The Rise of the Humble
Prosperity is whimsical and the harder it’s pursued, the faster it runs. Some people know this, and some people don’t.
By Tim Clark
It’s difficult to understand pain through numbers. A doctor may ask how bad something hurts on a scale of 1 to 10, which is almost impossible: agony is personal, and doesn’t lend itself to numeric definition. Imagine if you spread the misery over a town, or an area. How do you quantify the slow decline of an area with roots that run into the iron and steel furnaces of the industrial revolution?
We just spent two and a half days exploring the Northeastern Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania, and the numbers there are not good. Andover was once a thriving community; the railroad linked the steel industrial section in Pittsburgh and the oil fields of Oil City Pennsylvania with Lake Erie ports. Ashtabula exploded from a sleepy little port on the lake to a bustling, busy hub, where iron from Minnesota and coal from West Virginia and Pennsylvania were loaded and unloaded by immigrants, mostly from Finland, Italy and Sweden came to make a living. It was hard, dirty, dangerous work, and many of them died or were horribly mangled on the job.
That is all history, though.
