Take it from somebody who catches Pokémon in Homewood Cemetery: Pittsburgh is a city of Old Money.

Section 14 was developed in 1890 with millionaires in mind, said Jennie Benford, director of programming for the cemetery’s historical fund. By that time, the scale of wealth had changed “beyond what anyone had ever seen in this country,” she said. (P-G, Diana Nelson Jones)

A million bucks back then would be worth about 27 million now, but remember even a lot of the OG millionaires didn’t stop at a million. And the way they made it — well, you know how it involved a lot of fire and blood, but that’s another story.

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Many of us are liable to work with nature, when we can. There being fewer and fewer choices.

As part of a “Come Help or High Water” campaign launched last week, the group is looking to raise $80,000 to eliminate Eagle Lake by building a drainage piping system.

The Allegheny Trail Alliance provided $10,000, and the nonprofit has requested $50,000 from the Allegheny Regional Asset District, leaving an approximate $15,000-$20,000 gap in funding. Allegheny County is a longtime partner with the nonprofit.

“A drainage system will pull water under the ground and then parallel the trail,” Ms. Beichner said. “Water will then naturally find its way to the river.”  (P-G, Lacretia Wimbley)

This is how we have to do things now, with the Old Money. Make the pitch, schmooze some gatekeepers and pass the hat. There are worse systems.  Continue reading →

Politics is getting out-of-hand. Right?

Were I closer to Andrew Carnegie’s winter home, for example, my permission to have an abortion would have just been revoked.

True, I am biologically male. But “stuff happens” and sometimes men find themselves needing to help secure and furnish the costs of an abortion (or “go Dutch”) or arrange for a ride, or actually help a pregnant woman past any anti-choice protestors outside of some clinics, or just generally hold their hand and help them make that parenting decision. We men are not undergoing abortions ourselves, but in most senses they happen due to own actions and impact our own lives, so they’re “ours” as well. And sometimes we experience those abortions to our benefit.

If people start losing dearly held rights, things are going to get volatile.

So, in my capacity as Blogger in Chief at the Pittsburgh Comet, I’m sure I speak for all of Pittsburgh when I say we would welcome any of yinz Southron refugees who find your way up the Ohio River, or who come down from the east over the mountains after having made it up the Atlantic, to live as free men and women again. Bring us barbecue.

But then again, we don’t want to have to deal with chaos and dissolution forever, do we?

When it comes to fascism, this is just one convenient tactic. Eliminating reproductive freedom strikes a chord upon traditionalism, patriarchy and religious majoritarianism, not to mention cruelty in domination for its own sake. It’s a useful whip with which to order society under strongmen.

But fascist excitement is only one of our problems. Peoples have dealt with it before, and they eventually outlast that authoritarian perversion one way or another. Unsettlingly, we are also merely one generation or so into the Dawning of the Interwebs, and “coincidentally” only now entering the Era of Climate Change.

And so it’s hard to think about climate change without reflecting on colonialism and industrialization. Surreality has crept into political life since the bombs dropped and the Cold War began, a recognition that the world is only violently and precariously organized, and could turn on us at any moment. Climate change however reminds us that moment is approaching at ferocious speed, or indeed already past.

So what’s a blogger to do? Here I am, a White, middle-aged man, with an Internet connection. I don’t know to how to stop from getting crushed by our world falling down around us, but I must feign tell you what to do, it’s in the White middle-aged men orientation handbook.

Local politics. Of course! We’ll discover what to do on the global stage by paying heed to politics at its most basic, the nitty-gritty. Elegant, right? And what town could be grittier than Pittsburgh? Our coat of arms bears a fort, which in 1762, White invaders defended by distributing plague-laden blankets against a native siege.

But local politics requires a certain effort. In dealing with these people. Ugh. No, hold on. Let me put on my game face.  Continue reading →