Monthly Archives: March 2019

Too Much in the Wrong Places

Posted on by

Since 1950, humans have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. Nearly all of it is still in the environment, said University of Colorado biogeochemist Michael SanClements yesterday, during a presentation at the Rocky River Public Library.

“We have progressed from the stone age to the bronze age to the iron age and are now in the plastic age,” said SanClements, who discussed the history of plastic which he researched while writing his book, Plastic Purge. In the book and at yesterday’s talk, SanClements described the evolution of global society from one where consumer products were made of durable materials like glass, wood, ceramics, and metal to a throw-away society characterized by the proliferation of single-use plastic.

Half of all plastic produced today is used to make single-use packaging, SanClements said. These materials are used for an average of twelve minutes, but they last essentially forever. While plastic fragments, it never breaks down completely, and after 70 years of increasing plastic production, the material is ubiquitous in our environment, with uncertain effects on human health.

Single-use plastics, like grocery bags, water bottles, and other types of packaging are an example of an ugly, unnecessary use of plastic, said SanClements. But plastic itself is not the issue. As a material, plastic is versatile, inexpensive, lightweight, durable and appropriate for countless beneficial uses, including medical devices, insulation, tools, aircraft components, auto parts, and others.

“Plastic is a powerful, important product,” said SanClements. “But it’s a lot like an invasive species. We have too much in the wrong places.”

And one of the wrong places is the world’s oceans, which currently contain an estimated 51 billion pieces of plastic. “This is a global problem,” said SanClements, “and as a wealthy nation we have a responsibility to help other nations.”

Author Michael SanClements at the Rocky River Public Library

Worldwide, less than ten percent of plastic is recycled, said SanClements. In the United States, the percentage is smaller, especially since China stopped accepting U.S. plastic for recycling in 2018. Plastic needs to be sorted properly and be free of contaminants to be recyclable. Single-stream recycling programs in the United States, which allow people to mix various kinds of materials in single containers, increase contamination and make sorting much more difficult and expensive.

Material will be recycled only if there is a market for it, and right now, the U.S. economy has not developed enough markets to justify large-scale plastic recycling. Some plastic is burned in incinerators to recapture the energy contained in the petroleum-based products, but an estimated 85 percent of plastic used in the United States ends up in landfills or the environment.

As a society we need to differentiate between valuable uses of plastic and unnecessary, harmful uses, he said. He also believes we should make a greater effort to recover the energy stored in plastics by increasing our use of trash-to-energy facilities.

Single-use plastics are obvious candidates for replacement by other materials, he said. Sixty years ago, we had no single-use plastics, but we still had a consumer society that provided all the essentials for middle-class life. Solutions for replacing single-use plastic with other materials already exist, he said.

Reusable cloth grocery bags, refillable bottles for water and coffee, glass jars, paper bags, beeswax wrap, bars of soap, and reusable mesh bags for produce are a few of the simple alternatives that are readily available, affordable, and convenient, said SanClements.

“Nothing makes less sense than wrapping a cucumber that will last a week in plastic that will last a millennium,” he said.

March 22, 2019

From a High Place

Posted on by

It was the grandest of grand openings, but it wasn’t the beginning of an era, it was the end.

On June 28, 1930, 2,500 of Cleveland’s most prominent citizens gathered to celebrate the opening of the city’s massive Union Terminal complex. Centered on the two-level Union Terminal Station and crowned by the 52-story Terminal Tower, the complex was the largest mixed-use, multi-building development in the United States. New York’s Rockefeller Center – similar in concept but greater in execution – wouldn’t be completed until later in the decade.

Vintage postcard of Cleveland’s Terminal Tower and Union Terminal complex

The grand opening was the culmination of more than twenty years of effort by the railroad-owning Van Sweringen brothers, who hoped to replace Cleveland’s five separate railway stations with a single, lavish terminal. As planning progressed, their vision expanded, and they ultimately proposed a project that would reshape the face of the city. The six gleaming buildings that comprised the complex, with a seventh under construction and an eighth planned, confirmed Cleveland’s position as one of the most prosperous cities in America.

Today, as Cleveland struggles with all of the ills associated with declining manufacturing, racial discord, public corruption, and intractable poverty, it is hard to recall just how esteemed the city was in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Author Lincoln Steffins famously called Cleveland “the best-governed city in the United States.” And, for a time, the city was well-governed. City schools, the police department, the public library, and many civic and cultural institutions were nationally respected. Elliott Ness had been the safety director, John D. Rockefeller started Standard Oil in the city, and Cleveland industrialist Mark Hanna had obtained the presidency for his protégé, William McKinley.

From the time of the Civil War, transportation links, industry, and immigration fueled Cleveland’s ascent as a manufacturing powerhouse. The city’s combination of steel-making, auto manufacturing, metal casting, and paint production provided jobs and profits. From 1900 to 1910, the city’s population grew from 381,000 to 560,000. By 1930, as revelers gathered to celebrate the opening of the Union Terminal complex, the city’s population had reached 900,000, making Cleveland the sixth largest city in America and the third largest metropolitan area, trailing only New York and Chicago.

The Union Terminal complex was a gargantuan, mixed-use, multi-modal transportation hub, built before anyone knew what multi-modal meant. The complex accommodated long-distance passenger trains, interurban trains, rapid transit trains, taxis, buses, and private automobiles. The project replaced 35 acres of mostly deteriorating structures, displacing 15,000 residents and countless businesses.

At its opening, the complex included six interconnected buildings: the station, a hotel, and four office buildings, including the Terminal Tower, which would remain the tallest building outside New York City until 1967. A department store was under construction and a massive post office was planned. It was a city-within-a-city, where more than 10,000 people worked and many thousands more passed through each day.

The project itself embodied many of the elements that made Cleveland great. Immigrants fueled the city’s industrial rise, and thousands of immigrant laborers worked on the Terminal complex. Excellent transportation links via the lake, the Ohio Canal, and numerous railroads made Cleveland a great commercial center, and the Union Terminal complex was at heart a transportation nexus. As the city itself was originally founded as a real estate venture, the Union Terminal was also intended originally to support the Van Sweringen’s property enterprise in Shaker Heights by linking the new suburb to the city center by rapid transit.

Terminal Tower and Terminal Complex today (photo: Aerial Agents)

So, there was plenty to celebrate, as the $179 million project prepared to open.

But there were dark clouds on the horizon. Probably no one enjoying the glitz of the grand opening luncheon suspected that the Union Terminal’s opening would prove to be the high-water mark of Cleveland’s century-long rise. And not one of the many distinguished speakers hinted that Cleveland’s glory days were numbered.

A perceptive observer might have recognized a few ominous portends. The stock market crash of October 1929 had already shaved 33 percent off the market’s value. The number of unemployed workers in the city had jumped from 40,000 in 1929 to more than 100,000 in 1930, leaving more than a third of the city’s workers without jobs. During the 1920’s, passenger railroad traffic nationwide had dropped by 45 percent. Mass immigration had been ended by the First World War and anti-immigration legislation. City residents were moving to the suburbs in increasing numbers and manufacturing output had begun to decline. The many engines of Cleveland’s prosperity were grinding to a halt.

In retrospect, the signs were more than a dark smudge on the horizon. They were a tornado warning siren that couldn’t be turned off.

Today, Cleveland is still struggling to adapt to wrenching changes in America’s economy, decades of indifferent leadership, widespread disinvestment, racial animus, poverty, and the rest of the malevolent ills that have beset America’s former industrial heartland.

But the Union Terminal group still anchors a revitalized Pubic Square and the Terminal Tower still reigns as the city’s iconic symbol. The last passenger train left the station in 1977, but the terminal’s arched and columned concourses have been repurposed as a retail center and rapid transit trains still deliver thousands of passengers each workday. The department store is a casino now, but the hotel remains and the stately office buildings that comprised the bulk of the project still teem with workers.

The Van Sweringen’s railroad empire collapsed into bankruptcy in the mid-1930’s, but the steel, concrete, and marble evidence of their vision remains.

March 10, 2019

“If I must fall, may it be from a high place.”

Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Getting There Was Half the Fun

Posted on by

On March 9, 1862, the U.S. Navy ironclad gunboat USS Monitor fought a four-hour duel against the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. But the historic encounter – celebrated as the world’s first combat between ironclad warships – might have been just the second-worst thing to happen to the Monitor’s crew that week.

Crewmen of the USS Monitor relaxing on deck, July 1862.
(Naval Heritage and History Command photo)

Sure, the battle itself was a terrifying affair, as Confederate shells repeatedly banged off the Monitor’s armored turret. One exploding shell struck the Monitor’s exposed pilot house, temporarily blinding the union warship’s captain.  Inside the ship, the crew fought in smoky semi-darkness, seeing nothing and hearing little except the deafening crash of their own cannons.

But just getting to the battle tested the Monitor’s crew like few other voyages in U.S. Navy history.

For two days the union crew had endured a howling North Atlantic gale, repeated mechanical breakdowns, poisonous gases, exhaustion, and no hot coffee. A couple of hours of steadfast combat against the Virginia must have seemed anticlimactic to the sweating, straining sailors aboard the Monitor.

Hastily constructed in response to reports that the Confederates were converting the former USS Merrimack into the ironclad Virginia, Monitor was authorized and built in an astonishing 100 days. The design, by Swedish-born engineer John Ericsson, included forty patented inventions and featured a rotating turret that eliminated the need to turn the vessel to bring its main guns – actually, its only guns – to bear, a revolutionary advantage for combat in enclosed, shallow waters, like Hampton Roads.

The innovative design captured the imagination of Abraham Lincoln, who urged the Navy to acquire the vessel, but did not exactly thrill the members of the Navy’s Ironclad Board, who were to select the design. They made sure that the contract for the ship included a money-back clause if the ship proved to be a failure. They also required that the vessel be equipped with masts and sails, which was probably prudent in those early days of steam power. In the end, the Board approved the design primarily because the ship would be relatively cheap and could be ready in just over three months.

Constructed in Brooklyn, NY, USS Monitor was launched on January 30, 1862. The crew, hastily assembled as well, but presumably unfazed by their ship’s money-back guarantee, quickly set to work learning to operate their futuristic warship.

By February 19 the crew was ready to get underway for trials. The ship, perhaps, not so much. During its initial outing, engine problems forced the Monitor to be towed back to the yard. But the problems turned out to be minor, or, at least, could be repaired quickly, and Monitor was commissioned on February 25, 1862. She was immediately ordered to sail to Hampton Roads to defend the Navy’s wooden blockading vessels from CSS Virginia.

But as the ship left New York, it was quickly discovered that the steering gear had been improperly installed. Back at the yard, reinstallation was completed by March 6. By then, the money-back guarantee must have been looking more and more like a wise investment.

In an account dictated near the end of his life in 1916, Monitor veteran John Driscoll described his ship’s departure from New York as “nothing but gloom.”

But gloom would soon give way to something more akin to terror.

Towed by a sea-going tug and escorted by a pair of Navy steamships, which Driscoll noted would be totally useless in case trouble overtook the Monitor, the ironclad set off for Hampton Roads on March 6.

The first day was uneventful, although the weather became increasingly threatening. By evening of the second day, a full-force gale engulfed the little convoy. Monitor, with just two feet of freeboard, was singularly ill-designed to weather an ocean storm.

Almost immediately pounding waves swept the deck, and seawater poured into the ship through the smokestacks and blower pipes. While the engine room crew struggled to stay upright in their bouncing, iron ship, they were startled to see the belt fly off the port blower engine, reducing ventilation in the enclosed ship by half. Engineers shortened the belt, but every attempt to replace it failed, as the fan box had filled with water, preventing the engine from starting and flinging off the belt.  As the engineers struggled with the port belt, the belt on the starboard blower engine also flew off, leaving the engine room with no ventilation at all.

Unsurprisingly, the engine room quickly filled with exhaust gas, felling all nineteen men in the space. Quickly, other crewmembers rushed into the engine room and dragged their shipmates to safety.

Not exactly safety, perhaps, as the ship remained in the grip of the gale and the blowers were still inoperative.  But at least they could breathe the air in the turret, where they were taken to recover.

Driscoll had not been in the engine room when the blowers failed, so he had not been affected by the gas. Covering his mouth with a wet handkerchief and keeping his face as close to the deck as he could, he made his way into the gas-filled space and attempted to restart one of the blowers. Immediately, the belt flew off. Realizing that the flooded boxes were the problem, Driscoll grabbed a hammer and chisel and punched a hole in the fan box, allowing the water to drain out. In his words, the flood of water rushing over him expelled the gas near his face, allowing him to take a few short breaths. With the water removed, the belt stayed put and the blower started.

With one blower running, the gas was soon expelled from the engine room, and Driscoll, fortified with a shot of medicinal brandy and assisted by several seamen, re-entered the space and restarted the other blower. With that, the immediate crisis passed and Monitor continued on her way to Hampton Roads.

Throughout the voyage, water entering the ship through the vents and the turret made cooking impossible. Nearly fifty-five years later, Driscoll still ruefully recalled, “We had not even a cup of coffee from Friday morning until Sunday morning; we had cold water and hardtack.”

Monitor arrived at Hampton Roads late on March 8, after the Virginia had already sunk two Union warships, killing more than 400 U. S. Navy sailors.

Through the night and early morning. Monitor’s crew prepared to face the Virginia. They went into combat with guns that were untrusted and scarcely tested. Because the Monitor’s turret was barely larger than the guns, a recoil dampening mechanism had been invented by Ericsson. During initial testing of the guns, the brake mechanism was inadvertently loosened, allowing the guns to smash into the rear of the turret after firing, leaving dents that are still visible today on the recovered ship.  More importantly, fears that the weapons would explode if a full charge of powder was used forced the crew to limit the amount of powder in each shot.  Afterward, engineers estimated that if full charges had been used, Monitor’s shells would likely have penetrated Virginia’s armor. 

As it was, neither Monitor nor Virginia could seriously damage their ironclad opponent, and Virginia eventually steamed away. She did not return to threaten the blockading fleet. Monitor’s mission of defending the blockading vessels from Virginia was fulfilled.

March 9, 2019

For more, see:

Featured Artifacts

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2012/april/last-union-survivor

Chicks Dig It

Posted on by

I’ve resumed working out regularly with weights.  Not that I want a better body, but it’s pretty well-accepted that some weight training is very helpful for maintaining flexibility, stamina, and mobility, especially as you age. And that pretty much sums it up for me.

Plus, as I like to tell my young bride, chicks dig it.

And because you wouldn’t want to fall over and break a hip while putting on your socks when, with a little more effort, you can trip over a pile of free weights and crack your skull on a five-ton gym apparatus.

March 2, 2019

Life is Unfair

Posted on by

During my so-called career I spent more than twelve years as a law enforcement officer, including nine years as a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland Police in the 1920’s.

Law enforcement is a remarkably educational occupation. And the lessons you learn are sometimes burned into your psyche.  Not everyone has the opportunity to work in law enforcement, so for those who never donned the uniform, here are a couple of things I learned during my law enforcement career:

  1. It’s not personal. 

Don’t make it personal, be professional.  You are not the most important person in everyone else’s life.  What other people do usually has nothing to do with you. When you put on a uniform, everybody you encounter will respond to the uniform, not to the person inside.

2. Life is unfair.  

No surprise here, but it bears repeating. Not everybody has the same opportunities. Some kids have doctors and lawyers for parents, others have knuckleheads or drug dealers. No one gets to choose their parents or the circumstances in which they will live their early years. Bad things do happen to good people. Victims aren’t always at fault. Disease, disaster, and death are random, and life can be tragically short.  People don’t get the life they deserve, they get the life they get. 

3.  Violence is never the answer.

It’s just not. As Americans, we’re surrounded by violence: physical, verbal, emotional, economic. We glorify it. Violence is pervasive at the movies, on TV, on videogames, at school, and next door. Police are empowered to employ violence in the interest of public safety, not because they want to, or because they are well-trained or well-prepared to do so, because mostly they aren’t, but because there is no one else. Whatever the short-term effects of violence, the long-term effects are always negative. Always. That doesn’t mean that police should never employ violence, even deadly force.  The reason the police exist is because somebody has to be authorized to use violence in support of the public good. But there is always a cost – to the community and to the officer.

4.  Everybody just wants to get along.

Maybe not everybody, but certainly the vast majority of people. It doesn’t matter where they live. It doesn’t matter how they look.  It doesn’t matter where they came from or where they want to go.  Most people just want to live their lives peacefully with dignity and respect. 

5.  People who live in the ghetto didn’t create the ghetto.

Don’t blame them.  Widespread disinvestment, loss of jobs, illegal dumping, greed, redlining, housing discrimination, inferior schools, industrial pollution, and all the other things that make some neighborhoods highly undesirable were not caused by the people who live there today. Large-scale economic, political, and social forces acting over decades created the inner cities that we struggle with today.  The people that live in the inner city – and the people that live in other areas of the community – are victims of these forces, not perpetrators.

6.  There are two sides to every street.

And two sides to every story. The first story you hear is not likely to be the complete story. So, it is important to withhold judgement or a decision until everyone else gets their say.

7.  The truth is out there. Way out there.

Good luck finding it. Police officers quickly learn that the people they are talking to are frequently less than honest. When the police are called to adjudicate a dispute, usually everyone involved is at least partially at fault, but that’s not how they are going to tell it.  (“So, you say she walked up to you and just whacked you with a baseball bat for no reason at all. Are you sure you didn’t say something to her first? Are you sure nothing at all happened before she hit you?  You know, she says it wasn’t quite like that…”)

Not everyone lies to the police all the time, of course, but it doesn’t take long before new police officers realize that they need to be skeptical of just about everything anyone tells them. Sometimes people misunderstand or misinterpret what they see, and sometimes they simply don’t want to tell the truth. And a few people seem entirely incapable of telling the truth. In the long run, this is pretty unhelpful to police-community relations and the mental health of police officers.

8.  Evil exists.

The human capacity for inflicting pain, suffering, and terror on other humans is, apparently, infinite. Although they get a lot of attention, spectacular incidents of depravity are rare. But casual evil – thoughtless, self-serving cruelties intended to damage another person – happen every day. 

9. So does kindness. 

Compassion, generosity, and kindness are more common than evil, although, as a cop, you probably wouldn’t know it.

10.  Criminals are regular people, except when they are not.

There are people who, for whatever reason, are simply unable to live decent lives.  They lie, steal, cheat, threaten, and abuse at every opportunity. While they are a very small percentage of the population, they commit the vast majority of crimes.  If your town has 100 burglaries a year, it doesn’t have 100 burglars.  It probably has two or three burglars.

But even the burglars next door are regular neighbors most of the time.  They shop at the same stores as you, put out their trash on the same days, and root for the same sports teams.

And most people who commit crimes are not actually career criminals.  They are people who made a pretty bad choice, or maybe a couple of bad choices, but they are not irredeemably bad. There is no criminality gene, no neighborhood where everyone is a criminal, no racial, ethnic, religious, or economic group that is composed entirely of criminals.

Of course, these are things that I learned, or had reinforced in my time as a police officer. My experiences are specific to a particular department at a particular time, and cannot represent the enormous variety of law enforcement experience. Other officers, with different backgrounds, different life experiences, and different perspectives would create a different list.

March 1, 2019

Photos from the Cleveland Police Historical Society

Throw the Bums Out

Posted on by

I keep seeing posts and memes in support of term limits for members of Congress. It appears that term limits for Congress is a popular idea.  This is somewhat confusing, as I always thought that terms were already limited. I am sure I read somewhere that representatives serve two-year terms and senators serve for six years.

If a member of Congress serves longer than a single term, isn’t it because voters want them to continue in office? Incumbent officeholders still have to run in elections to remain in office, right? If voters are dissatisfied with someone’s performance, can’t they elect someone else?

So, by imposing term limits, are we saying that voters aren’t competent to select their own representatives?  If so, why hold elections at all? 

Or are we saying that experience in Congress is automatically undesireable?  Do we prefer other professionals to be inexperienced? Emergency Medical Technicians? Nuclear power plant operators? Auto mechanics? (“Wow, that’s a complicated piece of engineering there, Mr. Jones. I’ve never actually seen an engine like this. I did read a little about them when I was in school last year, so let’s take a look. Please hand me that hammer and step back…”)

Is there data that shows that inexperienced legislators are more effective?  Actually, there is data, based on the experiences of state legislatures which have already implemented term limits, and the data does not support the idea that term limits reduce corruption or otherwise improve the performance of legislators. In fact, there is evidence that less experienced legislators are more dependent on lobbyists and other interest groups.

There are plenty of problems with Congress, starting with the fact that there are no real incentives for bipartisan cooperation. Changing out the people working in a wildly dysfunctional system is the political equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as the ship fills with water.

Term limits probably won’t hurt much, except in cases where effective and popular legislators are prevented from running for re-election and are replaced by inexperienced legislators who rely on special interest groups to help them ‘understand’ complex policy issues. But as a means of improving Congressional performance, they are a simplistic and ineffective answer to a complex problem, and any energy expended advocating term limits is effort that could be better used elsewhere. 

February 28, 2019

See also:

Five reasons to oppose congressional term limits

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/05/08/no-term-limits-wont-draintheswamp-we-did-the-research/?utm_term=.dfe27b1e9f34

https://www.thoughtco.com/debate-over-term-limits-for-congress-3367505

And the Winner is…

Posted on by

A film called “Green Book” has won the Oscar for Best Picture. I don’t know anything about the film, but I know a little about the actual Green Book.

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide written and published by a former mailman named Victor Hugo Green. It listed places across the country where black citizens could actually buy gas, a meal, or a room for the night. It was a sadly necessary resource for black Americans for most of the twentieth century, when segregation was legal and might at any moment be enforced by violence.

Although the film is described as a “comedy-drama,” I don’t think real-life black Americans found much amusement in the fact that they were banned from commercial establishments all over their own nation.

If I were to make a film referencing the Green Book, I think I would focus on a middle-class black family and describe the extraordinary obstacles they faced in doing something as simple as driving across their own country – on roads supported by their tax dollars.

I am sure it was great fun to worry about where you might be able to get gas – that is, where you might find a gas station (or a restaurant, or a motel) that would actually serve you.  The film would include a heartwarming scene in which the dad – a combat veteran perhaps – has to explain to his young son why they are not allowed to stop at most of the places they pass and why there are some towns that they must avoid after dark – lest they be beaten, jailed, or both. It would also be inspiring to hear how they feared local law enforcement officers at all times.

Of course, I guess that scene would be unrealistic, as no black kid in America ever misunderstood the effects of legal discrimination, segregation, and racial hostility.

February 26, 2019

A Rumor of Spring

Posted on by
February in Ohio

February 23,2019

Spring has already arrived in London, where our daughter is attending university. This is in contrast to the situation here in Northeast Ohio, where we have another month or two of wintry weather ahead of us.

London’s mild climate is a little surprising since the city is pretty far north. If London were to be dragged westward to North America, it would be located in the upper reaches of Hudson Bay. The European city that is at the same latitude as Cleveland is not Oslo or Stockholm, which you might assume as you slog through another endless winter, but is Rome, whose Mediterranean climate is far milder than ours.

February in London (photo by Melina Topp)

The difference, of course, is the warming effect of the North Atlantic current, which significantly moderates Europe’s climate.

We may get our revenge, though, when warming sea temperatures and the melting icecap in Greenland disrupt the North Atlantic currents, turning off Europe’s supply of warmer water and lowering the winter temperature of the continent significantly.

Socialists of the Serengeti

Posted on by

Since cartoonist Thomas Nast first used an elephant as a symbol for “The Republican Vote” in 1874, the recognized symbol of the Republican Party has been the elephant.   

But elephant society is actually matriarchal and is characterized by cooperation, collaboration, empathy for members of their own kind, and resource-sharing – hardly the foundational principles of the modern Republican Party.

If anything, elephant society is communist rather than capitalist, and elephants are known for tearing down fences, not erecting them. Interactions within elephant family groups feature teamwork and cooperation, and members of the group work collectively to defend the group, locate food and water, care for offspring, and make decisions.

Elephants also learn from experience and highly value the knowledge of elder, more experienced members of the group. Elephant leaders – who are all female – achieve and maintain their position through the consent of the group.  To retain their authority, they must demonstrate courage, wisdom, superior knowledge of their environment, effective social skills, and the ability to maintain and strengthen close bonds within the group.  Matriarchs who favor some members of the group over others, who do not consistently look out for the interests of the whole group, who lack courage, and who lack the knowledge to lead effectively will lose their position.

A political party that embodied the social practices of elephants would champion policies that ensure that all members of the group have the resources and support they need to thrive. Infant care, child-rearing support, and education would be the highest priorities. Health care would be provided for everybody. Such a party would encourage shared responsibility, collective action to address problems, group cohesion, and compassion for all members of the group. The actions of the group would be based on what is best for the entire group, and decisions about the group’s future would be based on the best available information.

Not sure what political party that describes, but it sure doesn’t sound like the current Republican platform.

“For the body is not one member, but many.”  –  1 Corinthians 12:24

February 22, 2019

Don’t take my word for it:  https://www.elephantvoices.org/elephant-sense-a-sociality-4/elephants-are-socially-complex.html

“Third Term Panic,” by Thomas Nast, 1874

It’s Not About a Kid Who Lied

Posted on by

Author Kyle Swenson, center, and moderator Raymond Strickland, left, at the City Club of Cleveland.

In 1975, when 12-year-old Edward Vernon told police he couldn’t identify suspects in a daylight murder that he claimed to have witnessed, angry detectives threatened to arrest his parents unless he identified the killers.

That threat set in motion a years-long chain of misconduct, incompetence, fear-based silence, and official malfeasance that resulted in the wrongful incarceration of three men for a total of 106 years.

More than 35 years later, prompted by a 2011 newspaper account of the trial that pointed out obvious discrepancies in Vernon’s testimony and described the shoddy police investigation, Vernon recanted his story, leading to the release of two men who had been imprisoned for more than 35 years for a crime they didn’t commit. At the time it was believed to be the longest wrongful incarceration in U.S. history.

The author of that 2011 newspaper article was 25-year-old Kyle Swenson, a reporter for the weekly Scene Magazine in Cleveland. Today, Swenson is a reporter for the Washington Post, and yesterday he spoke at the Cleveland City Club about the case, which he has written about in a new book, Good Kids, Bad City.

No physical evidence linked 17-year-old Ronnie Bridgeman, 18-year-old Rickie Jackson, and Ronnie’s 20-year-old brother, Wiley Bridgeman, to the robbery and murder of money order salesman, Harry J. Frank, on the sidewalk in front of a white-brick inner city convenience store in Cleveland’s predominantly black east side on May 19, 1975. The prosecution’s case depended entirely upon the testimony of a 12-year-old neighborhood child who told police he saw the crime. The three young men had alibi witnesses who told police that the arrested men were not at the store during the crime. Two witnesses to the crime failed to identify the suspects. Other neighborhood residents told detectives that the young men were innocent, and several residents provided police with the names and descriptions of other men who were said to have committed the murder. Even the FBI provided police with the names of other possible suspects.

But while some leads were investigated by Cleveland detectives, their follow-up was perfunctory. They were focused on the three young men in custody and seemed uninterested in information that might clear them. There was still no physical evidence to link them to the crime.

Despite the weakness of the prosecution’s case, all three men were convicted and sentenced to death. They escaped execution only because the United States Supreme Court struck down Ohio’s death penalty law in 1977.

Because the three young men had requested separate trials, their sentences were not identical. Thus, in 2003, twenty-eight years after being arrested for a crime he did not commit, Ronnie Bridgeman was released on parole. But his brother, Wiley, and their friend, Rickie, remained in prison.

By the time he was freed, Ronnie Bridgeman had changed his name to Kwame Ajamu in an effort to distance himself from his past. But he couldn’t escape from the reality that his brother and friend remained wrongly incarcerated. Ajamu began contacting people who might help him in his efforts to free Wiley and Ricky. In 2011 he contacted the young reporter, Swenson.

As Swenson recalls, he was not immediately convinced that Ajamu’s story was true. Even an inexperienced journalist knew that many people lie to reporters. At the time, Swenson told the City Club audience, “I was less jaded than I might be today.”

But after meeting Ajamu; listening to his story over a series of interviews; studying trial transcripts, police case files, and other documents; and talking to dozens of people about the case; Swenson became convinced of Ajamu’s innocence.

One person who would not talk to Swenson was Edward Vernon, whose testimony convicted the three men. Vernon had overcome drug addiction, which Swenson said was connected to the fear and guilt he felt about his role in the convictions. Vernon was afraid that if he became involved in the case again, he would relapse.

But even without Vernon’s help, in 2011 Swenson published a detailed account of the crime, the trial, and its aftermath in the weekly Scene Magazine. And nothing happened. Vernon would not come forward and recant his testimony and the legal system was unmoved.

“I thought there would be some redress,” said Swenson. “That something would happen. I felt that I had let Kwame down, that the story hadn’t done what we wanted it to.”

But the story had caught the attention of attorneys at the Ohio Innocence Project. They believed Ajamu, Jackson, and Bridgeman were innocent, and that Vernon was the key. They pressed him to come forward, and in 2014, he did. In November, 2014, Vernon spent a harrowing day testifying at a court hearing. He recanted his earlier testimony and withstood hours of aggressive questioning by a district attorney. As a result, Jackson and Bridgeman were freed.

Vernon testified that his participation in the original trials had ruined his life. He had told detectives that he couldn’t identify the three men. But detectives had threatened to jail his parents if he did not identify them. “You don’t know how much pain and suffering I have been going through throughout these years,” he said in court. “You and nobody else knows. You can ask a thousand questions and it is still not going to free me from the pain and the hurt and the lies I had to live.”

Today, Ajamu, Bridgeman, and Jackson are free men. They have received compensation from the State of Ohio for the time they spent in prison, and a lawsuit they have filed against the City of Cleveland is pending. They have forgiven Vernon. “You can’t live with that hate for decades,” Ajamu told Swenson.

This story is not just about a kid who lied, said Swenson. “This case was a system failure.”

When he first began talking to Ajamu, Swenson was unconvinced. He had thought that the criminal justice system had guardrails to prevent people from being wrongfully imprisoned. But nothing as solid as a guardrail exists. The safety features that do exist were simply inadequate.

Like any system failure, the sequence of events that led to the wrongful conviction was lengthy. Had things been done differently at any point in the failure chain, the outcome could have been different. Had the police been better trained, or had detectives been more diligent, had the detective’s supervisors noted the discrepancies in the case, had the prosecutor been willing to question the police investigation, had neighborhood residents not been afraid to tell the police what they knew, had defense attorneys presented a better defense, had the jury demanded more proof than the testimony of a frightened 12-year-old, had any of these things happened, three innocent men might have been spared decades in prison.

It is chilling to think that had the death sentences remained in effect, all three men would have been executed.

“One of my fears,” said Swenson, “is that people would see this case as old history, that things like this don’t happen anymore. But that’s not the case at all. These cases are not old. They are still happening.”

For a comprehensive account of the trial, investigation and aftermath, see Good Kids, Bad City, by Kyle Swenson: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120236

February 20, 2019