In A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young,” the fifth stanza ends with the line “And the name died before the man.” Housman speaks of those many athletes whose feats came and went and whose names disappeared in the dust of time. Not so with former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris, who made arguably the most memorable play in football, a play known for a half century as “The Immaculate Reception” after the conception of Mary.


Franco’s name, frozen in acrylic beneath his bust in the football hall of fame, has outlasted the man; his deeds on the turf carried him to Canton and memorialization. And few football fans, even younger fans, can say they never saw a rerun of that famous catch. At the end of this week of Franco's death, his team, the Steelers removed by two generations of players, and their opponents, the Raiders, intend to play an anniversary game honoring that catch. Franco, needless to say, but voiced by many anyway, will not be there.


At his funeral, we will see an enactment of Housman’s line in the second stanza, “Today, the road all runners come,/Shoulder-high we bring you home.” Carried on the shoulders of teammates either actually or figuratively those many years ago at the end of a game he won in spectacular fashion, he will once again be carried “home.” And the town itself will become “a stiller town” now that he has reached the ultimate end zone.


Franco, in my personal experience, always seemed to care about people. When my daughter represented her parochial elementary school because she won the Readathon, Franco, who attended the award ceremony for all the Readathon winners, patiently posed with each child as parents, awed by him and proud of their children, snapped photos. Meeting him by chance in her adult life, she found him to be patient and friendly, as though nothing else was important save that chance meeting. My younger son had a similar experience after Franco came to our hometown for a football awards dinner. Recently, that same son met Franco at an event to which they both were invited, with Franco once again acting as though nothing was more important than that moment in time and space.


In posing over the years for those many pictures with fans and their children, Franco did in each encounter what so many have done over the past half century, stopped time by hitting “pause” on the video to see that catch. Anyone who has ever landed at the Pittsburgh airport has seen alongside a statue of George Washington and Nelly Bly the moment of the catch captured in the figure of Franco Harris with outstretched arms scooping up the ball before it hit the turf. Good company for Franco, George and Nelly. Franco, like the other two, has come to symbolize the area that harks back to Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt, Fort Necessity, Braddock’s grave, and the confluence of rivers. Franco personifies the area now as much as the country’s founding father and a woman who was as much as surveyor of the human landscape as Washington was a geographical surveyor.


I find it interesting that Mary has become associated with football. At the end of close games, quarterbacks launch “Hail Mary” passes to the end zones in hopes of a miraculous catch, each successful one becoming an analog of Franco’s Immaculate Reception. But few of those miraculous catches carry their meaning beyond the fandom of a particular team. Franco’s catch seems to transcend all; it belongs to city, region, era, and league. It was the birth of a championship team. The Christmas Eve memorial game gives evidence of that. I don’t recall the league memorializing a single historical play with a special televised game. And that it comes on Christmas Eve…


Think about it for a moment. Mary, whose conception was deemed immaculate gave birth in a humble setting in what has become as enduring an event as humans have recorded in art, architecture, and culture. That moment is memorialized every year throughout the world. The celebration of that “miraculous” catch is primarily an American matter, but even international visitors who land at the airport can’t help but notice the statue of Franco.


Franco, the great teams he had in support, and that catch have become indicative of American sports legend. But I prefer to remember him as a public figure with genuine patience in a fast-paced world. Yes, the statue and Hall of Fame bust memorialize him; the repeated showing of that catch does so, also. And the fiftieth anniversary game will capture the memory for a new generation of fans and athletes as older fans watch in nostalgia. But I prefer to remember Franco as one posing for a picture with a little girl, speaking to young football players at a banquet in a small town, and stopping to talk during chance meetings with my children in their adulthood as though no other matters weighed on his schedule. When Franco was with people, he was truly with them, attentive and kind, patient always with fans who associated their lives with his team, that catch, and the subsequent years of football dominance.


And while it’s inevitable that Franco’s catch and life will probably not endure as long as Mary’s immaculate birth and her eventual delivering a baby in a stable, both his catch and life will last as long as people play American football, go to Canton’s Hall of Fame, or pass though Pittsburgh’s airport. To have a moment in one’s life depicted in a statue placed next to George Washington’s statue reveals the honor afforded to Franco by the people of Pittsburgh. Would that any one of us could be so honored for a momentary accomplishment and an excellent career, or for a life marked by patience for others.


The most appropriate memorial to Franco is for each of us to freeze the moment of every encounter, to be with the person next to us as though there is nothing more important or pressing. Make every encounter a Franco encounter.

Mr. S. and Mr. H. talk.


Mr. S.: The thought occurred to me that context is everything.


Mr. H.: Sure, especially if you consider that the Universe is the context. Then, yes, context is everything. It’s all there is. Did you ever consider the corollary that everything is context?


Mr. S.: But I was thinking smaller than that. I know the Universe is the overriding context—and don’t even bring up that there might be other universes where the context is different; I was thinking more historically. Slavery in America, for example, existed in the context of a history of slavery, from ancient to modern times, or, in the case of America, until the Emancipation Proclamation abolished the practice. Of course, slavery still exists though many don’t seem to acknowledge it. In that historical context, however, I suppose most people who were born in the American South saw slavery as the “natural order of things,” maybe as a hierarchy of life they tied to their interpretation of the Bible. Slavery in America began in an era when many European Christians believed that both the distance from the mythical Garden of Eden and descent from Noah’s son Ham distinguished “humans” from “savages.”
    Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan. Hold on a minute…Let me look…yes, here it is in Genesis chapter 9: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” At the time of the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s, that passage had come to mean racial differences determined a hierarchical human totem pole. Ham’s offspring were thought to be darker skinned and to live farther from that Garden of Eden.


Mr. H.: Sorry. Catch me up on that. It’s been a long time since I heard the story of Ham.


Mr. S.: Well, a good example of the belief lies in the story of Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle, the ship famous for carrying Charles Darwin around the world. FitzRoy held that concept of “inferior humans” before, during, and even after the famous voyage. For the bright, but fundamentalist captain, Noah’s outcast son spawned generations of savages, including the denizens of Tierra del Fuego, four of whom FitzRoy tried to “christianize” by taking them to England, dressing them in British clothes, and sending them to school. The proof of their innate savagery lay for FitzRoy when one of them, Jemmy Button as he was called, returned to his native land, where he immediately went back to his “primitive ways,” shunning the education and the fashion of the British. That attitude of condescension based on the context of Ham’s descendants was pervasive among 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century Europeans. It certainly played a role in FitzRoy’s beliefs and actions.
    
Mr. H.: So, you are saying the context of both religion and culture was a driver of enslavement.


Mr. S.: Yes, but I really wanted to make a different point. I want to stress the significance of the context in which millions of humans lost their personal freedom. And I could point out other contexts that drove people to believe and act as they have.


Mr. H.: Makes some sense. Let me guess. There’s a lesson in all this.


Mr. S.: It’s not a difficult lesson to see. Context is everything. If I had been born in the American South in the early nineteenth century, I would probably have followed the belief of the day. Oh! I know. You want to tell me that anyone who was born then and there had a choice. But I would counter with today’s examples of gang members reared in inner cities without father figures, educated—or rather kept in ignorance—by failing public schools in economically depressed neighborhoods, and taught that they are victims. Sure, some of them break free from that context, but most don’t; thus, the many crimes and murders that disproportionately plague that inner city culture. It would be prideful of me to claim that I would have been the exception, the one who could break free from the context of southern culture in the era of slavery. And yes, I know that there were southerners who funneled people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. I just don’t know, given the context of the twenty-first century that I would have been one given the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the South. Can I truly understand a context when I am inside it? Can I truly understand it when it is part of who I am? 


Mr. H.: You have me thinking. I guess I could break down my own life into various contexts. I see that some people live almost exclusively in the context of political ideologies; some, in the context of religious beliefs; and others, in the context of some a like climate change or on rights based on identity. And I can’t go without mentioning the contexts of family, job, and health. I mean, look what some people do in the context of a chronic or terminal illness.


Mr. S.: I suppose you missed all those contexts associated with suicide, murder, and even war.


Mr. H.: I did, thanks. Plus, I failed to mention that contexts can be external or internal. Take all those riots in Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis, D.C., and…just take all those riots. People rioting in one place because of something or someone in another place—externally driven by the context of an event or a statement and internally driven by some need to loot and destroy. Look at what just happened in Iran, where women acted in the context of the “morality police” killing Masha Amini. Look at Russians leaving their country en masse because of Putin’s ill-advised war in Ukraine. There’s one, by the way! Look what Sweden and Finland did in response to the context of that invasion.


Mr. S.: Hmmnnn. Now that I think of it, telling children to see their lives in the framework of contexts might be a good move if they can be convinced that they are not victims of context. No doubt many teen suicides result from a belief that context is Everything; yet, the contexts of so many teen suicides are probably as limited in scope as mean girls shunning or shaming, bullies harassing, or a family member’s leaving or dying.


Mr. H.: Each of us could benefit every moment we understand the context of our actions.


Mr. S.: Where have you been? Isn’t that what mindfulness is all about, knowing the context of one’s thoughts and actions?


Mr. H.: I guess so. Mindfulness is context awareness now that I come to think of it. I’m going home to think about the contexts of my life.


Mr. S.: You’re welcome.

Desperation is dangerous. It limits the search for solutions. The desperate take ill-advised chances. You can see desperation’s effects in children abandoned at borders during the current Great Migration that historians generations from now will be able to assess. You can see its effects in the United States as millions surge toward Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. You can see its effects in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and even South Korea, where Russians have fled to avoid conscription into Putin’s increasingly more desperate battle that initially drove millions of desperate Ukrainians to migrate. You can see it in the diaspora of Venezuela, Syria, and Northern Africa. You can see it in Iran and in China, where oppressive governments impose the most restrictive laws. Just about everywhere you look, you can see desperation and its effects.


Individuals have long painted themselves into corners from which they see no hope for extrication. Nowadays, whole populations multiply what individuals have done: Take ill-advised chances. You can hear the desperation of Russian soldiers in intercepted phone calls to their loved ones at home; you can see how desperation has driven Russian soldiers to revolt and risk summary execution; you can hear it in the voices of Russian pundits that keep broaching the subject of nuclear war, the most ill-advised of all desperate acts humans have ever contemplated. Desperate times, indeed!


It’s now a world fraught with desperation, but it might be no more so than in centuries prior to the pandemic, World War I, and World War II. There have always been wars, have always been people conscripted into military engagements that held no personal value for them, and there have always been evil leaders running bad governments that suppressed their own people as all could witness even in the “free world” during the pandemic and as a constant in socialist and communist countries since their inception.


Desperation has long been a personal and social malady. Prior to its widespread proliferation through media, desperation spread by word of mouth. Today, it spreads its shadow overnight as social and mainstream media convince more people that they are desperate, that they have either backed themselves into an inextricable corner or been backed into that corner by some group or movement. Even governments enhance desperation’s spread. Take Putin’s gathering a soccer stadium full of Russians to announce in a televised speech Russia’s “special operation” to protect itself from supposed Nazis in Ukraine and from evil NATO members that seek to destroy the “motherland.” The cheering crowd in that stadium did not seem to recognize that they were backing themselves into a corner of desperation until months after the event, when body bags began showing up in villages and young men, conscripted to become cannon fodder, began calling home from the Front. Now, almost a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the world hears desperate Russian spokesmen talking about a greater likelihood of “going nuclear.”


Commonsense advises us to plan every paint job. Commonsense tells us to anticipate a way out before we paint a floor. And commonsense reveals that how we begin a project determines how we end it.*


Every family and every teacher who has encountered desperate people doing desperate acts should be motivated to include one very important lesson in every child’s curriculum: How to paint a floor from wall to door.




*Those who vote into power people who favor socialist and Marxist governments fail to plan their “paint jobs.” One need only look at the desperation of those who allowed socialist and communist governments to dictate how to paint their “floors.” One need only look at the historical migrations from “rooms” painted from door to corner.


            From Inside Out


    I painted the floor from outside in,
    Not knowing how I should begin.
    And now I find myself quite trapped
    Because my future was not mapped.
    If there’s a lesson all should know
    As they live and as they grow,
    It’s that for all the downcast mourners
    The world comprises many corners,
    And none provide an easy respite,
    They make, instead, the cornered desperate.
    “If I were you,” the wiseman said,
    “It’s best when people plan ahead
    “And paint the room from inside out,
    “Escape is then beyond a doubt.”

It seems to me that today’s Administration operates on reasons that lack underlying Reason. An example lies in the US government’s southern border policy—or lack thereof—where so many hundreds of thousands have crossed into the country illegally that to even speak of a “border” is an engagement in myth. Did I say hundreds of thousands? I mean over a couple million with the projection of millions more over the course of the next two years. Maybe the Administration has reasons for eliminating the most basic geographical description of a country: A political entity with geographical boundaries that separate it from either other countries or unclaimed wilderness. This, emphatically THIS, is where a country ends, and all within THIS boundary IS the land owned by the body politic. For the Biden Administration, in contrast, there is no distinction between “within” and “without” the nonexistent border. The “body politic” includes anyone who wants to be included, to the exclusion of the rules laid down by the previously defined body politic.


If one asked the current American Administration for the logic behind the open border, he would be disturbed by the lack of an answer. The head of DHS, questioned by congressmen, simply says, “The border is secure.” Of course, anyone with eyes can see the videos of caravans of mostly Central and South Americans—some of which contain identified terrorists— and anyone who lives in the many border towns and on ranches in Texas knows the reality of the uncontrolled immigrant invasion. In a purely empirical way, “reasonable” people know that the border is not—and this is irrefutable by the numbers—secure. Whatever the Administration’s reasons might be for refusing to uphold the laws of the land, the historically demonstrable will of the body politic, those reasons lack any semblance of Pure Reason. Or maybe not. Maybe the Administration operates on some a priori, or some axiomatic, thinking in which their assumptions exist in a world or on a level of Pure Reason that many Americans are just too incapable of understanding. Maybe the Administration operates in the realm of an inductive end product, some foreknown result upon which one can say, "See, we told told you we were right all along." It would be the same as completing a featureless puzzle and finding out afterward that, "Yes, we got all the pieces together properly. And, yes, you didn't know it, but we had our reasons for putting the pieces together because we knew beforehand the ultimate result."

But, of course, if you ask what the unfinished puzzle will look like, you won't get an answer. 

All of us have “reasons” for doing what we do and believing as we do. In many instances, the reasons fail the test of more encompassing Reason. That is, what we believe to be reasonable does not attain any unity with what is real and irrefutable. I might dream that I own a mansion, but upon waking, find that I live in a cave, and any attempt in my waking hours to unify the cave and the mansion fails utterly. I cannot make reality from that which is not real. I cannot say an insecure border is secure and simply will it to be so. Reasons can defy Reason. Dreams can be mistaken for reality. Caves can be mistaken for mansions. But when unrealities replace realities in the mind, then no judgment on what is real is valid. 


So, in circling back to the current Administration’s “reasons” for an insecure border, any reasonable person should ask whether Biden, Harris, and the Cabinet, plus, seemingly all the Democratic senators and all but one of the Democratic congressmen, simply believe that what they say is manifested in what is real. Do they operate on a priori knowledge? Some ultimate and irrefutable Reason that underlies their reasons? Do they believe they have an axiom on which all their border policies stand just as geometric reasoning and proof rely on the fundamental axioms?


And if they cannot define their reasons in the context of irrefutable Reason, do the members of the Biden Administration and all their compliant supporters—some eighty million of them if we consider their voting supporters—require empirical evidence that the border is not secure. Do they need more fentanyl deaths than the tens of thousands already accumulated as tragic consequences of an unsecured border? Do they need to have a personal experience, such as a child’s being assaulted by an illegal immigrant criminal? Do they need to experience a personal tragedy like the many acts of violence perpetrated on both abused immigrants and victimized American citizens to question their “reasons”? Obviously, that truckload of 51 dead migrants suffocated near San Antonio in the locked truck was meaningless. Or, did I miss the Administration's empathetic response?  


Probably. Recall what I have said repeatedly: What is not personal is meaningless. To which I'll add "unless it is empirical." The Administration, composed as it is of humans capable of feeling, has, it seems no empathy for the affected. The Administration’s undefined “reasons” for exacerbating the tragedies of crime and overdoses have no personal connection to realities. Is the Administration of one mind that America is “not defined by borders"? And do each of the Biden Administration’s supportive politicians hold this idea of a borderless country as an axiom even as all of them refuse to take the locks off their personal property or to remove the doors and open the windows of their houses? What is not personal is meaningless; but if one of them were to experience the same kinds of losses experienced by victims of illegal criminals, well, then...


Are the Administration’s reasons for its actions sounding the death knell of personal property? Is this a step on their path to complete socialism and a one-world society? And do the members of the Administration somehow see themselves as separate from the rest of the body politic? Do they comprise a group exempt from tragedies of loss of freedoms, loss of property, and even loss of life? Is this the group that reasons inductively, assuming as they do that they will attain some unified world of peace, love, and harmony, where, with the exception of their own stuff, all will freely share equally with any and all others what they have gained through their personal efforts?


The Biden Administration might have “reasons,” but it has not demonstrated it has Reason--or commonsense.

In a short verse, Bertolt Brecht writes,


I need no gravestone, but
If you need one for me
I wish the inscription would read:
He made suggestions. We
Have acted on them.
Such an epitaph would
Honor us all.


To alter that for this website, I write modestly:


I wish the inscription would read:
"He pondered life. We
Pondered what he pondered."
Such an epitaph would
Honor all who ponder.

Unfortunately, thinking doesn't necessarily lead to efficacious acting as I infer from Brecht's "suggestions"; in fact, it doesn't necessarily lead to any action. It can, in numerous instances, lead to inimical acting, as in the denial of rights and freedoms and even life perpetrated under the "thinking" of Marxists and socialists in the last 150 years and in the enslavement of millions of others under pre-nineteenth-century ideas about human value. But motivating others to think is the first step in getting them to act in ways that can be self-efficacious. There's no promise, of course, and no guarantee of benefits. People do what they do with or without forethought. Nevertheless, if I cannot be known for inspiring action as Bertolt Brecht desired for his legacy, then I desire to be be known for inspiring others to seek insights in the hope that their thoughts will be both self-efficacious and beneficial to others. 

​What would you want to see on your gravestone?    

Are you a middleman? Middlewoman? Politically correct “Middleperson”? Are you concerned about what such “middle-people” think? Here’s why I ask.


In his1969 book The Truth of Poetry, Michael Hamburger makes this point: “The vast body of critical and biographical literature about Baudelaire points to another development that is very much part of the situation of poets later than he; I mean the disproportion between the demand for poetry itself and the demand for literature about poetry. Very few, if any, serious poets since Baudelaire have been able to make a living out of their work; but thousands of people, including poets themselves, have made a living by writing or talking about poetry”( 2) [Bear with me a moment longer, because here’s the conclusion] “This anomaly--paralleled in many ways, as it is, by economic developments conducive to a proliferation of middle-men in all trades and industries—has not only produced conscious or unconscious reactions apparent in the political commitments of several outstanding modern poets, but has also affected the very substrate of their work.” *


Say what? It’s simple. We have more middlemen than we have doers. Take the annual State of the Union Address every President gives to Congress. The President speaks, and then afterward a host of others chime in about what he said, interpreting his words for the rest of us as though we were incapable of listening, understanding, and reacting. Or take a football game. Do you really need a commentator to tell you that So-n-So just threw a pass to a teammate? Or that a long run for a touchdown was a long run for a touchdown? Do you really need the incessant chatter of interpreters?


There was a brief experiment by one of the networks years ago. The televised game had no commentators. There were football players playing the game and a crowd making noise in the background. No comments. None. Zilch. The viewer was on his own, his eyes and ears his only guide to what was happening. I saw that game. At first it was a bit unnerving. I had grown accustomed to the voices of “expert” analysts telling me what I had been watching, explaining to me what I already knew. I had become used to the voices of middlemen.


And that’s what our society largely is. As Hamburger argues, more people—like professors of literature—have made a living off commenting about the works of others than the writers themselves, poets, that is. Of course, famous novelists can make a fortune, but consider the status of poets relegated to giving readings in small groups gathered in the back room of some library on a Tuesday night. Consider the limited sales of poetry books. Yet, there are critics galore who have made their living talking and writing about those few successful poets.


And on the nightly prime-time pundit shows? Well, it’s the same. People interpret others’ words and actions for the audience. It’s as though we are always watching a show like The Voice or America’s Got Talent, all of us constantly awaiting the opinion and judgment of others, the “middlemen” who interpret life for us.


And so, in a society of few doers but more interpreters, do we find that the doers eventually do as the interpreters influence? In short, do those who begin as creative voices end up as self-parodies and as puppets manipulated by those who analyze them? Are all doers awaiting the accolades of winning some “academy award”? Is everyone who becomes well known for a special talent eventually going to succumb to the analyses of “experts” who make their living off that talent?


Make an assessment here: How bound are you to the voices of middlemen? How dependent are you on the analyses of others? Watch the game with the volume turned off. Make your own analysis. Draw your own conclusions. Do your own judging. For your own sake, stop listening to middlemen.


*Hamburger. Michael. 1969. The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s. New York. A Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

The current US President, often apparently at a loss for words (or thoughts), uses “You know the thing” to escape his own mental entrapment. Once said, the thought becomes his communication to all because, well, everyone knows to what he must have been referring. In fact, faulting him for his brain freeze is slightly unfair though largely worrisome. Just about every human being suffers a momentary brain glitch. There’s so much to know and much to communicate, and we might properly assume that the head of the most powerful country has much on his mind. Nevertheless…


That the person called the “most powerful in the world” has brain freezes isn’t as worrisome to me as is his recapitulatory thinking. Mentally the product of an increasingly more Left-leaning Party, the President appears to foster growth on a tree of thought that finds its roots in socialist and special interest soils. His first acts in office demonstrated his philosophical bond to a generation born in fear: Fear of climate change, fear of social rejection, fear of financial insecurity, fear of political incorrectness, fear of labeling, and fear of just about anything that might be described as the successes of others who have forged fortunes from chaos. Or should I say “fear compounded by envy and ignorance”?


Take his closure of that famous Keystone Pipeline as an example of recapitulating the thought of his supposed political base. The pipeline had jumped every environmental hurdle and leapt through every environmental safety hoop. Its opponents had run out of options to halt its completion. It was deemed a safe option for transporting oil, as pipelines all over the world have demonstrated in the absence of sabotage. The pipeline industry had a history of complying with rules for the restoration of land disturbed by pipeline emplacement. The industry is safe and protective. I know this personally because I was part of 18-month study (1987) on right-of-way reclamation run by Argonne National Laboratory for the Gas Research Institute.*


Pipelines can be emplaced without much environmental damage, though as in all right-of-ways, where trees cover the surface, they must be cut. Any flight over eastern United States reveals straight swaths of bared ground through forests, where power lines carry their electricity from power station to homes. The right-of-ways are a necessary part of modern life and AC power transmission. And they are a necessary part of gas and oil transmission. Would the alternatives of DC power from localized power plants required by Edison’s grid in New York in the nineteenth century or trains from the North Slope in Alaska be as efficient for America’s large urban populations? Would using gas only locally be of any use to the nation at large? No, power and fuel distribution is essential to a large society with a third of a billion people.


But the “you know the thing President” decided that efficiently moving oil through a tried and true system was bad for world climate. Although I cannot say for certain, I’m guessing Biden has never been to a pipeline construction site or read research data on pipeline construction. I’m guessing also, that he seems to think that burning oil imported from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and even Russia has no effect on climate and that by shutting down American energy supplies he has done his job to save the planet. Go figure. Or, should I say, “You know the thing.”


A brain-freeze President isn’t a model of intelligent decision-making. He is rather a puppet of those in that generation fearful of risks, ignorant of physical processes, and manipulated by special interest groups with socialist leanings. A brain-freeze President is not capable of seeing options, as the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan demonstrated. A brain-freeze President cannot anticipate the consequences of his actions except in how they fulfill the wishes of those he believes he must please.


And a brain-freeze President cannot recognize where policy has failed and decisions have weakened a nation both domestically and internationally. Don’t look for rational explanations for policies emplaced by a brain-freeze President because, well, “you know the thing.”


   

*Zellmer, S.D., Taylor, J.D., Conte, D.J., and Gaynor, A.J. 1987. Erosion Control on Steep Slopes Following Pipeline Construction.
The optimum means of inhibiting soil erosion by water on steeply sloped pipeline rights-of-way is a dense vegetative cover. A field study, funded by the Gas Research Institute and conducted by Argonne National Laboratory, compared the environmental effectiveness of eight erosion control methods representing a wide range of economic cost on a 23% slope in southeastern Pennsylvania. Replicated plots were established over the pipeline and on the working side of the ROW after cleanup operations. Precipitation, runoff volume, and sediment yield were measured after major storms for 18 months. Vegetative cover and species composition were determined by the point intercept method at various time intervals during two growing seasons. These data indicate significant differences in sediment yield for some storms due to control method and ROW location. Total plant cover was not significantly influenced by control method. 
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5661684  (Zellmer, S D, Taylor, J D, Conte, D J, and Gaynor, A J. Erosion control on steep slopes following pipeline construction. United States: N. p., 1987. Web.) 


There are about 2,000 research articles on pipeline construction and gas and oil transmission. How many do you think the opponents to the Keystone Pipeline have read?

A conversation between two people, a climate-change alarmist, Mr. A, who attended COP27, and a climate-change doubter, Miss B.


Mr. A.: Wonderful turnout. That 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) was a great step forward. There were 50,000 attendees at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. And the Ocean Pavilion hosted some 15,000 of those attendees.


Miss B.: Whoa, you’re telling me that some 50,000 people traveled to Egypt to discuss climate change? On whose dime? Various governments? Some private benefactors? Fifty thousand! Could you calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the travel?


Mr. A,: Look, it was important to meet to discuss climate change. And we made great progress. For example, the ocean was included in a separate section (XIII) of the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. And paragraph 26 declares the need to address systematic observation and information gaps in our knowledge of the ocean and its role in climate change. The COP people agreed that the ocean plays a role in mitigating a climate disaster.


Miss B.: Sorry, I wasn’t listening. Did you say there were 50,000 attendees? Fifty thousand?…Oh! And I assume they all left feeling enthusiastic about their universal agreement that the oceans are important to the climate systems.


Mr. A.: Well, of course. And people agreed that the oceans should be studied more systematically.


Miss B.: You are aware, aren’t you, that since 70% of the planet is covered by water, the oceans play an integral role in climate? Take ocean currents, for example. Have you noticed that where there are cold currents on the western sides of continents, there are deserts on the continents? Have you noticed that where maritime air enters a continent, it spreads moisture over the continent, making a region like the American Gulf Coast a bit humid by comparison with the American Southwest? Have you noticed that the Gulf Stream affects the climate of Ireland? That the Labrador Current affects the climate of New England? Fifty thousand COP attendees. What are they going to do about ENSO to change the world? What did they accomplish beyond adding carbon to the atmosphere and walking away saying, “See, we care”? You’re telling me that they decided the ocean is important? I’m impressed. Who’d a thunk it? 


Mr. A.: It was important to get everybody in agreement. Everyone there said that we should be doing something.


Miss B.: Yeah. Stop flying around the planet unnecessarily. So, COP28 will be the next big conference. COP29 the one after that; COPAdInfinitum after that. And at each conference people will agree that “something must be done,” probably even if the so called climate crisis doesn’t occur. But then, I guess every weather phenomenon will be labeled a climate issue. You will get on a plane next year and go to another conference where you will have drinks and hors d’oeuvres, maybe some caviar, and definitely some steak—when no one is looking because, as you know, cows add methane to the atmosphere.


Mr. A.: Go ahead, mock. We’re getting the world to recognize a problem and find ways to prevent a disaster.


Miss B.: Really? Find ways? Or are you finding ways to set civilization back centuries? You don’t want fossil fuels? I guess you don’t want the advantages they bring to raising lifespans, supplying hospitals with reliable power, heating and air conditioning the very buildings where the COP conferences are held, and providing the most convenient means of travel the world has ever seen. I guess you’ll ride a horse to the next conference.


Mr. A.: You climate deniers…


Miss B.: “Deniers!” Why, because I see the product of your claiming there’s a climate crisis just because the world might have warmed a degree Celsius over the past 150 years though there also seems to be a “pause” in that warming over the last twenty years? Is more carbon dioxide bad for the crops? Is it really possible to associate weather events, even droughts, with overall climate change? Did the Mayans and Anasazi civilizations suffer long-term droughts because they burned fossil fuels? Is there proof that a warming world will not reverse its own warming as it has many times? Warmer oceans? More evaporation. More evaporation more clouds. More clouds, more sunlight reflected to space and cooler temperatures. More sunspots? Fewer sunspots? 


Mr. A.: But we scientists agree that…


Miss B.: Who agrees. Look at the contradictions in the IPCC reports. Look at the IPCC’s own statements. Hold on; wait, I have one here. Here it is. This is your so called “crisis.” One IPCC executive summary says: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers…Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”


Mr. A.: But 97%…


Miss B.: Come on, we all know that figure of “scientists” or scientific consensus has been debunked, that it is based on a flawed and limited survey and that it even includes “nonscientists” who have been convinced that there’s a crisis. And all the while that you COP attendees worry that something must be done and sign away your potential for individual wealth in the grand redistribution scheme, the Chinese and Indians keep burning fossil fuels in an attempt to achieve economic dominance.


Mr. A.: Look at all the good we have done…


​Miss B.: What? What good? Yes, we now have some alternate energy sources. That’s good, but you haven’t changed any world climate by one iota. Twenty-seven conferences and all I have heard is talk, talk, talk. And it’s always the same “We must act now.” Want to act now? Stop going to conferences all over the planet. Follow Jimmy Carter’s advice. In the depth of winter keep your thermostat at 55. Wear a sweater. You’ll be immensely uncomfortable, but you’ll save energy in the short term. You'll "save" the planet. 


Mr. A.: You just don’t understand. We’re in a crisis.


Miss B.: I think I do understand. We have crisis-level hypocrisy and ineptitude. We have a crisis of money spent on unreliable energy systems. We have a crisis born of belief over skepticism. We have a crisis of the wealthy flying everywhere to tell people not to use the cheap, abundant energy that electrified the civilized world and that all the Third World countries desire. Keep those remote villagers in the dark! Keep them hot in summer and cold in winter. Decrease their growing longevity to pre-Industrial times. Limit their carbon footprint to some small cooking fires. In the meantime, you fly to exotic locations and reap all the benefits of a fossil fueled economy. But, hey, you're saving the planet, right? 


Mr. A.: You’re just impossible…


Miss B.: And that’s your scientific assessment? Hey. Enjoy yourself at COP28 in Dubai. I hear there might be as many as 80,000 delegates. Nothing like holding the event in a cheap Motel 6 along an American Interstate! Eventually, at some distant COP as the population of delegates grows exponentially, just about every other person on the planet will be an attendee. Dubai? Give me a break.

When my youngest child was just three years old, we traveled south for a vacation. Packed into our station wagon, the five of us stopped on a Saturday night in North Carolina, where someone asked where we “were from.” The three-year-old said confidently, “We’re from America.” Today, when that three-year-old, who travels widely as a consultant and speaker, is asked to identify “where he is from,” he typically says, “Pittsburgh.” But he’s not; that is, neither he nor we ever lived within the boundaries of Pittsburgh. Yet, what he says is not a lie; we are, as southwestern Pennsylvanians, as much “from Pittsburgh” as are those who live in the urban center. And for various reasons.


First, like so many others who live near, but not in cities, we identify with an economic center. Second, as in much of the country, we identify with sports teams, specifically with the Steelers and Pirates, and also with a major university football team, the Pitt Panthers. Third, many in the area identify by companies located within or on the periphery of the city. At one time, those companies were the massive steel mills that employed tens of thousands. And at the heart of the downtown district in the pre-and post-WWII, lay a central shopping district with three very large department stores that anchored hundreds of other businesses—all, for the most part, now long gone. Fourth, the city houses the local TV stations and major theaters, as well as museums, major hospitals, research universities, revitalized neighborhoods, and traditional bar and restaurant agglomerations: The South Side, the Strip District, and a number of other popular spots from Shadyside to the North Side. Pittsburgh draws the allegiance of western Pennsylvanians. In that sense, my three-year-old now grown up is “from Pittsburgh.”


Anyway, isn’t it just easier to say “I’m from Pittsburgh” instead of saying, “I’m from some town you never heard of that lies in a region generally known as southwestern Pennsylvania”? Dotted by villages and townships plus some actual “towns” and “boroughs,” the region has one overriding identity: Pittsburgh. And the same, I dare say, can be said for other regions: Chicago, Atlanta, Savannah, etc. When the place where one lives has no national significance, then the closest place with such significance becomes the center.


There is a large body of literature that centers on urban centers. The sociology of cities is replete in hypotheses and theories, some of them purely numerical analyses of why cities use the space they confine and house the people they house. Much of that literature is at best esoteric, using statistical models that do not seem to capture the life of those who live in cities or associate their identities with them.


And that makes me think of an argument I once had with a sociologist. He said, following a model of cities he favored, that medieval European cities were walled with a central large structure, the cathedral. It was that wall and that dominant structure that defined the personality of the people: It’s how they identified as being “from” somewhere. He then argued that the modern city was amorphous, the product of suburban development enhanced by commuting that decentralized life that was once limited to the walkable city neighborhoods. No longer, he argued, could one identify with a city center, a major plaza, or a majestic cathedral.


To which I responded with a single word: Steelers. Not that I might put professional football and a stadium at the heart of a city—though the stadium in Pittsburgh is, in fact, a “heart”—but symbolically, the football stadium and the baseball stadium are both “in the heart” of the city. In other words, whereas my friend saw suburban development as a dissolution of the centripetal forces that make a city a “center,” I saw a cathedral replacement in the symbolic center. That one can easily find as many if not more people focused on a Sunday on the Steelers as are focused on a local cathedral, is indicative that a city is more than a walled space with only those contained within labeled as “from Pittsburgh.” And the “cathedral” of sports casts a shadow over communities far and wide: One can find a “Steeler bar” in Reno, Nevada, and fans of the city’s team in other communities both in and outside the country. Pittsburgh isn’t a walled city. It’s a symbolic center. The stadium is, as St. Peters in Rome is for Catholics, a center that holds.


As the steel mills failed in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods also failed. Where pride in the community declined with a declining population, disrepair became the signature feature punctuated by occasional attempts to revitalize. But a bit too late, I might add. The suburbanization of the region had begun. Yes, the region became physically amorphous by comparison to the city of the pre-and-post-war years, but it had retained a loyalty among the suburbanites so much so that they still identify as being, in the eyes of outsiders, “from Pittsburgh.”


And now, especially after a pandemic and the development of cyberspace, the center is changing again for those once located within city boundaries. Is the concept of a “city” undergoing another change? Remember the emigration of New Yorkers during the pandemic? Will they return physically, or will they reconnect to the city via Zoom or some other cyber mechanism? Do those who leave carry their city-identity with them forever? Is a "brand new Floridian" just an "ex-New Yorker"? 


Pittsburgh still attracts suburbanites because it has retained theaters and restaurants, sports teams and universities, museums and boutique shops. It still runs festivals that attract “outsiders.” But it isn’t the city it was of a half century ago. Yet, in its difference, it somehow still centers identities of western Pennsylvanians and emigrants to other parts of the nation. It is a center that “holds.”


This leads me to ask you, “Where are you from?”

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes, “The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” One might think he was foreshadowing problems we experience with our complex technology, but his focus was government. The same notion that “simple is best” lies at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s thought that “that government that governs least, governs best.”


Of course, a twenty-first century political philosopher might easily argue that the America of Paine and Jefferson differed greatly from America today, so neither expression is applicable to the country—or to any current society. America just has “too many people” for an eighteenth-century ideal. Add globalization, and the notion of a “more simple government” fades to a distant social and political memory as some quaint, but old(e) thought.


Simplicity breeds its own problems, anyway, so its efficacy in the body politic is largely mythical. Thus, the relatively simple American Constitution has undergone tweaking since its inception. And it will continue to undergo nuanced interpretations. I suppose we could also argue that the Ten Commandments also beg reinterpretation in every age and circumstance. Or, take those two Commandments of Christ: Love God; love your neighbor as you love yourself. One need only look at the many Christian denominations, social barriers, and wars to see where those seemingly simple commandments led because of the way they have been interpreted. Neighbor? Yes, but not So-n-So.    


Each of us encounters a struggle between simplicity and complexity in a cycle that makes explaining core values difficult. We might start with a simple ideal only to realize that its manifestation requires a complex of actions based on the realities of daily life. The recent pandemic laid the context for one version of the dilemma that might play out again as wintertime sicknesses spread a shadow over society in 2022 and 2023. Government “officials” are toying again with mandatory masks, for example, and with mandatory isolation and vaccinations. Those solutions bring, as everyone discovered over the past two years, complex responses without guaranteed results and generate their own problems. In a complex world of billions, someone somewhere has to interact with others. Simple rules? Many applications!   


Apparently, though everyone can see a value in simplicity, no one wants to have others impose it. Simplicity is a personal matter, and it lies embedded in our sense of freedom. We can choose to live hermit-like, but we balk at any attempt to impose the hermetic life on us. And whenever we see those “in charge” imposing on others restrictions they do not impose on themselves in blatant hypocrisy, we rebel or we become angry: Why should, for example, a Gavin Newsom have an unmasked dinner at an expensive winery while restaurant patrons around the state have no similar freedom? Why should those who proclaim the evils of fossil fuels and impose restrictions on them be able to jet around the world so proclaiming? Their “simple” solutions apply to you, but not to them. They perceive your life as simple, whereas they perceive their own as complex.


Simplicity is a social ideal whose practice generates contradictions and hypocrisy. When a complex government attempts to impose simplicity on its citizenry, inevitable bad consequences follow. One need only look at the test scores of American students to see how a “simple solution” of widespread “public” homeschooling engendered other problems, complex problems, for individuals.


The threat to individual freedom arises whenever government officials seek simple solutions to complex problems. Their only recourse is reductionism that bespeaks control of the masses—and, with the exceptions of a self-proclaimed “elite class,” the individuals that make up those masses.


Much of the universe appears to run on irony, and that seems especially true of human societies. As governments grew from more simple to more complex, they have sought simple solutions to complex problems. Big government ironically seeks to simplify and in the process makes life more complicated. Look at the number of pages of regulations in any government agency to see how, for example, a simple principle like “clean water” or “clean air” has become encyclopedic in practice, so complex that agencies have multiple “specialists” because no one person or group can handle all in their purview.


And the irony extends to millions who prefer by their vote a more complex government over a more simple one—again in the ironic belief that the Big Government will offer simple solutions. They freely exchange their individual complexity and its freedoms for imposed simplicity that results in an unwanted complexity. In every instance, government-imposed simplicity lies on a path to totalitarianism and greater personal debt with only the “elite” enjoying the freedoms denied the masses. That path is paved with future earnings, as the recently passed “Inflation Reduction Act” will reveal in the payroll of 87,000 new IRS agents that will grow over the next decades and beyond, especially as their eventual pensions mount astronomically. If over the next two decades those agents achieve the current $62,000 average IRS salary, the bill will be at least $100 billion. The complexity of tax collection now includes at least nine categories of government employees whose ranks will swell with the new additions. *


Jefferson and Paine envisioned a government Aeolus, the god of the winds who gave Odysseus a bag that contained unfavorable breezes. With all but a favorable wind bound up, Odysseus could continue his journey home. His crew, thinking that the bag held some treasure they could share, opened it and released the unfavorable winds that blew the ship off course. Big government is out of the bag and blowing the ship of state in whatever direction the many agencies desire, many of them at cross purposes or in redundancies. It’s too late to put the winds back in the bag. What Jefferson and Paine proposed cannot be achieved.


*The Office of Personnel Management lists the following IRS positions:

1. Tax Examining
2. Internal Revenue Agent
3. Information Technology Management
4. Miscellaneous Clerk And Assistant
5. Financial Administration And Program
6. Management And Program Analysis
7. Internal Revenue Officer
8. Criminal Investigation
9. Financial Clerical And Assistance