Cleveland: A Fifty Year Plan

 "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun." THE NAPOLEON of NOTTING HILL By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

I long looked very close at other places far from where I come.  The issues presented themselves in different lights.  Not being familiar with something makes it novel.  I have always paid extra attention to novelty.  As I am here now longer than I will be here I have come to believe that novelty can be cultivated.  Returning home after a long time away I looked on everything I knew the best with new eyes.  It doesn't really matter where you are as long as you are home.

Our leaders have some vision.  They see the positives of Ohio.  We are well located.  It makes sense to put data centers in the Midwest.  It does not make sense to subsidize them.  We can argue for a long time about this, but we must agree that those well laid plans have gone off the rails.  Local news reports decades ahead of raised bills for electricity.  We are far more valuable than our leaders believe.  An honest audit might in the end find oil too expensive to burn.  We may never agree upon that but I would like to talk about those things that we can agree.  For example, the artificial intelligence industry does not need hard working Ohioans subsidizing it.

Why a fifty year plan?  Because it is a place to start and something large that I can tell is still human scale.  I am fifty five years old and my Granny would have been one hundred five.  There is a certain symmetry that enter my thoughts.  The policies of the past have  built an infrastructure of stagnation, large free standing monuments to the politics of division and poverty. 

Cleveland–Akron–Canton, Combined Statistical Area 

Cleveland and Ohio have underestimated their own weight.  If you ask me without Cleveland there is no Akron.  Without them there is no Ohio.  There are now technically bigger cities in Ohio, but there are no other more important ones. 

The population of the city of Cleveland peaked in the 1950s and has been declining my entire life.  The CSA  continued to grow for the next fifty years.  This is not something we generally think about in the rust belt.  So what does the CSA mean? essentially there is a way you could walk from Cleveland to Akron and never see the city end.

We make plans based on artificial borders and we love our home rule in Ohio.  There are newer parts of the country that do things differently.  But it is important to understand the deep time of Ohio.  We are doing things others do not simply because we always have.  They don't because they never have.  Portland set growth limits.  Ohio set no limits.

But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman. THE NAPOLEON of NOTTING HILL

We come from before time was time.  Above where I sit was ice more than a mile thick.  If you can imagine that you can imagine something of eternity.  The bed rock did not debate the glacier it was ravaged.  We have some of the best glacier grooves in the world that finally put any question to end.

Funny story about those world class glacier grooves: we destroyed more than half of them before we knew their value.  They had other uses as everything does.  That is our region for you,  Something even bigger than the CSA.  Scientists trek to the Lake Erie islands to show these grooves.  They shoot at many angles that give them something of their original grandeur, but what is left is like nothing else to observe.

In the quarries you can walk on beaches hundreds of millions of years old.  I have this fossil that I would best describe as a proto-foot.  No one knows where the first foot was created.  The largest of monsters regularly pulled from our shale.  Certain things can only be done in certain places.  We do not have everything.  You will never find a dinosaur bone.  Our rocks are older and newer then them.  For three hundred million years Ohio just washed away.

[possible closer, whole paper: Kipling — "What should they know of England who only England know?"]