News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've been canning, freezing, drying, and eating all the garden produce we can this week. It's that season of bounty, and the fact that classes start Monday gives extra motivation to put up our food.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays on compliance, bourbon tourism, and sequoias.
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Mark Botts explains why he grows frustrated when he hears coaches or parents excuse sloppy play in youth sports by declaring that it doesn't matter because the point is that the kids "have fun": "Competing to your best ability, according to good training, and not winning is still respectable; such failures mark much of our existence. Our calling is not to be victorious but to be faithful. In contrast, competing with an indifferent or sluggish hand is disrespectful."
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Fred Albert Dane reviews Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America and warns that some of today's efforts to bolster racial justice rely on the same flawed definitions that earlier generations used to excuse oppression: "Problems of definition persist under the new order of things, however. There is still no central race bureau, but there is no shortage of guidelines and administrative decisions trying to find the boundaries between preferred races and non-preferred ones."
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Nadya Williams invites us to reevaluate our view of politicians as a class: "What if our expectations of politicians whom we mock or despise are simply unrealistic and guided by the standards of this world? The faith of some regular Americans in their ability to achieve social reform already amazed de Tocqueville in the 1830s. But this mindset, flowing so naturally from the much-lauded Protestant work ethic lulls us into this optimistic feeling that somehow we can just muscle our way to a perfect solution or compromise, if only we work hard."
This summer I read David McCullough’s The Pioneers to help fill out my knowledge of this region’s history. I'm looking forward to reading more of the books of this historian and master writer who grew up down the road in Pittsburgh. I learned much about the settlement of the Ohio in the early years of the new nation and the role that Pittsburgh played as the portal to the Ohio River. McCullough’s narrative focuses on the leadership of the Reverend Manasseh Cutler in getting the settlement authorized and coordinating its logistics. During his first visit, in 1788, Cutler preached a rousing sermon to the struggling settlers, meditating on the conditions for enjoying liberty:
Some serious Christians may possibly tremble for the Ark, and think the Christian religion in danger when divested of the patronage of civil power. They may fear inroads from licentiousness and infidelity, on the one hand, and from sectaries and party divisions on the other. But we may dismiss our fears, when we consider that truth can never be in real hazard, where there is a sufficiency of light and knowledge, and full liberty to vindicate it.
Such is the present state of things in this country, that we have just ground to hope that religion and learning, the useful and ornamental branches of science, will meet with encouragement, and that they will be extended to the remotest parts of the American empire. . . . Here we behold a country vast in extent, mild in its climate, exuberant in its soil, and favorable to the enjoyment of life. . . . Here may the Gospel be preached to the latest period of time; the arts and sciences be planted; the seeds of virtue, happiness, and glory be firmly rooted and grow up to full maturity.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro