A friend of mine who has one of those larger than life personalities once lamented on his wife's interest in genealogy. "They're dead. These are dead people. Why would you want to look up uninteresting facts about when people died or were born or when they moved?", he said with his hands waving. It's hard to argue with logic like that. But I'm going to do it anyway.
One hundred and fifty years ago or so, some people who are now dead were creating the luckiest moments of my life. My grandparents, and their parents were forsaking their family histories because the world was changing and because those families were not including them in their plans for their legacy. Half of them were coming from Europe and half from south of the Mason-Dixon line. They came to Flint, Michigan where my parents and most of my cousins were born.
My great grandparents were born in a time when being born first still meant something. The first male traditionally received more of the family fortune and was treated as more important than his siblings. It was a time when fewer resources meant more competition. As one of my ancestors found out, even if you asked for help from your own brother, you might be met with an illogical response such as, "God helps those who help themselves."
Sometime around my late teens, I had to make my own decisions and decide how I could find my own fortunes and choose my own legacy. My heritage was helping with that, but sometimes it was a barrier. The illogical phrase that I have come up against was; I am "personally responsible" for my fate.
It's true to a point, I had choices about my education, including how hard to study. I could have worked out harder and done better in sports or practiced more and improved by ability to play an instrument or just read more books and paid more attention to the adults who were deciding to send people my age off to fight in some place on the other side of the globe. No matter what I did though, decisions about my fate were being made that were just as much out of my control as the ones made by people before I was ever born.
My dad's grandfather was cut out of any inheritance so he left Germany and eventually came to America through Canada to Flint. My mom's grandfather was born just as slave's were being freed. His father could no longer keep the people he had inherited so he moved west. I know very little about why made his decisions, but I'm guessing the economy of Tennessee was suffering in the post Civil War era. For my mom's dad, there was a falling out with his brother, and he packed up his young family and drove from Arkansas to Flint to get work.
Both of those grandfathers of mine took advantage of the growing economy of the auto industry. The next generation took advantage of unions and the low cost of higher education in the war years and after. They were not rich. The rich were being taxed to build the infrastructure that made America the most powerful country in the world and kept the USSR in check including beating them in the so-called "space race". All of that had positive and negative consequences.
I only know of those good and bad effects because of the advantages they gave me. To continue to keep up with the evil in the world, we need higher education and a healthy defense system. You may not like the Liberal professors that are created by that, or the crimes we commit in foreign countries, but I know I would not be able to understand all of it without the advantages that they created and keep creating. It's not a perfect world.
If I could overcome the culture created by 10,000 years of human history, and live in a world that matches my vision of loving, caring, good neighbors, who work hard, I would do it. I may not know what to do, but I know tearing down everything from the past is not the place to start. Breaking a tradition, questioning an authority, opening a dialogue, those are things that my great grandparents did and I honor them by thinking for myself.
I know that they knew that they could not know what I know. They were muddling through life just like the rest of us. Powerful forces altered their futures. Random events that may have seemed small changed their future. They kept on. I wouldn't be here if they didn't.
Bruce Springsteen put it more poetically. As Bruce was about to become a father, his own father visited him and made a sort of apology for the father that he had been. It was more than that. It was a warning of the mistakes he had made. Telling his son not to make them with his own children. In Bruce's words, "To release them of the chains of our sins, my father's and mine and our father's before. That they may be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives. We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them. Or we assist them laying those old burdens down and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way and some transcendence."
There was a new Bill and Ted excellent Adventure movie this year, gotta give a nod to that. It was about the fulfillment of their original mission, to bring the whole world together with their music, which keeps seeming to happen and then not happen in each of the movies. I've followed a similar pattern through the years. You could review last year's New Year's post for example.
In February, I almost got a local chapter of Braver Angels off the ground, then, that thing that 2020 will be most remembered for happened. Braver Angels has continued online, so that's good, but getting people together in living rooms has not been happening so much.
The article marks this year as the year that we will probably stop referencing the "Reagan legacy" and start using "Trump legacy". Before Reagan, we were very much under the influence of the "Roosevelt legacy", The New Deal. Today, we have people who are confused about all of this, who are afraid of "socialism" but don't want "the government" to take away Medicare or Social Security. The details of this battle between the social safety net and big business are in the article.
It also describes how racism has been used as a weapon in this battle. That legacy goes back to the Civil War and the years that followed; Reconstruction. It mixes our identity as strong individuals who have high morals and ethics with a focus on vague enemies, like "communism" or "terrorists". It leverages these tools and uses legal maneuvers to selectively apply votes so it appears to be democratic and patriotic. It draws lines, and sets up each side to believe they are the "real" America. I'm using tons of scare quotes because all of these definitions are in flux. Photo: Deconstructing Reconstruction
Many genies have been released from their bottles lately and they don't like being put back in. They will continue to impress us with their magic tricks. But as everyone knows, you have to be very careful what you wish for because genies can be so literal in their interpretations of your words and the trick is then played on you.
As the article notes, we are at a point where millions of people are openly asking for votes to not be counted and questioning the entire system and willing to overturn the results of our duly run democratic process. It is not logical, but it is the inevitable result of playing on people's righteous belief in their ideology.
There are scenarios where the same righteousness could have resulted in a Left Wing disaster. But don't confuse the danger of government that is too liberal with the reality of one that was captured by and run by conservative big business. Both can lead to oligarchy; rule by a rich elite. The "liberal" and "conservative" labels lose their meaning when you look at who makes the rules, that is, the ones with the gold.
I recently listened to a discussion with Coleman Hughes and Douglas Murray on Coleman’s podcast. At times I had trouble figuring out what world they live in. These are not small players and they covered many major talking points, so if someone can explain this to me, maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing. The title is “The Intersectional Crackup with Douglas Murray“, but intersectionality is far from the only topic.
If you aren’t familiar with the term “Intersectional”, it covers the interconnected nature of the categorizations that people fall into. As we began to address centuries old oppression, we addressed them separately, such as women’s issues or rights for people of African descent. Intersectionality recognizes the dynamics when a person is a member of more than one of those groups. It sounds simple when you look at the definition but it gets convoluted when people want to make it so, like in this podcast.
The podcast starts with a commercial, so you can skip that.
Hughes seems to head into an important discussion about leading a meaningful life at about 4 minutes in but he keeps the discussion to how difficult that is in a world of identity politics. He says the current culture has taken on a “religious” like form. From then on he focuses on how not to build a sense of self.
Murray’s first answer to Coleman’s opening question is to agree about the religion shaped hole in society. You can trace this back to Nietzsche, who famously said “God is Dead” and less famously said, “and we killed him”. He (Nietzsche) then went on to speculate what people will use to fill the missing answers and moral judgments provided by religion. Murray says the “intersectionalists” use guilt, atonement and heresy, just as religions have. He does not see a discussion about purpose. He denigrates youth on both the left and right. The conservatives don’t have a “how”. The Left does, but he rambles about some sort of “abdication” by adults that I don’t get.
He says he could give his views on how people found meaning in the past, but then he is vague. He says “literature” without naming much. He says this is a failure of atheists. I have seen him interact with atheists, so I can’t figure out why he doesn’t see them doing this. It was the atheist thinkers and writers, past and present where I did find meaning and purpose. The only purpose I can glean from religion is “read the scriptures, pray, and if you don’t find purpose, you did it wrong.” Anything specific, anything meaningful, can be found in a non-religious source from writers contemporary to those sources. The non-religious ones are usually not only better, but they don’t require you to memorize any names of prophets or their movements. You just need to work through the ideas.
Around this time in the podcast, 10 minutes or so, both of them have started using the term
https://www.facebook.com/WeStayWoke/
“woke culture”. This is the latest term that began with a positive meaning but is used in a derogatory manner. I understand why to some extent. Some people are actually aware and paying attention, thus “woke”, and some are pretending to care about the issues of the day but are really not well informed. Hughes and Murray are going after the latter group.
Coleman then says something I couldn’t be sure I heard correctly it was so strange. He said, “If you are Right Wing, you can’t be unapologetically Christian”. I think he’s saying Right Wing Christians feel they have to hold back on expressing their religion because it is associated with oppression of the past. In the podcast, or any of the other times I’ve heard these two speak, I have not heard any awareness of a liberal version of Christianity. It is a wing of Christianity that has been growing for decades, with roots that go back to the 13th century and early Christian humanists.
Hughes however grew up with what seems to be a narrow-minded sect of liberals that saw themselves as a rebel force, as he says, a ‘resistance’, ala Star Wars. Instead of finding the many more nuanced messages and movements in the country, he has become ‘anti’ to whatever that was.
After the 13 minute mark, Murray pushes this even farther, saying these recent Left ideologies are not based on intellect. Occasionally, he does hit on something worthwhile. He notes that when a group of any kind presents a prepackaged system, it can gain followers, but there is a downside. He cites the Catholic Church and how Ireland, once a Catholic stronghold has lately been divorcing itself from that. I would say something simplistic, like Murray just hasn’t found a Liberal group that he likes, but that’s his job, to seek out and evaluate groups. So something else is going on here.
Hughes makes a similar worthwhile statement, then messes it up. He says he is not comfortable with the idea of “my country, right or wrong”, but then ponders why all those brown people are coming here. He figures if they are coming here, we must be doing something right, and apparently doesn’t figure much beyond that. It does not occur to either one of them that they are coming here for the promises in our Constitution. They come here for the education system we subsidize, the business assistance, the protection of rights, the things they don’t have in their country. The things Liberal politicians vote for and fight for.
Instead, at about 21 minutes, they launch into how amazed they are that we still get excited when another barrier is broken, like a black woman becoming Vice President. Hughes says Obama broke the final barrier and that should have “changed the model”. I’m not sure what that means, but he does not give the slightest nod to what happened to the culture during the Obama years.
Another good point from Murray is that young people, or anyone else, should not “hack into history”, looking for something wrong. Instead we should try to “reconcile” who we are to that past. But he sets up a straw man to knock down. He says people then ask him, “what about injustice”. He accepts there are struggles but dismisses them, giving no examples of one that was fought and won. He does not make a case for why it’s time to put discussions of racism, inequity, or misogyny to rest. He alludes to “rivers of thought” that we should attempt to navigate, but never says what those are. And I’ll repeat that this is not the first or only Douglas Murray I’ve listened to.
At 27 minutes, he makes a comment that he doesn’t want there to be “types” of books or studies, there shouldn’t be “women’s books” for example. He backs this up by citing Bayard Rustin, a strategist for Martin Luther King Jr who was against the rise of Black Studies in Universities. It seemed like segregation, just what the White people wanted. He jokes at something he apparently has heard, that people say there are no gay writers in the canon.
I don’t know who Murray is talking about because he rarely gives quotes or names. Of course
Getty images
there are gay people who wrote books, ancient to current, because there were always gay people. The problem is, many of them hid it, or if they didn’t, the next generation erased it. It’s harder to erase history now, it is not “written by the winners” as it once was. This is an unusual time, when people of all stripes are gaining positions of power, crossing borders easily, working across cultural barriers. The only thing I can make of this is Hughes and Murray don’t want that. They play on the fact that they are each members of a category that has experienced disadvantages, Hughes is black, Murray is gay. They take their own example and claim that it proves these problems are behind us. They see none of the history of changes in norms, they never compare our time to any empire of the past that came close to the level of inclusivity we are experiencing. I can only speculate, but my guess is they see a zero sum game, and they are on the winning the side, so they want change to stop to reduce the risk of losing what they have.
It gets worse but the details are just a different flavor of the same theme. At 36 minutes, Murray calls the Left’s ideas “simple”, saying it’s easy to understand and the Left makes it more complex. The man has a platform as big as just about anyone, but I can’t find this simple message he says he knows.
I’ll give Murray credit for one more item, on the topic of cancel culture. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. It’s when someone who has found fame, position, and hopefully even has said something worth saying but, then says something off the mark. Some group, large enough to get an audience, amplifies that mistake and calls for resignation or demotion or some other form of cancelling. This puts a damper on anyone who is even thinking about speaking up. It takes our open forums where ideas are incubated and encouraged and turns them into echo chambers where everyone fears offending the next fringe group. Murray speculates that this behavior might bring down the “woke” system. I think it might already be happening.
After that he has a couple doozies. The one that tops them all was “we don’t need people to come along and pretend to us that we are things we’re not.” It’s at 52 minutes and 45 seconds. I agree that there are people who call themselves Liberal but don’t bring with it all of the liberal values that go with that label. They bring a set of standards that may not match the values and ideas that got us to the current enlightened era we are enjoying. We should all be vigilant of that. I don’t know how Murray misses that people in history who “pretend to us that we are things we’re not”, are the same types of people he is speaking against. Back in time, they were priests and princes and town constables and local sheriffs. Now they are bloggers and influencers and talk show radio hosts.
What’s missing is, we have to base our decisions to “call out” problems on the values that built our free and open society. “Calling out” is not the problem, it’s what you call out. We can discuss the “how”, but don’t let that bury the “what”.
Deb Haaland. Secretary of Interior Nominee
These two might be tired of people identifying themselves with a traditionally oppressed group. For myself, I am far from tired of hearing about barriers being broken. A Native American in the position of Interior Secretary for instance, is quite meaningful and worth noting. But these guys, now that it’s not just straight white guys getting everything, want to say, “oh yeah, that’s what we all wanted the whole time, see it’s fine, don’t say anything about it now and it will all go away forever”. They are getting paid by the system as it is, and they aren’t interested in why they are despite their intersectionality. Easier to denigrate anyone who does question it or blame them if they have not received their piece of the pie.
What I’m hearing here is that they feel very much the same way that large groups of people have felt in the past. Blacks felt marginalized, and in the South with voter suppression and everywhere with housing red lining, they were. Women were harassed at work and it was portrayed in sitcoms as a joke. I understand that men like this are not treated as special as men were just a generation ago, and that probably feels like they have lost something. But the people they are talking about are not asking to be treated specially, just equally.
I’d like to cover just one more term, “identity politics”. The way Hughes and Coleman are using it here, they are pointing to the people that claim that say you have to be a member of a certain group to understand that group’s plight. They are complaining about people that are asking for something extra based purely on their membership in some group, identified by skin color, sexual orientation, or similar traits. I agree with this for the most part. It should be that equality is just that, equal. I think human beings are capable of empathizing with others and understanding the needs of others, without actually experiencing all possible circumstances.
Hughes and Coleman aren’t limiting their solutions to just this narrow issue however. They are expanding it to claim that no policy should consider any type of identifying characteristics. When evaluating history, they ignore the basis of nations, wars, religions, hiring practices, and budgeting that was the norm until the middle of the last century. There were no black senators. Women could not get high paying jobs or leadership positions. Girls did not have sports programs. These facts matter. People who are born in a system that gives them privileges will rarely change the rules to reduce the privileges. Change requires legislation that identifies those traits that were used to identify those who were barred from those privileges in the past.
It was only 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so we kept this hike short. It felt good to finally finish Section 1. Not that long ago, we would not have even been on the Superior Hiking Trail yet, it was just another short section of trail somewhere in the Duluth area. Now, some of these hikes between here and the beginning of the trail are my favorites.
We used Uber this time. Parking our car at the Hartley Nature Center and using it to get to the Martin Road Trailhead. This did not work out ideally. Google maps takes you to the wrong side of Woodland Ave. and Uber drivers use Google maps. We wandered around this busy road for a few minutes. After checking two trail apps and finally the SHT trail sections website, we figured out we needed
to be east of Woodland, not west. If I had used the Duluth trails map I would have figured this out immediately. That map has been great, but we've reached it's eastern edge with this hike.
From Martin Road, the sign for the parking lot for the trailhead read “C.J. Ramstad North Shore Trail”. This is also used by snowmobilers but luckily it was a little too early for that. It splits after a few hundred feet and the snowmobilers go one way foot travel the other. The scenery improves too. You follow Amity Creek, a steep gorge and after a mile and half you come to a dirt road at Downer Park. It’s road hiking from there on out, but the park provides nice scenery. Then you go through Forest Hills Cemetery, which is also somewhat scenic.
Navigation is easy on roads with no houses and no turns. In residential areas we saw blue markers on telephone polls. When you get to the residential areas, homes are wooded lots so it's an enjoyable walk. Near the end of this stretch, you will come back to Woodland Ave, and which is a wide multilane road. Plenty of sidewalk though, so no problem. It’s a short hike up to Hartley Nature Center.
Sometimes nature isn't so pretty. We came around a bend and apparently we interrupted an owl in the middle of mealtime.
No camping in the city. Trail is well maintained with a variety of sites.
On a record warm day in November for Duluth, we set out to conquer “the hill”. If you have so much as driven through Duluth on the highway, you can’t miss that it sits on a hill. The lake is at 600 ft above sea level and the top of the hill that holds iconic images like Enger Tower is over 1,300 feet. So, forgive us if we decided to start at a higher elevation for this 5 mile stretch. We also skipped a few miles from Highway 35 and Grand Ave, but we’ll circle back to that.
If you know anything about the last decade or so of Duluth history, you know that they have been working on these woods that are too steep to build on, improving them with hiking and biking and other sporting activities. They are a major attraction. If you look on the Duluth trail map you will see a variety of trails. It can be hard to pick out the Superior Hiking Trail. But, while walking from Haines Road down to the Bayfront, we never made one wrong turn. The signage was great, and the design of the area keeps everyone happy. You can see the mountain bike trails, and every now and then a biker flashes by, but you only cross the trails a couple times. There is some cliff climbing in here somewhere too, but we never noticed it.
We did notice the ups and downs. We started at 1,040 ft and peaked at Enger Park at 1,150. Throughout the hike we gained 900 ft and lost 1,500. A couple short sections were city parks with paved or gravel trails or boardwalks, but most of it was just dirt and on a bad day could be mud, so don’t be fooled by the fact you are in a city. There are a couple creek crossings and the larger ones have well built bridges. Only in extreme conditions would these be a problem.
As soon as you step off of Haines Rd, the city sounds will fade and you won’t believe you are surrounded by 80,000 people. On the other end, just before we reached W Michigan St, we were very much reminded of where we were when we spotted a homeless encampment. We didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should not be vigilante. More on that later.
Haines Rd is N 40th Ave from Highway 35. Just climb straight up, past the big switchback and you can’t miss the parking lot, the signs, and the trail. If you’re going back toward Spirit Mt. the sign over the tunnel tells you that you are on the trail. You’ll immediately notice the variety of trees and that the area is obviously managed, but still quite wild. After a mile or two you will start to get vistas of the city and the lake and the harbor and the noise is not quite as filtered out.
Lincoln Park
You’ll come down a bit and then level off and pick up W 10th St., a quiet neighborhood with a great view. There is some street parking that you could use to access the trail but you would probably be better off going up to N 24th and Piedmont Ave. if this is where you want to start your hike. There is official parking there with an official SHT sign. Piedmont is also called highway 53 but you can’t park on that. If you come up that way, get off and find the residential part of Piedmont. If you are hiking through, take the big bridge over 53.
It’s a little brushy through here, just south of the Enger Park Golf Course, but then it breaks into Enger Park with a tranquil Japanese garden, and of course, Enger Tower. Stay on the high side of the park unless you want to go over and see the view from the Tower. It’s all downhill from here. You might not notice when you get into Central Park. It is much smaller than its New York namesake. West 3rd St. goes through that, but there is no parking. On the edge of that park, you will use a short section of N 14th Ave W with a possibility of on street parking. Pick up the trail again and you will be along a steep cliff above W Michigan.
I have driven by this spot on W Michigan St. many times and noticed people on the sidewalk with camping equipment, but not the expensive long range hiking variety. More like the ‘carry your home on your back’ variety. What I never noticed is the little SHT sign at the intersection of Glen Pl Dr. You are within view of some housing and W Michigan is very busy but you are also under the cover of woods. Safety is an issue here. My hope was that anyone there would not want to create a reason for anyone to bother them, so they would be motivated to not bother us. But there could be people there who weren’t that good at making decisions like that too.
Spirit Mt. campground or Duluth accommodations. Steep climb near the zoo, followed by a smooth descent. Trail can be wet and slippery in places. Great views of West Duluth.
After the strenuous section from Magney-Snively to the Zoo, we decided to set our sights a little lower and do a 2.3 mile long section from the Zoo to the bottom of “the hill”. If you drive into Duluth, you will know what they are referring to as “the hill”. On the highway, you pass Spirit Mountain and get a spectacular vista of Lake Superior then descend that mountain and see the industry that built up along the port. If you keep driving into downtown, you’ll see how they put that highway underneath street level and integrated the city into the lake shore. But let’s get back to hiking.
We got off the highway at Central Ave just before that tight turn at the bottom of the hill. Find the trail-head at Greene St and N 63rd Ave W by snaking around in the residential neighborhood north of the businesses and staying close to the highway but on the Duluth city side of it. The trail goes
underneath the highway back to the Zoo, or go past the spooky looking house to go north up the hill then eventually east. Look for the cement barrier to find a section that leads back to the paved trail if you want to technically cover every inch of the SHT. Otherwise, use the paved trail to go under the highway and look for the trail veering north almost immediately. But don't back under the highway or you're just back to the trail-head again.
We drove back to the Zoo to start our day hike, see the previous section for the Waseca St trailhead.
By starting at the Zoo, we climbed most of the altitude for this day in about 20 minutes then had a nice slope down from there to the highway. As you go, you’ll see more and more city and less and less nature. But they are still great views. The fauna is mostly aspen and mostly young growth, nothing like the well preserved section of Kingsbury creek. You are closer to population and likely to see more runners too, although on this beautiful day on a weekend, we saw no one until the very end.
Because of the bridge that is out at the north end of Kingsbury creek, be sure to stay to the east side. There are two bridges at the start of the trail. The first one, right off the trail-head, will say that the SHT is on the west side. Your choice to follow that or not. You’ll have one more that crosses back over the creek. The trail looks a bit like a forest road on the east side at times, but just use the creek to navigate and you can’t go wrong.
You will transition from the meandering St Louis River areas that have changed little in thousands of years to the busy port towns of Duluth and Superior over the course of this section.
There are very few spurs or intersecting trails here and unless you are fogged in, you’ll always know where you are even if you forgot your compass.
We had some friends who wanted to join us this time, so we
skipped over the sections in the middle of Duluth and picked the eastern end of
town for some of the best places to visit. If you’re going in order, this is a
great way to finish Duluth. Also, you’ll be going up over 1,000 feet, and back
down 300 feet, most of the down coming after the peak in Bagley Nature Center.
You’ll get a great view of the University of MN Duluth from there. You’ll also
pass near Chester Bowl ski hill (very small compared to the earlier Spirit
Mt.). Also, Hartley Nature Center, so, quite the tour. We cheated and drove
over to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve to observe some birds, but you’ll hike through
that if you are going to the next section.
We also cheated and started at the top, so we could go mostly
downhill. Parking is ample at Hartley Nature Center. The trail goes south out
of there, along the road you came in on, or go past the Nature Center building
to the northwest and it will wind back to the south toward Lake Superior. This
is one of the best sections on the entire SHT for Lake Superior views.
The trail is rocky and there are cliffs. At one of the lookout points we saw a
memorial plaque, but I
couldn’t find any information on it. I know people have
jumped into Chester creek when the water is high and that has not ended well
for them.
A couple of turns to watch out for; Linking Chester Bowl and Bagley Nature
Area, you’ll do some road walking along the north edge of the UMD campus. There’s a bike trail into campus at
Bagley and we just crossed the road and went into that, then realized we were
wrong. From Chester Bowl going north, it’s W Kent Rd then north on N 19th
Ave, but the signage got us through that just fine. There are 2 inch stickers
on the backs of existing road signs.
The Duluth Lake Walk is designated SHT from Bayfront Festival Park to the Rose
Garden and Leif Erikson Park, but this so easy to hike, I’m not going to cover
it. Duluth is famous for Canal Park, the Lift Bridge, the old fashioned train
stations and many other sites along this section, and I could never do them
justice on this blog.
