Center, the county’s only domestic violence shelter, for the total amount of $77,500, plus $50,000 in support services for sexual assault victims; the Flagler County Free Clinic, $60,000, to provide primary care, dental care, and Volunteer Medical Specialty Network services to eligible Flagler County residents, and SMA Healthcare, for $173,300, to support substance abuse and mental health treatment services. The county’s Joyce Bishop, Health & Human Services Director, is presenting the grants. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here.
The University of Florida is conducting an on-line survey on behalf of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to learn more about the use of disposable plastic bags, auxiliary materials and wrappings by Florida residents. The study’s principal investigator is Dr. Tim Townsend from UF and the Sustainable Materials Management Research Laboratory. The survey will be administered on-line using Qualtrics from mid-September 2021 until October 31st, 2021. If you are able to participate in this very important, please visit this link below. Survey link: https://faculty.eng.ufl.edu/timothy-townsend/survey/ … This survey is available to all Florida residents and if you have any questions, please contact Ms. Ashley Ricketts via e-mail at [email protected].
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“Minstrel shows were disgusting, all the more so in how utterly central they were in American entertainment for so very long. But is there no statute of limitations on how long a people will feel actual injury about such a thing? In 2021, there is barely a person alive who attended a minstrel show performed as mainstream, professional entertainment. Even those who may have caught ragtag amateur groups keeping the tradition alive are likely now quite elderly. The idea seems to be that we (relatively) younger Black people and our non-Black fellow travelers are nevertheless so viscerally stung by seeing any manifestation of this bygone tradition that to show dated footage of a white British actor in blackface, as part of an academic colloquy, qualifies as a grievous insult. But I like to think of Black Americans as a people of pride and forward thinking. I miss those qualities in this submission to an insult leveled by perpetrators now very, very dead. And since no one can seriously argue that Sheng’s intent was to revive or exalt the practice of blackface — and not to teach something about the operatic adaptation of a seminal literary work — to treat him as an accessory to those dead perpetrators seems more a kind of performance in itself than a spontaneously felt insult.
-—John McWhorter, “What I See in the Latest Blackface ‘Scandal’,” The New York Times, Oct. 15, 2021.
