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When DARK AGE AHEAD was published in 2004 most said Jane Jacobs was wrong.
She was not wrong as time is showing us.
Dark ages happen when people forget she warned us.
So much has been forgotten.
The Boy Scout motto is, “BE PREPARED.”
In 1968 Jane Jacobs and her family came to see one of my programs. That was the start of a friendship that changed my life for the better. Two years later I learned she had written a book titled, “THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.” I bought it. I read it. I read it again, again and again.
Many have said they have a problem understanding her ideas. I said to her son, Jim, “The reason people have a problem understanding THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES is because your mother wrote it from the perspective of the dirt poor.”
Said Jim, “You’re right.” He added, “My mother loved you.” I replied, “I love your mother.”
“You have the wrong attitude. If you leave this school today you will starve top death in two weeks,” my high school principal told me. He said that to lots of people. Lots of people have had it said to them. Had I not left I would not have met Jane Jacobs. Truly, had I not left I would have starved.
In a piece in THE GLOBE AND MAIL Jane Jacobs said, “I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I’m afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes…I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me…they get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are…University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything…We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it’s clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web.”
Yes, it is. And right now that web is being ripped to shreds.
If you think this moment is bad, well, what is coming is much worse.
Be prepared.–Reg Hartt, November 30, 2023.

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