Whitcomb: Post-Storm Neighborhood Cohesion; Blocking Off Land; Mexican Mess; Lovers of Lies
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Post-Storm Neighborhood Cohesion; Blocking Off Land; Mexican Mess; Lovers of Lies
“Though a seeker since my birth,
Here is all I’ve learned on earth,
This the gist of what I know:
Give advice and buy a foe.”
— From “A Garland of Precepts,’’ by Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978), American poet (mostly of light verse) and author of children’s books.
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“If parents would only realize how they bore their children!’’
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright and critic
“The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.’’
-- George Washington (1731-1799), “Father of the Nation’’. He wrote this in 1786.
“Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.’’
-- George Gershwin (1898-1937), American composer
Today is the first day of meteorological spring. Meteorological winter comprises the three coldest months – December, January and February.
March 20 is the first day of astronomical spring this year. In any event, hit this link and take the long view:
Do big storms bring neighborhoods together? Well, for a while, as we’re thrown together picking up branches, shoveling out sidewalks, driveways or, in the case of last week’s snow dump around here, entire blocks. Then it can get tiring and claustrophobic as we impatiently seek to get back to “real life” and its duties and pleasures, many of which are dependent on America’s car culture. Americans, after all, are famously impatient.
At least on our block, there seemed to be good spirits on the day after the storm, mostly because of the beauty of the blue sky and whiteness of the still-pristine snow in the crisp air.
Kudos and thanks to public works and other people dealing with last week’s mammoth mess – long, long hours. And special thanks to neighbors who helped my daughter get her little car off a glacier on the East Side of Providence last week.
And now it’s March, famous for its hopes and disappointments weather-wise.
xxx
Sign of techno times: For the first time in its history, on Feb. 24, The Boston Globe didn’t publish a print edition because of the fearsome logistics of trying to get workers to its Taunton printing plant, well south of Boston, and then to try to distribute, by truck and local delivery people, this old-fashioned product amidst a record-setting blizzard. I’m sure that the local and state officials approved: Why snarl up roads?
But I’m sure that the pub would have put out the printed paper, in limited copies, in the days before it had a website, even with a storm as big as last week’s.
Euclidean Land Use
This is the anniversary year of a very important U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in 1926, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty. This decision affirmed that municipalities could impose zoning, much of it rigid, to determine what can and can’t be built by area. It especially set the pattern of setting aside tracts where only housing, most notably single-family, could be built, keeping away stores and other commercial development and manufacturing (even light-assembly operations) and helping to build car dependency and spread suburban sprawl.
(Factories were a lot more polluting and noisy in the 1920’s than now. But even now, there are often very good reasons to keep them at some distance from where people live.)
In its more extreme form, Euclid helped create “snob zoning,’’ in which jurisdictions have reserved large tracts for multi-acre minimum lots for housing the politically powerful affluent, the property tax from whom is alluring.
But the intensifying housing crisis has, thankfully, led some localities to revise their zoning to encourage more multi-family housing within mixed-use development, to, among other things, make shopping and services more accessible. The recent sea change in policies on land use includes reviving old-fashioned town centers with a variety of stores, restaurants, skilled-trades enterprises (plumbers, electricians, etc.), health-care outlets, professional offices, and artisans’ workshops. This would help bring back Americans’ frayed sense of community, worsened, paradoxically (?) by social media.
I myself grew up in a town where you could easily walk or bike to a village center where you could buy most everything you might need. But for the last half-century, you would have had to drive to get most stuff.
But change is difficult, especially when affluent and politically powerful people oppose it, especially when it involves less-affluent people moving close by. Witness the turbulent effort in ritzy Wellesley, Mass., to put 180 apartments on a five-acre parking lot there.
Most people say they favor building more housing, if not near them.
Storing the Juice
This is very happy news.
Maine Public reports that New England's largest standalone energy-storage facility has opened, in Gorham, Maine. It’s helping to improve reliability and stabilize electricity prices across our region.
The project’s more than 150 battery units can store up to a total of 350 megawatt hours of energy.
The facility collects power from the grid during low consumer demand and delivers it when backup electricity is most needed, usually during cold and hot spells. Let’s hope that many more such facilities open soon in our six states, and increasingly take juice from regionally originating energy, be it solar, wind, hydro, hydrogen or other “green energy”.
We Empower Mexican Drug Lords
Kudos to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for leading one of the toughest campaigns in years against her nation’s drug cartels.
The biggest prize this time involved the killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho,’’ who had built his Jalisco New Generation Cartel into the nation’s most powerful criminal group, in a country with many of them. The cartel responded with a wave of shootings, arson and roadblocks across Mexico, and citizens are bracing for more violence ahead, as competing factions seek to fill a partial power vacuum.
As in previous big anti-cartel offensives, the latest Mexican offensive was assisted by intelligence provided by the U.S.
Will President Sheinbaum’s action have a long-term effect? Almost certainly not, because the central source of the seemingly endless drug wars is Americans’ insatiable hunger for hard drugs, U.S. dealers’ lust for money, and the vast supplies of U.S.-made guns and ammunition with which we arm Mexican and other foreign drug gangsters.
What They Want to Hear: Eternal Epstein
I think that plenty of Trump fans realize at some level that most of what the malignant narcissist says can be quickly proven to be lies, but the lies are music to their ears. And anyway, a demagogue depends on followers’ willful suspension of disbelief.
But even many of his most devoted cultists must have tired of the one hour and 47 minutes of bombastic baloney and bigotry in his speech last Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, since Trump lies about just about everything, we should know how to respond to his denials on this:
Trump reflects the moral standards, and ignorance, of tens of millions of Americans. But sadly for them, they weren’t handed a vast parental fortune, and the guidance of the likes of Roy Cohn, with which to batter their way into vast power and satisfy their dreams of wide-open avarice.
But then, as the Third Reich collapsed into bombed-out ruins in 1945, many Germans continued to revere him.
Why have European governments been tougher about going after public officials involved with Jeffrey Epstein than has the U.S. government? Simple: They’re much less corrupt than Trump’s regime.
xxx
I’ve been partly irritated and partly amused when AI offers to take over what I’m writing and homogenize it into AI speak. Now, maybe it would create prose more pleasing to many readers than what I come up with, but does this presage the widespread death of individuality in writing?
xxx
Are New Englanders unfriendly to newcomers? More generally, are they too reserved? I’d argue that they just tend to be less superficially friendly than people in much of America, while their long-term relationships tend to be stronger.
Reading this article got me thinking about this: