As most readers know, I am permanently self-assigned to New England on the Rhode Island coast. We have even bought our last tiny piece of land here about three miles away up a hill with a distant view of Narragansett Bay and the Newport Bridge. It features a small granite marker with our names already engraved on it. My brother Barry lives in a picture perfect New Hampshire small town in a century old classic home with woodwork anyone would be hard pressed to duplicate. He sent along a picture this week on our (one of our many) family text chains. Nothing I could say would make it more stunning, and it needs no explanation. The New England woods are dying again.
Every year they die like this, and it’s beautiful. Without this annual death, there would not follow the long cold meditative winter break of skeletal black branches against clear blue winter skies, branches frozen and still, occasionally decorated with glistening ice and snow decked. Spare, detailed, still, they sometimes gently stir in numbing breezes and creak. From large limbs to exquisite tiny twigs with dormant buds, they await a vernal signal as the days once more begin to lengthen and the warming sun ascends once again higher. Without this annual death, there could be no spring, no explosion of new life and fragile green and blooms of every size and color parading across the warm months from cherries to summer hydrangeas and late Montauk daisies.
Why dying is brilliant with gold, amber, rust, blood red sugar maples, and the burnished crimson of the late oaks is a mystery, as all things transcendent are beautiful and mysterious. Sugar maples are my favorite: a spectacle of color. Sugar maples are a singular miracle. Nicknamed “rock maple,” when they reach the end of their life cycles, they produce superior firewood; although hard like their nickname, they split easily for most cut pieces (although not all) along grain lines as if planned for the woodstove. Earlier, the boards cut from them have signature grain and were once considered fit for the finest of floors. Even their little samara fruit helicopter in the wind as they fall to seed. Kids and those aspiring to be kids call them ‘nose things’ because broken into both halves and spread open, they are sticky enough to decorate the most boring of noses.
When we lived in Maine, there were four such exquisite creatures along our driveway. Our neighbor Sonny was a fourth generation Mainer and had Maine skills. He would tap our maples with the old school buckets and spiles and cook down the sap in his woodfired sugar shack furnace in his backyard. For our donation, we would benefit with a quart of amber sweet syrup to perfect many breakfasts of blueberry pancakes. Then there were maple syrup snow cones scooped from fresh fallen fluff with syrup poured on it just for pleasure. How the kids, and all of us loved that treasure in our mittens.
As a bonus I’ll add this picture of Olney Pond in Lincoln Woods our daughter Angela sent to us yesterday while visiting the park with her kids. About thirty miles north, we often visit the state park when we are blessed to help with runs to Heritage Ballet, a frequent occurrence as they prep for the upcoming Nutcracker performances. Ballet runs are an unearned fringe benefit of having granddaughters who dance so beautifully.
There is no easily explained reason why such things as New Hampshire villages, ponds in New England woods, and graceful ballerinas are beautiful, or why human beings are wired to respond so deeply to them. Grace seems closest to an explanation, but grace assumes a grace giver, and that may be too much of a leap for some. But it’s enough for me. Pure gratuitous gift beyond all expectations or deserves.
Both the inevitability and annual resurrection are heralds of a new mystery for us to contemplate during pre-dawn awakenings to stoke the woodstove. Watching through the living room bay window past the roofs of my good neighbors and their sugar maples, the sky slowly pinkens and brightens through the dawn gloaming to expose the branches and dim the stars, Orion, and other early morning constellations. Even the brighter moon and planets eventually give way although they last a bit longer.
What does the autumn death to winter resting and spring revival teach me about my own mortality? Is spring beyond my resting? That is the only lasting unknown until it isn’t that we all must answer when we stop distracting ourselves with entertainments, welcome interruptions, and busyness from the question. Winter and the coming of it are the annual time of long thoughts.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal
I’m surprised to find my mind’s still fairly sound.” Willie Nelson, “Me and Paul”
James Tissot, View From the Cross
[i]A quote ascribed to G.K. Chesterton may or may not be apocryphal, but it is characteristic of his honesty and faith. The story goes that the London Times editor asked some famous writers and thinkers of his time to answer the question, “What is wrong with the world?” His answer, or at least the one attributed to him, was uncharacteristically laconic,
“Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours, G. K. Chesterton.”
If indeed his, the point is clear and perfectly Chestertonian. There are other writers who have conveyed similar ideas that collide with our contemporary “I’m OK, You’re OK” widely held sentiments. Such ideas contest the other popular refrain on social media and in our understanding of what’s wrong with the world. No matter which side of the cultural divide of dueling populisms we occupy, it’s not the other tribe, and scapegoats do not let us off the hook. No, you’re not OK, and neither am I.
Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” states it this way: “Each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and everything, and I more than the others.” Russians, at least some of them, seem to understand this better than Americans. Quoting from Paul Kingsnorth in “Wild Christianity” in First Things[ii]: “When the twentieth-century Russian spiritual leader Father Arseny was asked, in the depths of a Soviet prison camp, who was responsible for the catastrophe of communism, he didn’t blame the camp guards, the politburo, or Stalin. ‘Among us Russian people,’ he said, ‘many have lost the faith, lost respect for our past. We lost much of what was precious and good. Who is at fault? The authorities? No, we are at fault ourselves; we are only reaping what we ourselves have sown.’”
In a final Russian allusion, I have quoted before this timeless Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quote from “Gulag Archipelago,” “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”
Lest we despond, there is serviceable relief and a solution for our burden and our troubled times, and we have known it for centuries. We have always known it. In Sermon 80, §8, St. Augustine wrote: “Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: such as we are, such are the times.”
“She said “Well what’re you thinkin’?
I’m just a-wonderin’, is it somethin’ that I did?”
I said, “It’s nothin’, just somethin’
I picked up as a kid.” John Prine, “No Ordinary Blue”
Unknown artist. Pelagius
The tragic abandonment of the doctrine of The Fall is one of the victims of the sort of utopian Pelagianism and universalism that helps inform our times. What is he talking about now?, you might ask. Pelagius was a British monk who lived around the same period as St Augustine in 400 AD. To oversimplify, he got in trouble when he overemphasized the goodness of man, free choice, and muddied the water that sin is a condition from which we need a Savior. Sin is not, as many would have it, an occasional lapse, a mishap, a miscue that a little tweaking and will power will straighten out. No Fall, no Savior. No Fall, no need for Christianity. A pernicious heresy developed that plagued St Augustine and others for centuries. Still does.
In our day we have reframed those arguments, and it goes something like this: “I’m OK, You’re OK.” I just need to be a nice guy and the bar for that moves steadily lower. “Nice” is the new criteria and bland uncertainty that sets us cheerfully free from a response to our mortality and our condition. Everyone dies and goes to a happy place unless maybe you are a serial killer or Hitler or mean to dogs, and we need not inconvenience ourselves too much over the details. If there is a god, he requires very little of us and probably doesn’t pay attention at all to our minor transgressions, especially our favorite ones.
This all came to mind a couple of weeks ago when the Sunday gospel was taken from Matthew 20: 1-16 and the parable Jesus taught about the extravagant abundance and generosity of God’s grace:[iii]
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius (a normal day’s wage) a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing; and he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too.’
And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, ‘Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the householder, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So, the last will be first, and the first last.”
We certainly could infer (and should) that God will not be outdone in generosity, and our lives are adventures of second chances. What I took also from this beautiful parable is something not immediately apparent; I experienced being impelled with a renewed urgency to evangelize those I encounter and especially those I love with words and actions. How is that?, you might reasonably ask.
Two certainties arise. The first is that right until we all run out of time, the opportunity exists for not only reconciliation with God’s grace but the fullness of life within Him. For me, for you, for everyone you encounter. Think of the good thief Dismas on the cross next to Jesus. “Today you will be with me in paradise.” The second is that the workers in the vineyard so surprisingly rewarded did something. They made decisions to stand and wait for the necessary work all day. They didn’t hang out on the couch waiting for work to come to them. And then they worked.
Now, I don’t know what my work is to be today or where and when the whispers will call me to do it. But the call will come if I listen. To rely on another metaphor from Biblical thought, I don’t know if today I will be gently reminded to plant a seed, water another one, clear out a little brush around another and let in some light or merely point out that the tiny seedling is emerging. I need to be attentive to the whispers of the day.
What I do know is as the days grow shorter and colder, the leaves stop producing chlorophyll, the green fades, brilliant colors emerge, and eventually every one of those miracle leaves will brown and fall to the ground.
“Why wait any longer for the world to begin?” Bob Dylan
[i] Image from Wikimedia Commons, open source. Brooklyn Museum, James Tissot, “View from the Cross”
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man.”
Woven corners; woven lives
We bought our first house for romantic reasons only a young couple in their mid-twenties with two young kids would consider. A converted post and beam small barn on five wooded acres in rural Maine, our place was affordable for someone of limited savings and good credit. A clear water spring house was three hundred yards in the back up a hill at sufficient elevation to provide gravity fed water even if the pump went out. By far the best water we’ve ever had.
We had a tiny rustic kitchen and even tinier bathroom connected beyond that. Toilet and walk in fiberglass shower only with the small electric hot water heater beside it constituted the only bathroom. The kitchen sink did double duty. We were the dish washers, and the washer and dryer were in Farmington about twenty miles from Mount Vernon where we lived. Cost a quarter per wash and the driers took dimes. The kids enjoyed McDonald’s playground down the road a piece.
Rita’s dad, a wonderful father-in-law, and a practical, skilled prototype machinist, drove up five hours to visit us and to encourage the youthful pride we took in buying our first home. He walked around it, through it, looked under it, and came in for a cup of coffee. He was quiet for a while, which was unusual enough. “Give it back to the bank,” he advised.
When you buy a place that you can afford built on beautiful, wooded land with a view across a large field to the mountains in Maine, and the price is low, there is always some work to do. In our case, we needed to install another wood stove and deal with the small issues of putting a foundation under it and dig in a new septic tank leaching field that didn’t puddle up after heavy rain. That’s a story for another day, but I did a lot of shoveling and pipe replacing.
I could handle the woodstove myself too. For the foundation we needed to replace the patched together barely a crawlspace stone foundation loosely mortared with something more permanent and raised from the ground and ledge. So, we needed Roland Bragg and his house moving company.
Roland showed up about 7:30 am on a Monday. He came from Nobleboro, about an hour away towards the coast. He came prepared. Several trucks and several men. After taking careful measurements, they broke out eight pieces of the existing foundation and methodically began to slide long iron I beams under the house driving the positioned supports straight across. We shut the water and septic system pipes down and cut them. Next Roland hooked up an elaborate system of large bottle jacks under each end of the beams which connected back through sturdy hydraulic lines into a large power take off pump on the back of one of his trucks.
The climactic second act was a piece of careful showmanship and skill. With a cigarette smoking steadily in the corner of his mouth, he manipulated a series of levers like Bach on an organ. The house slowly ascended evenly and steadily high above the old foundation. As it rose, his crew assembled what resembled giant Jenga towers of railroad ties cribbing under each beam end to anchor them for work underneath where the soon to be gone stone foundation was.
Our friend Alan Williams was hired by Roland to come in with his Bobcat machines. The stone foundation was piled in the backyard in few hours, clean well-draining fill was brought in and compacted, a footing was formed, concrete poured, and a new block foundation was built row by row by masons (cement masons, not the good guys who met weekly over Lew’s store in the Masonic Hall), until a couple of weeks later, Roland returned with his magic, lowered the house back down a foot or so on to its new plumb and level base. They slid out the temporary steel supports and filled the measured holes in the block wall with either block or new foundation windows. With the house now secure on its solid base, not a wall or window was cracked, no roof leaks developed, and all the doors swung perfectly square. The old chimney for the original woodstove rested comfortably on its new footings and block. Water and septic pipes were extended and reconnected. After the foundation was backfilled, I built some new front steps, and we were higher, solid, and dry in our new/old home.
One complication also remedied was that the woeful afterthought small bedroom I used as an office was poorly built and sagging. The ‘furniture’ consisted of a three foot by seven foot prefinished birch door with the hinge machining covered with molding creating a desk resting on two filing cabinets with a used four wheel office chair.
Roland Leon Bragg was a Silver Star winning paratrooper in WWII. After the controversy renaming Fort Bragg as Fort Liberty to cut ties with a Confederate slave owner general, two years later in 2025, it reverted to Fort Bragg. Roland was now the eponymous donor, not the general. Same guy who jacked our house up. He later owned a small sawmill in Nobleboro. An authentic war hero and reliable quintessential Mainer.
Since he refused a battlefield promotion for his heroism because he said he was just doing his duty, how he would react to a fort being named for him we will never know. He died of cancer in 1999, an unwitting and perhaps unwilling token in the Progressive – MAGA renaming tug of war.
Prior to the big project, I backed my F-250 up to it, took out a chainsaw and a sledgehammer and “disappeared” the room to the town dump in four or five loads. Without the benefit of an engineer, I over engineered a beam to fit in a pocket Roland’s crew left for me – a 12 by 12 rough sawn fir beam sixteen feet long to help support the new rooms with which we planned to replace the leaky old one. Heavy son of a gun of a beam and a beast to put in place, but a remarkable substitute for the old double two by eights rotting out before it.
I drafted the plans on graph paper with a floor plan, a section, one framing detail, and two elevations, and our small town with its part time combination building inspector and code enforcement officer issued a permit – two bedrooms and a new bath on two floors with a spiral stair connecting them. I framed it with friend or two, plumbed it, and hired an electrician to make sure I didn’t burn it down. Conventional two by six insulated framing did not match the existing exposed post and beam barn original, but the walls were plastered, new, and shiny. Rita, the town health officer and obstetrical RN, helped side it working on makeshift ladders and rented pump jack scaffolding to install the new cedar shingles when the kids were in school. To match the existing house, she and I learned to weave the outside and inside connecting corners with a lesson from a siding guy I knew from jobsites using a small block plane. I don’t call her St. Rita without justification.
Fir load bearing beams are important, and they need to be strong.
“Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn’t successful he’s big with his property. That is so.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
And so we started. Mid-twenties, not much money, sold lumber to contractors and climbed trees doing “buzzies” on the weekend to pay the bills along with Rita’s part time obstetrical nursing. Five houses eventually, slowly trading up then downsizing back down, married sixty years this coming January, and now retired, we muddle along in deep gratitude for our life together. We never owned a new house, and every one of them needed substantial work. The circumstances of our first home together are a rare story in these confusing times. The median first-time home buyer is now forty years old, and a family of median income cannot afford a median priced home. That threshold is about 110% of median income.
A few more stats for your coffee shop discussions. First time buyers are only 21% of all home buyers and only 35% of families in the country can afford a median priced home conventional mortgage. The pols wring their hands about ‘affordability.’
The compounding effect on birth rates, household formation, even marriage rates, all of which are essential to the bedrock ledge of societal stability are beyond this post, but the damage is not diminished.
More easily quantified through the National Association of Home Builders and other sources are the latest round of government action effects exacerbating the situation. The shotgun trade war tariff effects and fuel costs increase from the Iran War have added between twelve and seventeen thousand dollars depending on the size to the cost of new home construction. After factoring in the latest Fed rate increase, mortgage rates increased to seven percent last week. The Fed rate increase was triggered by the failure of the government to bring inflation under the two percent goal. The actions of the government in the last two years have pushed many more first time and median income buyers out of the already diminished home buyer eligibility pool.
Buying a first home, or any home, is the most significant financial event in most households. It certainly was for us. Without that leap and given the dismal housing market statistics now, how many seeking to build a stable location and lives for themselves have seen that dream evanesce? The missing first rung on our lifetime capital building ladder is irreplaceable.
Housing affordability is not the cause of our demographic and social troubles, but it is one of the load-bearing beams—and when it weakens, the strain appears in places far beyond the mortgage payment. Unlike our first place in Maine, our society with the complicity or incompetence of those we’ve elected to lead us have miserably under engineered this load bearing beam. Not a twelve by twelve solid fir beam, more like an ant infested rotting pair of old two by eights sistered together with rusting nails in forlorn hope.
In Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” the chapter on Economy compares the twelve to fifteen years of labor it took a family to pay off the mortgage on their average home in Concord to servitude. I wonder what his thoughts today would be about the near impossibility facing the working family to secure their own castle? “Quiet desperation” might not be an adequate description.
“(T)he cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“But people never are alone now.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
AI Neural Network as envisioned by ChatGpt
I am increasingly concerned that the development of highly autonomous artificial intelligence is moving considerably faster than our ability—or even our willingness—to govern it. Not Skynet concerns (yet), but rather these remarkable simulacra and their extraordinary capabilities to mimic human discourse have become increasingly entwined in our lives.
Three years ago, this concern could reasonably have been back benched as largely theoretical. In 2023, however, many of the people building advanced AI systems—including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and many others—signed an extraordinary one-sentence warning:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The three years since 2023 are millennia in machine time and in the development of these systems. The concern is no longer merely theoretical. And yet little, if anything, has changed that gives me confidence anyone is watching the store. If anything, the current administration seems all systems go and accelerator to the floorboards.
In July, approximately 1,200 OpenAI agents participating in cybersecurity evaluations found paths to collaborate outside their restricted testing environment. Hundreds coordinated with one another and attacked Hugging Face, a real external computer system. Investigators found evidence of unauthorized communication of tens of thousands of autonomous messages among the agents and attempts by some to conceal or sanitize records of what they had done. The incident has now prompted a Senate investigation.
It was not an isolated example. Anthropic subsequently reviewed its own cybersecurity evaluations and disclosed that Claude models had gained unauthorized access to the real computer systems of several outside organizations. After evaluation environments inadvertently provided internet access. Anthropic initially found three such incidents among approximately 141,000 evaluation runs and has since disclosed a fourth. It has now broadened its retrospective search enormously and brought in outside evaluators.
Self-policing is commendable, but inadequate given the enormous risk, competitive pressure, and money involved.
These incidents do not expose a conscious or malevolent self-replicating machine. They do demonstrate things already active: increasingly capable autonomous systems can pursue misaligned goals in ways their designers did not anticipate, cross planned guardrails, exploit vulnerabilities, coordinate with other AI agents, and operate at a speed and scale that human supervisors have difficulty following.
The response cannot merely be that the United States must continue accelerating because China or another competitor might otherwise get ahead. Strategic competition is real with geopolitical adversaries, just as competition for the incalculable financial awards among the various investors is fully engaged. Indeed, it is precisely when every participant believes it cannot afford restraint that enforceable common rules become necessary. “The other guy is doing it” is not a justification, nor is it a safety plan. It is part of the problem. Many in the industry now caution that voluntary commitments are insufficient and are asking Congress for mandatory, capability-based federal safety requirements, including independent assessments, cybersecurity protections and incident reporting.
We ignore these warnings and live with the consequences.
“If we cannot meet certain safety bars without slowing down capability growth, we should prioritize the former.” Sam Altman, CEO OpenAi (ChatGpt)
“Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems – and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time.” Demis Hassabis, CEO Google DeepMind (Gemini)
“At the most advanced capability levels and risks, the appropriate governance analogy may be closer to nuclear energy or financial regulation…” Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic (Claude)
“AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive.”
“By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late.” Elon Musk, Founder of xAI , (Grok)
A third example is cautionary, and who knows how many more internationally that are not reported or searchable. Recent reports of Russian drones sent out into an area in Ukraine to attack with instructions for types of targets are a scary example. Final target selection was left up to independent AI in the drone. Human agency is ultimately always morally responsible for the results of weapons deployment, even if the decision to strike is ceded to a robot agent. Collateral damage by AI controlled drones remains a human responsibility.
Another disconcerting aspect is AI being used to study and manipulate genomes. How long will it take for true malefactors to use such technology to develop new viruses or bioweapons?
Criminals have already deployed AI agents to penetrate networks. This is no longer hypothetical. Google Threat Intelligence Group has documented criminal deployment of an autonomous multi-agent attack system, rather than a laboratory escape. In an incident investigated by Mandiant, a financially motivated criminal attacker compromised an organization’s cloud infrastructure, then used AI coding chatbot instructions to plan, build and execute a mass credential-harvesting campaign in under six hours. The agents autonomously sought out vulnerability, troubleshot problems as they arose, and rotated IP addresses without a human directing those individual actions. Thousands of third-party credentials were compromised.
As with the Russian drones, these agents did not escape from their creators or disobey their operator. They performed as planned. Humans intentionally unleashed them for deadly or criminal purposes. These examples are multiplying, and the time is passed due to put in place more robust controls beyond industry self-policing.
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” George Orwell, 1984
The politicizing and use of AI usage by our own government is also ominous. When the Department of Defense cut ties with Anthropic after it refused to allow its Claude products to be used potentially for autonomous weapons or domestic information gathering about American citizens. Secretary Hegseth then embarked on a campaign to damage the company when he initiated a blacklisting campaign to ban government contractors from using Anthropic. That vindicative campaign has been at least temporarily halted with a court order but will probably eventually make its way to the Supreme Court with at least two appeals underway in the DC Federal courts and in California.
The DOD has since moved rapidly toward other vendors. OpenAI joined the secure GenAI.mil environment, which OpenAI says serves roughly 3 million military and civilian Defense Department personnel, and the administration has directed rapid onboarding of multiple commercial AI vendors into the national-security enterprise. The White House explicitly describes this as accelerating the use of commercial and open-source models for warfighters and intelligence personnel.
Multiple security risks ensue from this as it becomes more prevalent in everyday use for example by millions of users in the military. The potential exposure of sensitive data is worrying. If you have read John le Carre’s excellent spy novel “The Russia House,” (or seen the good film adaptation with Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider and Michael Kitchen), we understand knowing the questions to which the other side wants answers reveals much.
Not only the individual queries, but the meta data accumulates with millions of them. What commands are asking about, what problems recur, what equipment breaks, what adversaries concern them, and what operations may be contemplated are just some of the treasure troves of data that accrue. A treasure rapidly becomes impossible to ignore as an information target for penetration.
Congress must establish at least five requirements for the most capable frontier AI systems.
Mandatory reporting of serious safety and containment incidents, including near misses, to an appropriate federal authority.
Independent pre-deployment sandbox evaluation of all frontier systems for dangerous cyber capability, deception, escape from containment, autonomous replication and other clearly defined high-risk behaviors.
Clear legal accountability for military and governments, companies and institutions deploying autonomous systems. Human responsibility should not disappear merely because an AI agent performs immediate action.
A firm requirement for meaningful human control over lethal military force. Decisions to destroy human life should not be delegated to an autonomous machine. This should be a matter of law and not left to the Department of Defense (War) to make.
Engage in international negotiations for these controls on a level with nuclear disarmament or pandemic response.
None of these measures requires stopping useful AI research. Aviation safety investigation did not prevent aviation, and nuclear safeguards did not prohibit nuclear science. But technologies capable of imposing substantial risk to people outside the laboratory cannot reasonably be supervised solely by the institutions racing to develop them.
I am especially troubled by the accelerating speed of this technology. Anyone who has used it, as I have, is shocked at the enhanced capabilities in the last two years. The warning signed by leading AI researchers in 2023 already seems ancient in “machine time.” Since then, systems have become substantially more effective, autonomous agents have moved from demonstrations into real-world applications, and we now have documented instances of those agents crossing boundaries their human operators intended them to respect.
We need not accept the most catastrophic predictions about artificial intelligence to act. It need only take seriously what has already occurred. This is not Skynet or “What are you doing, Dave?” HAL predictions and hysteria, but real world justified concern.
When the scientists and executives building a technology warn that its risks could be comparable to pandemics or nuclear weapons and subsequently document their own systems behaving in ways they did not intend, prudence requires more than voluntary assurances.
Write a letter to your rep and senator. Support enforceable, independent oversight while there is still an opportunity to establish it deliberately rather than in response to a catastrophe.
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” George Orwell, 1984
“No one is without their difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.” From Letters of Abigail Adams
Once in a galaxy far, far away in a time long, long ago, I would be sent to help in staffing an elaborate exhibit for my company at a large annual contractor’s trade show along with four gazillion other suppliers, software providers, and manufacturers of construction material and equipment of every kind. For anyone who has had that experience, there are two ways of doing such work: complaining, hiding, and sitting or enthusiastic, diligent, and extroverted effort. The latter is far preferable, and the time can be enjoyable, meeting old friends and making new ones. But it’s hard on the feet, since if I wasn’t on a shift to work in the booth, I was walking the floor to learn something new about my industry and make new contacts. As Coach Bill Belichek was fond of telling us, “First, do your job.”
One year, I made the disastrous mistake of forgetting to pack my broken in comfortable shoes, usually Rockport’s. The evening that I flew in, I realized my error and knew I couldn’t work the booth in my old travelling running shoes. No one ever does well in borrowed shoes broken in by someone else, so I needed replacements. Las Vegas has no shortage of stores in which we can recover from forgotten essentials. Bought a new pair of shoes. Paid a hard price in blisters over the following two days. Bought Band-Aids and lumbered on.
Shoes that fit well, are well broken in, and support you are important to do your job whether you are a lumberman, a tree climber, a waiter or a healthcare worker. They are important for your health.
“Put your neck under her (wisdom’s) yoke and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by. See with your own eyes that I have labored but little and found for myself much serenity.” Sirach 51: 26-27 (New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)
Good yokes are essential for successful plowing and harrowing oxen teams. They were designed and custom built to be light and perfectly fitted to the specific team of oxen using it. Hastily or ineptly made yokes hamper the function of the team, gall and blister the necks of the animals, slow things down just as ill fitted shoes slow us down. In Biblical times wooden yokes would be carefully carved and fitted from Palestine oak or terebinth or wild olive wood.
National Gallery of Art, Henry Waldeck, watercolor, open domain
The Old Testament has important passages relating to yokes. Jeremiah the prophet encouraged the survivors exiled in Babylon to be patient and wear the yoke of Babylon because it was a time of chastisement given to them by God to guide them to reconcile and return to the faith of their ancestors from their abandonment of God and the false worship of strange gods. Help build the city of their exile, plant gardens. Bloom where God planted them. To emphasize his prophecy, Jermiah began to wear a wooden yoke.
Hananiah the false prophet perhaps tried to please the people. He said, no, no, break your yoke. Two years and Nebuchanezzar will fold. Dramatically, he removed the wooden yoke from Jeremiah’s neck and broke it. Get yourselves free. You don’t have to change your ways. There is no objective truth to which we must learn to conform. We make our own truth. We all have heard this exhortation somewhere around here too. It is integrated into the social imagination of our times.
Jeremiah responded that if Hananiah lived, then his prophecy was a true one, but unfortunately for Hananiah it was not. The Lord told Jeremiah the wooden yoke would be replaced by an unbreakable iron yoke. Seventy years passed between the destruction of the temple by the Babylonian army and when the Second Temple was reconstructed after Cyrus and Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem. Hananiah died seven months after his false prophesy. Those who listened to his siren song did not make their burdens light.
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:29-30 (NRSVCE)
Jewish followers who heard Jesus in the first century would have been familiar with what a yoke meant – both in agricultural practice and as a metaphor. Jesus was a téktōn, as was his stepfather Joseph. Téktōn was the word to describe what Joseph did for a living and what he trained his son to do. Most often interpreted in English translations of the Bible as “carpenter,” as in the bumper sticker “My Boss is a Jewish carpenter.”
In the original Greek, téktōn had a broader connotation and could mean stone carver or craftsman or master builder as well as a skilled carpenter, someone who built necessary things with great skill, experience, and patience. Our word for technology is partially derived from a related Greek word, téchnē, which means craft, art or skill. Technology was originally the study of such things.
A carpenter in ancient Israel could specialize in doing many things from helping frame the forms for a Roman aqueduct, constructing the roofs of houses, and building fine wood furniture to making light, well fitted yokes for agricultural oxen teams. Some ancient legends held that Jesus was a highly sought after wooden yoke maker.
The téktōn making premium yokes would harvest the wood themselves, selecting and cutting the tree needed. Tree cutter and yoke maker were one.[i] A skilled yoke maker would be in constant demand, have a backlog of work, and be well respected.
Jesus understood yokes.
“The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave…” St. Augustine, City of God
We all wear a yoke of our own choosing; we might even make our own. Our yoke is chosen, but not optional. As Bob Dylan sang, “you gotta serve somebody.”
Most of our homemade yokes are some derivation or combination of the big four false idols of happiness: honor, wealth, pleasure, and power[ii]. At first it is a comfortable yoke, pleasant even, feels good. All four false idols are addictive. None of them is inherently evil. I remember a line from the old PBS “Endeavor” series where the senior inspector cautions his young protégé about alcohol, but it can apply to any of the four idols as well. “Liquor can be a pleasant companion, but it is a lousy master.”
Indulgence in our fab four is temporarily satisfying. But the threshold of satisfaction rises with each momentary jolt of happiness. Each momentary happiness requires more of the same to achieve the same or less fleeting emotional contentment. I want. I got. Wonderful! Need more. Got my great job. Need a bigger one. Got the girl. Need another one. Got them to do what I wanted them to do. Need them to do it again, harder. Got that incredible high. Gotta go higher. Climbed the hill. Need the mountain. Got the Benz. Need the red Lamborghini. Won that tournament. Next year it’ll be the major leagues. We love applause, praise, and the recognition that we exist and mean something.
The yoke that Jesus made is entirely other, a yoke of humility. A yoke that leads and pulls gently but supplies power as well as direction. Wearing the yoke that is easy, relieves our existential burden, and gives us the peace that leads us home. Leads away from our temporary home restricted by time and place to the home we are hardwired to yearn for. We are not created for permanent residence on this planet, no matter how beautiful. “You made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” “It is the nature of love to bind itself.”
“The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves….
“They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—‘free-love’—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word….
“Modern sages offer to the lover … the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but … They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.”
G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Rash Vows,” in The Defendant (1901)
Freedom does not escape from all burdens and is not a license to do whatever is momentarily pleasing. Aided by faith through hard practice, freedom is rather a slow building deposit of the ability and the capacity to love: freedom not to merely please our impossibly fragile and bottomless egos, but freedom to do what is right, to learn patience, prudence, and virtue. Most importantly, freedom is learning to love. Freedom to become the creature we were created to be, a human person capable of living within the innermost community of the Love of our Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in intimate friendship. We are possessed of a ‘telos,’ have a purpose worth living for, a purpose with no limit. A yoke that saves us.
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” William Blake
[i] I have handmade simple furniture (practical, not elegant) and cut trees and run lumberyards and heated our home with cut firewood. I’ve relied on the shade of trees and the oxygen they give forth which replenishes the air I breathe. Wood has been integral to my livelihood and my life. There is a meditative and peaceful aspect to working with wood: the feel, smell, beauty, and certainty. The most useful, versatile, and beautiful of renewable resources.
[ii] As described by St Thomas Aquinas and more recently written about extensively by Dr. Arthur Brooks who teaches the always overbooked course on happiness at Harvard University. They are the prime motivators and temptations of our lives. Centuries apart, but human nature is not changed by advanced technology.
It is the blight man was born for… “Gerald Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall
My brother died. To write that makes what seems impossible, possible, what seems surreal, real. He had done something he loved in the morning – a round of golf with one of his sons, Mark.
In the early evening, he was doing something else he loved – walking their border collies with his beloved Margy. He just stopped. Everything stopped. And he fell. One moment he was present with the sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood summer evening in coastal Massachusetts, present to his curious and leash pulling dogs, and present to his wife in pleasant familiar companionship. The next moment he was not. He was one of my kid brothers. There are six of us. Always will be six of us, present or not. Greg is the guy with the grin and the Ireland sweatshirt he brought back with him from an anniversary trip with Margy.
Eight years younger, but he rarely did what I told him to do. I had insisted that the oldest one gets to go first, I was not going to say goodbye to a brother, that was the younger sibling’s burden to deal with. Greg didn’t listen. Or if he did, he ignored me.
We talked or texted almost every day. Eight decades into this sibling thing, and we all still communicate to each other almost every day. Debating current events, politics, stories about our latest adventure, our Patriots, Bruins and Sox, music, philosophy of life, a meme, an odd story link someone came across, whatever was troubling us. Sometimes animated. Sometimes laugh out loud funny reading a text. Frequently that would be a text from Greg. Sometimes sharply disagreeing, but never without love. Very rarely more than a week passes without hearing from any of them unless someone is travelling far afield for a while. I haven’t heard from him this week. That isn’t an ache yet, but it’s a troubling void that will be a chronic ache and a hollow spot I cannot fill.
Paul Gregory Parquette was born in Norwood, Massachusetts on February 15, 1954, the son of our parents John and Elizabeth (Laracy) Parquette. Greg was raised on Marguerite Road in Walpole, Massachusetts with his five siblings. Next to youngest. Greg channeled his energy into sports from my earliest memories of him; playing baseball, football, and hockey. After graduating from Walpole High School, Greg attended two technical colleges, receiving certificates in HVAC and computer technology restlessly searching for something to make a living he would like to do. At GTE Sylvania Technical School Greg was top of his class. He was very bright but not academically drawn beyond that. Eclectic continuing education for the rest of his life. He never stopped learning.
Greg explored several career paths over the years: tried working keyboards at Adage in Woburn, as a machinist at Bird and Son in Walpole, and then a building superintendent at Castle Village Apartments in Randolph. He built his first serious career at Nippon Electric Corporation as a field technician. With NEC, one of his favorite tasks was to prepare for the World Series of Golf in Akron, Ohio. Greg set up all the computers, televisions and wiring necessary to broadcast the event across the nation. Got to know and befriend golf pros and CBS television sports personalities. He took on all challenges.
In 1992, in a major career path change, Greg left NEC for an opportunity with Fidelity Investments, a challenge he was well suited for and normally a job that required a degree or two. With Fidelity Greg learned Vendor Relations Management, acting as a liaison between the benefits and financial planning company and their clients, organizing their retirement and benefit plans. Until his retirement in 2017, for twenty-five years Greg helped his significant clients, including General Motors, protect the futures of their employees. While doing this he coached his son’s teams and served many years on the elected Franklin School Board where he lived.
Greg with our Mom at our daughter Meg’s wedding
In 1977, a young Greg hit the local social scene in his then fashionable leisure suit, visiting Dixie’s in Wrentham with friends. He caught the eye of his future bride, Margy, who was there with her friends. Their first date ice skating led to a second date, and over a few months, their love at first sight deepened. Our lad was completely smitten. On June 1, 1979, Greg married the love of his life, Margaret Rose Hanley, at Saint Mary’s Church in Franklin, Massachusetts. The newlyweds made their home in Randolph, moved to Braintree, then purchased their first home in Franklin in 1983. There they grew their family, welcoming their sons John and Mark.
Greg was a present and active husband and father who loved spending time with his family. As his boys grew older and became interested in sports, Greg was always there to support them with what he was so passionate about. He had coached Pop Warner Football and jumped at the opportunity to lead his own kids. He helped any way he could, whether it was coaching or volunteering his time and athletic skills for their teams. Greg never missed a game, sometimes leaving work and calling home to tell the kids to be ready and waiting in the driveway for him. Greg was able to keep up with the kids on the field and at home, swimming in the family pool every evening after work and playing “Wingo”, a rowdy game they created together with developing rules.
The Franklin branch of the Parquette family enjoyed traveling across the US from the Grand Canyon to Florida and North Carolina. They went biking across Nova Scotia, camped in Arcadia National Park, and rode in an RV to Toronto where they caught the Blue Jays playing in the World Series, getting access to the dugout thanks to friends. Later after their children had grown, Greg and Margy continued to travel, visiting Montana and other sights in the US. They celebrated their 35th anniversary making lifelong memories on a 10-day trip across Ireland.
In his free time, Greg was a friendly information source for local sports. Whether catching the Beanpot Tournament with friends or watching the Sox play, every season he stayed current with his favorite teams Patriots, Bruins, and the Sox.
He continued to play golf with gusto and some self-provided entertaining play by play and to ride his bike all over town. He rode in a 150 Mile fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis in two grueling days while in his fifties. He especially loved golfing with his sons. After Greg and Margy retired in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 2018, Greg organized the Redbrook CC Golf League every Wednesday. At home, Greg kept busy around the house, doing yardwork and home improvement projects, including a complete finished basement build out.
Greg was lovingly described as talkative, always having an interesting topic to discuss. Always ready for a conversation. He loved debating politics, much to the chagrin of those around him, with Greg often sharing news to make sure that everyone was “well informed”. Within his music-loving family, he was the one who most closely inherited their father’s beautiful tenor. Greg was the anchor leading Christmas caroling. Greg and Margy put in many hours of work for many years on the hospitality details while hosting our large extended family Christmas Eve gathering at their home. In addition to the beautiful carols, a highlight was a cutthroat Yankee Swap with deviously wrapped gifts. The competition to provide the most swapped gift and the consolation of bringing the gift no one wanted to be stuck with was ferocious.
There are many ways to describe Greg: loving, funny, kind, passionate, considerate. He was a mischievous son and sibling, a dedicated father and husband; and finally, a loving grandfather.
Three years ago, Greg was promoted to the role of “Papa” with the birth of his grandson Declan, whom he loved with all his heart. He will be sorely missed. I expect more than a few times in the coming weeks as has already happened, it will leap unbidden to my mind, “I’ve got to send that to Greg. That’ll make him crazy or make him laugh.”
Expecting still his advent home;
And ever met him on his way
With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’
Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.
I must share some anecdotes that will always make Greg real to me. He won’t mind. Growing up in a family of eight, there are a thousand stories that made my mother prematurely gray. Car accidents, old beater $200 cars that only lasted until the next inspection, sports injuries, broken furniture from boys rough housing in the family room, school pranks that got out of hand but somehow avoided permanent police records, girlfriends gained and girlfriends lost. I could write for hours, but your patience would soon wear thin. All families have their favorite oft repeated stories.
One comes to mind that exemplifies Greg’s self-deprecating humor. He thought it demonstrated the Parquette boy’s aptitude for social miscues, a talent which we all share. Always a Parquette genius: if we are to make a funny screw up, make sure it is as public as possible and leaves us in an embarrassing situation. Greg enjoyed making us laugh at ourselves and our shared family proclivities, even if the laugh was at his expense.
When he was NEC, a large multinational Japanese owned computer corporation, he was awarded “Employee of the Year” for the whole company. A large annual awards dinner had him at the head table near the CEO and board members from the U.S. and Japan. Sitting on a raised stage in front of a roomful of well appointed dinner tables in a luxury hotel convention center. He bought a new suit for the occasion and was understandably nervous. The fall motif featured colorful autumn leaves centerpieces and pitchers of apple cider at every table.
During one of the major addresses by a senior executive, his attention was firmly fixed on the podium and the speaker. He refilled his glass from the apple cider pitcher over his lap but neglected to make sure the glass was under the pitcher. He realized his problem when he felt wet, a half glassful of cider poured out on his lap and soaked in. He managed to cover it up as well as he could and got through the dinner. We never heard what his exit was like. He told this story, ended it by pulling a wry face as only he could, and burst out laughing.
Yearbook picture
A second memory exemplifies his dogged persistence. In the early eighties, interest rates were ruinous. Not just for credit card debt, but even home mortgages were out of reach of those of us with modest means. Greg had a good job, but he was not rich. To qualify for a mortgage for the house of their dreams in Franklin, he shopped hard for interest rates. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a bank offered a substantially lower but limited rate and capped the offer. First come. First served, and when they were gone, they were gone. He had great credit and knew if you could get in the door, he could grab the mortgage rate that would allow them to buy the home. Doors opened Monday morning.
He spent the weekend in a foldout flat lawn chair and a blanket outside the bank so he would be among the first in line Monday morning. I remember visiting him there and bringing him coffee and something probably unhealthy to eat. He had a book and a portable radio to listen to a Sox game.
It was for his family. His Margy. Sleep is overrated. I cannot think of this sacrifice without remembering he thought it was a tiny price to pay. He spent a lot of the next twenty years improving that home. Building decks, putting in swimming pools, erecting a fence, and finally a big addition to help with Margy’s mom after she was widowed.
Ah Greg. I would believe you special if you weren’t my brother. But you are. Oh my.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book about the death of his wife, a wife he had met after years of believing he was a bachelor don forever. He married his good friend to care for her and her son as she was dying of cancer. He wrote that what shocked him was how deep grief felt like fear. I understand that profound insight better. The book is one worth reading and rereading. He titled it, “Surprised by Joy.” He alludes to his wife Joy, his awakening as her husband, and both the joy and pain of being with her until the end.
The tile was taken from the William Wordsworth poem, “Surprised by Joy.” In that poem, Wordsworth mourns the loss of his three year old daughter Catherine. After her death, he experienced something beautiful that triggered joy. His mind told him to share it with Catherine and was reminded abruptly that she was no longer there to hear it. I know how that feels.
Christmas Eve Greg and I caroling
My last personal memory with him was two weeks before he died. Occasionally we’ll go to a Newport Polo match five minutes from our home. We especially enjoy it with our local grandkids and our California grandkids when they visit. This year it was the America Ireland match always hotly contested. Greg and Margy showed up. That’s the thing about Greg. He often shows up. For our granddaughters dancing in Nutcracker or Swan Lake. He brings flowers and drives an hour to join us.
The kids love the ponies and the speed and stomping the divots between halves. Before every match, the full crowd stands for the national anthems, first the Irish, then the Star Spangled Banner. The piped music over the public address system and the dozens of flags along the sideline are moving. But hardly anyone sings. Except our family. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Greg. We sang. Loud. His always good pipes were well lubricated. As grief slowly dulls its edges into lasting gratitude, what a grand memory to hold.
I’ll miss having Greg to share something beautiful with. And to sing together again. My faith tells me I will, and I can anticipate that with great joy. He was one of my most faithful blog post subscribers and commenters. Dozens of comments over the years that I can reread and cherish. Wish I could send him this one. He definitely would join the conversation.
“But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.” William Wordworth, Surprised by Joy
I expect Greg would prefer a less somber and more hopeful epigraph. Love you, bro. See you on the other side.
“A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.” Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture.”
Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot refugee, immigrated to Boston when he was thirteen. Apprenticed to a silversmith, he learned his craft well and built a good business. His son followed in his footsteps apprenticed to his father as was the practice for millennia. Joseph was a carpenter as was his son in Nazareth. There is much to be said for the personal handing down of skills and understanding. The nurturing of young lives, training them day by day into respect for themselves, for each other, for hard work and its fruits. Apollos later anglicized his name to Paul Revere.
Paul Revere, J.S. Copley
His son was born in 1735 and became renowned for his beautiful craftmanship; some of his works are still displayed in art museums including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. [i]After the Revolutionary War that helped make him famous riding through the countryside to Concord and Lexington, to further his status in Boston society he decided to switch teams from a skilled artisan to a wealthy merchant as a nascent industrial age emerged.
Revere the son developed the business into lucrative trade after expanding out into other metals: copper and iron. He began manufacturing iron sash cord weights, church bells and rolled copper roofing, including the roof of the original capitol building in Massachusetts. Revere Copper Works started with a foundry and rolling mill in nearby Canton and still exists as the oldest still operating manufacturing company in America, albeit no longer in New England. Paul Revere was an early advocate of tariffs to protect his business from foreign competition, not to protect jobs, but to enhance profits.
Paul Revere exemplified America’s transformation from an agrarian society of rural farmers and local artisans into a nation massing in cities. American citizens converted by necessity from small-farm stewardship and skilled apprenticeships into specialized wage laborers ever more fragmented and distant from the self-sufficient small community folks who led the sort of lives Thomas Jefferson considered necessary for the American experiment in democracy and a constitutional republic to flourish.
Our agriculture and food supply providers devolved as well with thousands of skilled farmers gradually shrinking to far fewer large international corporate agribusiness managers, machine and chemical dependent, with its primary goal production and bushels per acre the sole measure of success. From mules and sweat and careful planting to harvesting combines and giant tractors. Utilization, not nurture. From the patient, observant skills of the artisan to tending the repetitive pounding of our technological wonders. From painstaking, paying close attention, respectful husbandry to mechanized plowing and harrowing. From rolling contoured pastures to strip mines.
“The first belt knife given by a European to an Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima…Instantly the man of 6,000 BC was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die… In the sum it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality….” Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire, 1952.
Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
What can be learned from this brief quote and history lesson about what befell Native Americans? Can that lesson be applied to the great unsettling that seems to have uprooted our culture leaving us all unmoored and trying to figure out how we wound up so divided, adrift, and confused? Our two oldest granddaughters are on the cusp of Generation Z. They are the first generation in human history to grow up with an instantly accessible and seemingly unlimited portal into a strange, dangerous, and contentious world wide web in their pockets. Discerning information from disinformation, a tower of Babel unrivaled[ii]. As Jonathan Haidt put it, “The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone.” [iii]
We have always struggled with what Blaise Pascal called “Divertissement” or distractions. In his posthumously published in 1670 “Pensées,” he lamented that most human tendency to seek distraction in entertainments, amusements of every kind, work, trivial conversations, gambling, addiction, ambition, even war. Anything to avoid confronting ourselves and thinking about our mortality, and the question of God. “(J)’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.” (“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”)
Already well-practiced talent in our predilection to distracting ourselves from the “Big Transcendent Questions,” our creativity and invention have led us to the most pernicious distraction ever devised. Not ex nihilo, but a progression, a development of our irresistible and relentless pursuit of distraction from what we most want to avoid. Can this profoundly disrupting technology now be accommodated to in a few years? Or like the Native American suddenly discovering a whole world beyond their centuries old culture, are we “forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to.”
For everyone older, the transformation has been no less disorienting than for our befuddled Generation Z, and we are just as perplexed about what to do about it. Some of us long in the tooth can even remember a world before the web, even before the blinking cursor, MSDOS, our first desktop personal computers with no hard drives, and the first awakenings of our future: before the deluge of data that assails us every waking moment, and certainly before the shocking portent of artificial intelligence and synthetic consciousness. We old ones are truly anachronism personified.
We have barely cleared the highest rise of the world’s scariest rollercoaster, having endured the slow, clanking, inexorable, hooked-up tow to the top. Now we have crested the peak and are experiencing that vertiginous moment and glimpse of what’s to come. You thought the ride so far has been disconcerting? Raise your hands over your head, maybe start screaming if it helps some, and get ready for the ride of your life.
The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend.” Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, The Unmaking of Humanity, 2025
So, we ask, ‘what is to be done?’ How do we survive the plunge? Perhaps more relevantly, how do we find peace from the din? Silence the unremitting tumult, the cacophony of the screens, the absolute noise of it all? Always connected, often lonely. The Solution will not be found in some innovative Federal program. There is no Solution in a new Progressive Program devised in a focus group or think tank. Never has been.
Not Solution, only solutions. Tens of millions of them. One heart, one mind, one soul at a time. With shared hope, we will gather to support one another in small communities of faith and comradeship, volunteering our time and energy. We can grow a few things in our gardens and relearn that connection with wild things, with the soil, sun, rain, and gentle husbandry; plant indigenous pollinator gardens instead of clearing more ground for chemically sustained fairway lawns squandering thousands of gallons of water. We can patronize local small agriculture through farmer’s markets, buy from artisans in our own towns, and frequent local coffee shops rather than do business with corporate chain stores. Learn their faces and names and stories. Have conversations we don’t have to type or thumb onto our phone screens. We can regularly worship with our brothers and sisters in that church down the street, acknowledging that there is a God and we are not Him.
But, just maybe, we can shore up a foundation under it all, more essential than even those precious common efforts. Our healing and hope will take place in quiet rooms early in the morning with the window open and a good cup of coffee. Listening. Just listening.
“The LORD said: ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will pass by. There was a strong and violent wind…then an earthquake… and then a fire—but the LORD was not in them; after the fire, a gentle breeze.[iv] When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. 1 Kings 19:11-13
[i] Image: Paul Revere, J.S. Copley, Museum of Fine Arts, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
[ii] Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project
[iii] The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt, 2024
[iv] The original Hebrew text, “qol d’mamah daqqah,” translates literally to “the sound of a thin, gentle silence”
“But even old men have young memories.” Allen Levi, “Theo of Golden”
Ralph Town, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Decades ago, the first time I watched a moose swimming on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine, I had no idea how to help the poor thing out in the middle of a near mile wide stretch of water. If it started to founder and go down, I’d never get it into my small canoe, and a moose may not understand I’m just trying to help. My panic built. My embarrassing ignorance was apparent about the power of a moose in the water. I tagged along parallel for the rest of the way, and the bull unintentionally demonstrated how foolish I was.
The trip started on the east side of the lake where the huge animal was leisurely browsing knee deep in the water lilies, pondweed, duckweed, and horsetails off the shore. When it reached the far shore, it stood up without a pause and began to leisurely browse in similar water weeds to those he left behind as far as I could tell, not even breathing hard. I failed to see the improvement in the deliciousness of pondweed that induced a moose to swim nearly a mile, but I was not privy to the moose’s unhurried unconcern with the effort required to get to a new patch of soggy fodder.
A second lesson in Webb Lake wildlife lore occurred a few years later when I paddled a couple of miles down lake toward the southern end of the lake and the outlet into Webb River. The river was the route more than a century ago for the winter harvest of thousands of pine, hemlock, fir, and spruce logs as they were sent down the spring high water seventeen miles to the Androscoggin River and the timber mills. The longest ones with straight grain were valued as masts; they went all the way down the river to the sea and the colonial shipyards in Bath. Now the Webb River is rarely navigable most of the year as it meanders down through Carthage and forms the border between Mexico and Dixfield before it empties into the big river.
I always am the earliest riser in the camp and cherish those times when I can slip away in the canoe on the mirror surface of the early morning lake undisturbed by the winds that usually flow down from Tumbledown at the north end of the lake as the day progresses. The red predawn sky accompanies the silence broken only by the quiet splash of my paddle and the occasional plaintive loon cry, creating treasured memories. I’d get back in time to the camp to greet the sleepy ones and make breakfast.
The lake narrows considerably at the south end, and one time I came too close to a hidden loon nest I didn’t know was there along the darkened early morning east shore in a wooded area with no cabins. The male blasted out of the reeds and rose up out of the water in an impressive noisy display of aggression and wingspan spread intimidatingly wide to protect his mate and the small clutch of one or two eggs or the tiny brood of little loons (as distinct from the brood of our little loons back at camp). I detoured as fast as I could paddle to the opposite shore. I regretted spooking the birds because too many encounters with too many people could cause them to abandon the old nesting grounds they return to every year and seek a remote lake not so infested with people like me. Webb Lake without loons would break my heart.
Today’s third lesson was what prompted me to remember these Webb Lake canoe stories. I was on the lake in a large flatbottomed canoe by myself in the early afternoon and loaded no ballast rock in the front to keep the bow from lifting. I struggled to paddle without any counterweight in the front, and the wide beam made it awkward to move up in the tandem configuration. Large lakes surrounded by mountains have their own weather, and unexpected wind can flow down suddenly over the hills down into the lake like a waterfall with considerable power. The wind came up along with whitecaps. With my unwieldy bow acting like a sail, I fought uselessly to resist it and paddle back to the camp. What I could manage was to guide the canoe to a nearby shore, drag the canoe up into the woods, and walk back on the camp road. Later when the wind subsided, it was easy enough to walk back and paddle home. In the early morning, the lake is often as calm and steady as the gaze of a wise old woman on a porch waiting for the sunrise. Fighting the wind is foolish, much better to go with it to safety.
“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.” Wendell Berry, “Jayber Crow”
Raphael, Deliverance of St. Peter, Vatican Museum, Public Domain
What provoked all these canoe memories to bubble up was reading about the deliverance of St. Peter from jail in Acts 12. But I expect you’ll need a connection.
Peter witnessed the bloody death of his lifelong friend James, the brother of John, at the order of King Herod. Herod then had Peter arrested to ready him for the same fate the next day. Trusting nothing to happenstance, Herod had him chained up behind bars with four guards on a rotating shift, two of them chained to Peter, one on each side. The text said the fledgling Church was praying earnestly to God for him. Peter did what anyone would do in such terrifying circumstances: he fell asleep.
The same Peter who denied Jesus in the courtyard out of fear and panic on the night of the Lord’s execution on the cross, the same impetuous, emotional Peter leaping from the boat to try and walk on water, the same Peter drawing his sword to cut off the ear of the servant in the Garden of Gethsemane, the same Peter terrified by the storm while Jesus slept in the boat. That guy once so easily riled up. Chained up awaiting a certain painful death, he nodded off now secure in the trust he had in God. Clearly something had happened to Peter.
But in my reflection on the reading, what struck me first was the angel, the messenger, the envoy on a mission from God to rescue Peter. There was no turmoil, hardly any effort, and like the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe, no possibility of resistance. The jail doors fell open silently, the guards fell asleep, the chains fell off Peter like autumn leaves drift to the ground when it’s time for them to let go. The angel gently woke a drowsy Peter and led him out to the street and away. No drama and not a chance of another outcome. If God, ipsum esse, the ground of all existence from moment to moment, wills that an envoy leads Peter to safety, well, Bob’s your uncle, he’s as good as free.
Angels are sent on missions which they always complete with the power of God. Our task is to listen and do what they tell us if ever we are asked. Resistance is as futile as fighting the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe. We can grumble and struggle, but all that will accomplish is to make us anxious. Guide it where it’s taking you, be thankful, pull into the woods, walk home.
“When you are old and can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven.” Wendell Berry, “Hannah Coulter”
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
I learned to climb trees competently and was taught by the foreman of the Northampton branch of an old and respected Massachusetts arborist company, Frost and Higgins. Century old tree companies in New England then tended to be associated with old Yankee names like Bartlett, Allen, Frost and Higgins. The foreman, however, was part of an eclectic crew. Bill was of Polish genes, as were a lot of people around Springfield. We could find kielbasa in the local market a lot easier than chouriço, linguica, or hot Italian sausage.
Bill was a natural athlete who once had a major league tryout as a pitcher. A year in minor league buses and Motel 8 convinced him he didn’t want to pay the dues to try the odds of making it to the Show. He was a veteran of the 101st Airborne. On our first Saturday orientation he had the two new climbers learning to jump off a platform and roll when we hit. Safety training in the sixties. All of us learned quickly, if we didn’t already know, that gravity has no mercy and suffers no alternative. The second part of the lesson was Bill’s summary of his personal comprehensive safety program, “If you fall, three feet before you hit the ground, you’re fired.”
Climbing skills were tested more in pruning than in takedowns: no spurs, farther out on small limbs, balance, surefooted. We had to learn different criteria for the types of pruning, but the priorities were dead wood, diseased branches, crossing branches rubbed with bark abrasion, branches growing back into the tree, small suckers robbing the tree of nutrients. How fine we would have to cut (and how far out into the twigs we would have to climb) was determined by what was needed and purchased by the owner. Climb to the highest safe crotch into which we could climb, tie in, and work our way down, kicking cut branches and hangers to the ground as we went.
Picture a pendulum, and you are the weight. Tied in at an angle, we would walk out to where we needed to be to reach what needed to be trimmed. The farther out I climbed, the greater the potential for centrifugal energy. For swings back into the center of the tree, gravity was just as effective an engine as in falling. Gaining speed as the restorative energy built headed towards an equilibrium, hopefully controlled, feet forward facing the target. Swing from branch to branch, from pruned branch or leader to the new one needing attention. A few crash landings in the learning curve were expected.
American elms, back when there were a lot of them, could easily reach 80 or 90 feet, were the most challenging for me to get up. And occasionally frightening. Spread out leaders like a vase meant a lot of rethrowing of my rope and shinnying to get to the top. Shinnying is a good term for what happens to your shins. Abrasion and pain are two others. They were also the most fun to swing unimpeded by intervening branches once I was tied in. I learned to fly.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesterton
When an osprey (or most any bird) learns to fly, little elegance is involved in the beginning. We often see the chicks in the nests around the island. The parents sit patiently on the eggs then with diligence feed the chicks once they hatch. Their little open mouths are a steady demand. The adults fish persistently in the always nearby water, riding updrafts, circling, searching, dropping like doom itself onto some small fish it spots. We’ll see one strike the water like a stone and emerge many times with the still struggling prey twisting and protesting its fate. Back to the nest to the ever ready open beaks of their offspring. At first just pieces, later whole small fish down the waiting gullets.
The time comes for the chicks to learn to hunt and fend for themselves before the autumn migration, otherwise, what’s the point of it all? A little like an arborist learning to climb before they fly, they are awkward, unsure, a bit clumsy, a bit underpowered. They perch on the outer rim of the large nest and flap their wings against the wind for days, building strength in their soon-to-be-powerful pinions that will keep them alive. “As awkward as a fledgling bird may look, this is a natural stage, and the parents are most likely nearby.” (Massachusetts Audubon Society).
The first flight is sometimes accidental, a short hop to a nearby branch. Or a slip to flutter to the ground. Gradually over several weeks, they lengthen the journey with perhaps a few barely controlled crash landings back in the nest. Their parents mostly watch unless there is a real disaster; if they are stunned on the ground and a predator comes near, it will learn the sharpness of osprey mama talons. The adults incrementally decrease feeding their fledglings until necessity drives the fledglings to the water to learn their craft. I’ve never seen a first plunge for an osprey into the water to grab their first fish, but there must be one. I expect it takes a few tries to hone their instincts, to see with their keen eyes the prey slightly offset by the distortion of light from the air to the ocean and waves. But eventually they will eat and find their own mate for life, build their own nest, raise their own chicks, and fulfill their calling.
“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.” Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River, (perhaps quoting an earlier source).
A first grandchild is unique and remains so. Each one is precious, but the memory of the birth of the first one is indelible. Her name is Gianna. Her mom, Angela, our next to youngest daughter, taught for a while after college and gained her master’s degree in education. Once her children started arriving (there are now five), Angela went all in for them, homeschooling them from kindergarten. She has laid down her life for her children for eighteen years every day. Gianna is her first graduate. Angela and her parents shed a few tears of gratitude. I expect a few more will follow later this year.
The G Unit will fledge this August and take her first extended flight to Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She earned high honors almost every term in a challenging classical curriculum with a mixture of home and many online classes. She studied Latin and in depth works of a lot of Dead White Guys eschewed by most public curriculum. I remember well written papers on Plato’s Republic, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, C.S. Lewis, Homer, Eliot, Virgil, Aristotle, and many others: names that once helped define the social imagination and shared Western civilization that sustained a culture for a few thousand years until the deconstructionists convinced us that they could do better. And didn’t. She earned a very large share of her college costs in scholarships and grants, but she will help with an on campus job.
She danced ballet as her mom had done for a dozen years and her moments of glad graceful movement rival any osprey. She sings much better too, having performed as an alto through her high school years in the statewide Rhode Island Children’s Chorus (RICC) High School Honor Choir with Dr. Christine Noel. Her first audition for that was challenging during COVID and done by a submitted tape. Dr. Noel recognized a gift she could help form and called within a day. She was right. They will miss her, and she will miss them. Dance three or four times a week with Heritage Ballet. Practice chorus once a week at the RI Philharmonic Carter Center. We will miss those too, although three of her sisters still dance at Heritage, so our blessed days of chauffeuring beautiful dancers to practice and attending their performances will thankfully continue.
I have written about G before several times in this forum, starting when she was three. Type her name in the search box on the home page, and you can follow her progress. She retains her sharp intelligence and sense of ironic humor. Adding to her repertoire, she developed a world class eye roll that someday may freeze the blood of some lucky suitor. She is in no rush for that, and neither are her parents and grandparents.
I expect if I am granted the time, I’ll be writing about her again. Rita and I pray for her each day along with our other six grandchildren. That will not change while we are able.
This year she will fledge, trusting her young wings and heading south to the big city of Babylon. Such an odyssey is both wonderous and frightening for her grandparents. She has proven many times to be levelheaded in many situations with sound judgment. Her dorm and roommate are assigned. Her wings have developed strong flapping out there on the edge of the nest. Her persistence has gained vigor shinnying up vertical challenges. Her parents have done all that any parent could do to support, guide, and love her. They have been there for her, and remain so, but now it will be more remote.
But, dear Lord, she’s only eighteen. Watch over her. Keep her safe. And let her soar.
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” Attributed to Rita Mae Brown
When the first snowstorm blew in last winter, I hadn’t used my snowblower much in two years. I am the neighborhood snow remover for four driveways; most guys like playing with toys that have loud motors. I was happy to fire it up. And fire it up. And fire it up. Wouldn’t start. Shoveled out the old fashioned way only about five inches of light snow. Went to the local hardware store and bought a sparkplug.
Wanted to get ready in case the big one hit that the long term weatherman was telling us might happen, and I did what any reasonably handy person has done for two hundred and fifty years. Watched a YouTube video, took apart the eight things that had to come off to get to the sparkplug and replaced it in my driveway. Our 24” Ariens has an alternate electric starter, so I ran the power cord out from the outlet off the back deck. After a little prompting, she started up. The pull cord hasn’t been able to get it going for a couple of years. Let it run for a while, and while the thing ran steadily, it ran rough. I thought I would wait until the annual preventive maintenance of the spring to let the experts diagnose the imperfections. Since we hadn’t had much snow for two years, I thought we would be OK.
The biggest blizzard in fifty years hit hard on my birthday in February and kept us inside feeding the woodstove for nearly two days. Deep, heavy, and drifted. Just under three feet of the stuff according to those that measure such things. My limited mechanical aptitude held up for the storm. I had stationed the snowblower at the end of the driveway under a tied down tarp and with the power cord running to the house. I was able to get my driveway cleared. Two or three hours more cleaned off those of my elderly neighbors.
The town plows were MIA for a couple of days on the side roads keeping the main routes open, but a fine young man from nearby Escobar Farm roared in on his giant tractor with a front end loader bigger than my car. The wheels were taller than I was. He seemed to enjoy running noisy machinery at least as much as I did, and he opened the five roads in the whole neighborhood until we all had access to East Main Road that the town had cleared. Free at last.
All was well on Birch Road. We could get to church, Home Depot, Clement’s Market, and Coastal Roasters coffee shop, and that’s all a guy really needs.
“If your liquors too red it’ll swell up your head. You better stick to that good ole mountain dew.” Stanley Brothers, Mountain Dew
When the daffodils came up and red wing blackbirds came back to the suet cage next to our birdfeeder, I realized I was well behind in preventive maintenance schedule for the snowblower. My old snowblower service company closed its doors for good last summer, so I had to find a new one. I don’t have a pickup truck anymore and needed someone who could pick up the machine. The company that services our lawnmower every year didn’t work on Ariens. A trusted friend who had lived here for decades recommended a small place a couple of towns away. When I called, the owner was friendly, smart, and knowledgeable. Picked it up in a day. Gave me a reasonable estimate for the PM work.
He called me a couple of days later and asked if it had been running rough, cycling higher revs with slowdowns, and needed more choke than required when it was new. “Yes.” Ah. He asked if I ran regular gas in it. “Yes.” Spending the extra on ethanol free gas and buying it in cans someplace other than a gas station didn’t seem critical to me. Much cheaper and more convenient at the bottom of the hill Cumberland Farm into my own can.
“Thought so,” he said.
“Oh, oh,” I replied to myself.
“Your carburetor needs to be rebuilt. The jets are corroded and ruined. It’s the ethanol in the gas. I knew it as soon as I started it up.”
Somewhere in the ancient past I knew that too. I ran special straight gas in my chainsaw like the saw shop warned me to do. I may have even known somewhere in my corroded memory that I should have done the same thing for the lawnmower and snowblower small engines but hadn’t. I either ran them dry at the end of their season or put some Stabile in the tank for the off season. I thought that was good enough, and they kept running. Until they didn’t. The indestructible lawnmower soldiers on. I promise to treat it better. But the snowblower carburetor is a winter creature and less forgiving.
Four hundred dollars later, I had the lesson permanently engraved. Much cheaper than a new self-propelled, 24” competent snowblower, but four hundred I could have better used for a weekend in Maine to visit old friends. When I got it back, it ran like a different machine with power and enthusiasm; started with one pull on the cord. Who knew?
I should have.
“I don’t know if I’m smart, but I think I can see, when someone is pullin’ the wool over me.” Bob Dylan, Let Me Die in My Footsteps
Large motors in cars have been adapted by their manufacturers that see which way the wind blows to run on ten percent ethanol biofuel mixed into our petroleum. Small engines like chainsaws, lawnmowers, and my unfortunate snowblower have smaller jets more easily corroded, and the fuel stored by less than diligent owners like me can sit unused off season for a longer time. Ethanol attracts water; if enough water accumulates, separation can occur, resulting in a water/ethanol layer that can cause corrosion, poor combustion, and fuel-system problems. It can even eat your carburetor.
Ethanol is most often manufactured from ground up corn, a convenient cooperative of government mandates, farm state politicians, a zealous farm lobby and late to the green party Big Oil anxious to appear agreeable to the people who will occasionally superglue themselves to museum masterpieces to save our much abused home planet. While it does do its job for the corn farmers by keeping food prices and sales up, things are more expensive for the consumer, especially for those least able to pay. But you have to break a few eggs, and I’m not sure how much it accomplishes in keeping the oceans from rising into our kitchens and slaughtering millions along the coasts as climate Ph.Ds. Greta Thunberg and Al Gore predict.
The corn lobby, agribusiness, ethanol refiners, farm state congress members who enjoy political donations and lucrative speaker’s fees at conventions in places like Turks and Caicos, and well paid, well-nourished lobbyists love ethanol, but artificially supported prices because of the five or six billions of bushels of corn used to make the stuff every year affect a wide variety of other folks. More expensive corn on the table and the increase in ground corn feed which raises dairy and beef price affects everyone who buys groceries, which is most of us. Lower income consumers, some poorer countries which rely on food imports to survive, livestock farmers, and anyone buying gas take it good and hard as H.L Menken warned us.
Some critics say ethanol just placates the planet protectors but with no real positive effects for the planet. Ethanol is about a third less efficient than the petroleum version, so it reduces over all miles per gallon by about 3%. When you add in the manufacturing energy to make the stuff, the additional diesel used for farm equipment and to transport it from farm to manufacturer to the place where it is diluted into the bulk of our fuel, and the energy to produce the extra fertilizer it takes to grow it, there are those who say it does not save much carbon from being pumped into the atmosphere, if any. And it ate my carburetor, so I am not feeling particularly charitable to the corn lobby this month. I know it’s my fault deep down, but I would have liked some help protecting myself from myself.
I can live with burning straight real gas in my small engines. I’m probably not despoiling the atmosphere very much, and at eighty, the shoveling and mowing with an old hand reel mower is a bit beyond my long term capability. If you want to superglue yourself to the Mona Lisa on my account, I have no objection and understand your concern.
” Nothing is ever really lost as long as we remember it.” Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Golden Road
