The notion that simple solutions exist to knotty problems should trigger a host of red flags.

I have a bone to pick with “just,” because in at least one of its permutations, it lies.

My dictionary defines “just” in its adverbial sense as ”simply; no more than,” which, when you think about it, “just” seldom is.

Consider, for example,  Nike’s admonition to “Just do it,” and Nancy Reagan’s solution to the lure of recreational drugs: “Just say no.”

If it were as simple as Nike and Nancy would have us believe–if we’d “just” lace up our running shoes, and “just” decline the drug du jour—then the percentage of obese adults (34%) and obese kids (17%) would fall to zero, and zero drug use would mean we were all clean.

The point here, is that with campaign season upon us, and about as unavoidable as a 900-pound, halitosis-ridden gorilla on the coffee table, the notion that simple solutions exist to knotty problems should trigger a host of red flags.

Because in these days of financial uncertainties, social realignments, and toxic exchanges that pass for public discourse, chances are, if the solution to any problem were as simple and obvious as “just” doing it implies, whatever the “it” was, it would have been done, and we’d all be seeing its beneficial effects.

Unfortunately, there exist a number of office seekers this fall for whom the “just” admonition constitutes the entirety of their political platform, while any concrete, creative change that might result from their rhetoric is either immaterial or non-existent.

In New York, for example, gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino has come up with the simple (or simplistic, depending on your views) notion of “taking a baseball bat” to Albany.  According to some polls, this “just” approach resonates with more than a few voters who note that Mr. Paladino’s campaign reflects their “anger” at political “insiders.”

But as columnist Clyde Haberman noted recently in the New York Times, if Mr. Paladino “believes that he can waltz into Albany with his baseball bat and, as he vows, pound it into cutting state taxes by 10 percent in his first six months and state spending by 20 percent in his first year, he better own a helmet that fits well.”

Leaving aside the question of whether anger represents a viable methodology to bring about constructive change, consider the impact on the public discourse of both public and private voices who lay claim to some sort of real Americanism by virtue of their “just”-ness—as in “just” being Every-day Joes and Josephines— while at the same time exhibiting little or no grasp of basic American democratic tenants.

It is apparently came as a news flash to Christine O’Donnell, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Delaware, that the First Amendment to the Constitution forbids the establishment of any national religion, or the preference of one religion over any other.

And apparently neither Dred Scott v. Sandford— in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent were, in effect, non-citizens—nor Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down separate public schooling for black and white children, were sufficient blips on Sarah Palin’s radar screen that she could cite them as pivotal moments of American history, despite her highly-touted image as a patriot and a representative of the American Everyperson.

Further, it seems that along with ratcheting up public rancor and attempting to pass off “Don’t Tread On Me” as the solution to convoluted national problems, some voices out there are equating ignorance with chic–or at least evidence of some sort of “real” patriotism.

The more a candidate demonstrates ignorance of basic English; the more a candidate dismisses educated, critical thinking as “elite,” the more, in the candidate’s own parlance, those gaffes qualify them as “real” Americans. (Or, as Ms. Palin put it in a recent tweet, “‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’  English is a living language.  Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”)

Fraught times can morph the most innocuous-seeming words into distinct threats to clear thinking, to informed public discourse, even to the basic understanding of who we are as citizens in a working democracy.

“Just” is one of those words.

Benjamin Franklin famously described the American experiment as “a republic—if we can keep it.”

That’s an admonition to informed debate and careful considerations, not “just” sloganeering; sloppy, uninformed rhetoric, and simplistic reasoning.

Come to think of it, let me tweak the title of this piece with the power of punctuation.  How about “Just: Don’t Do It.” 

Trish Bennett’s award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in the Main Street News for many years.  She holds a master of science degree in journalism and was adjunct professor of media history at Quinnipiac University before relocating Bryn Mawr, PA.  Her latest work appears in “This I Believe: On Love,” a collection of essays submitted for broadcast on National Public Radio, and on sale in stores nationwide beginning Nov. 9.  
Click to read Trish’s essay in “This I Believe: On Love.

Porches are, like summer, are sloth-inducing and community-inviting

The American poet Robert Frost is famous for—among other things—penning the line, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

Frost’s lines concern a stand of birches observed in winter, bent down, as those trees

tend to be, by snow and ice. It is as if, Frost observes, a small boy had shinnied up the trunk, and, with the bravado of the young, reached the end of the tree, and flung himself, clutching its topmost branches, feet-first into the blue winter sky and “ridden” the tree to the ground.

The image of the birch-swinger is a metaphor for the poet’s on-again, off-again relationship with the world: “It’s when I’m weary of considerations,” he writes, “and life is too much like a pathless wood…I’d like to get away from earth awhile, and then come back to it and begin over.”

Now given the fact that it’s July in New England, as opposed to January, I will make bold to offer a seasonal amendment to Mr. Frost and note that, fine as birches are, one could also do worse than be a sitter of porches.

Bear with me, and I may actually get you to believe that homely, un-“hot” objects like birches and porches can actually be the stuff of meaning, allowing us to revel in life rather than merely regarding it as a conquerable commodity or something to be endured.

Porches are ephemera to many modern home builders and largely to the 21st century mindset in which everything seems to require justification via a specific purpose.

Real porches–and here I exclude so-called “three-season rooms” which are made practicable,  and therefore justifiable, by insulation or infomercial awnings; and “decks” which many times dangle in space supported only by four by fours and which function as a grilling stations and occasionally collapse, sending bratwurst, steaks and grill person into the sump-pump bog some 18 feet below—are, like summer, short-lived, sloth-inducing, and community-inviting.

And to have one, especially a front porch, is to be blessed.

First, porches represent the once-upon-a-time in architecture. A time when folks strolled streets after dinner; a time when neighbors knew their community as faces and names met over day-to-day dealings; a time when social interaction was spontaneous rather than marked on an agenda three weeks in advance.

So once upon a time, after supper, you spied Fred and Mabel over your flower boxes and invited them up to your porch for ice cream and/or gossip.

Porch furniture, likewise, embodies a largely abandoned approach to existence: It does not warm, vibrate or advertise as orthopedically approved. Rather, it rocks, but back-and-forth; it swings, but in the wind.

So once upon a time, Junior de-camped to the porch and poured over Treasure Island, or Pop left the edging until tomorrow and expended his strength willing Ted Williams to first base while downing a lemonade.

“A good porch,” notes writer Garrison Keillor, gets you out of the parlor; lets you smoke, talk loud, eat with your fingers—without apology and without having to run away from home. No wonder that people with porches have hundreds of friends…Me and the missus float back and forth on the swing, Mark and Rhonda are collapsed at opposite ends of the couch. Marlene peruses her paperback novel in which an astounding event is about to occur…the cats lie on the floor listening to birdies, and I say, ‘It’s a heck of a deal, ain’t it, a heck of a deal.’ A golden creamy silence suffuses this happy scene, and only on a porch is it possible.”

As I said, one could do worse than be a sitter of porches.

Happy summer.

Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net

To dwell in a space means, I think, to combine a spiritual relationship with a spatial one.

“Space” is a concept that has been omni-present for us over the past four months, because in August we sealed our lives up in reinforced cardboard, loaded kit and caboodle, and traded old space for new.

After living nowhere but New England since forever, I and mine find ourselves transplanted to suburban Philadelphia, amid spaces where Welsh spellings defy heroic attempts at decipherization (if there is such a word), much less pronunciation.

Bryn Mawr (“brin mar”: or “great hill”), for example, is downright straightforward compared to Bala Cynwyd.

(Bala Cynwyd’s translation, like its spelling, is convoluted in the extreme.  My theory is that the name of the place was dreamed up by an inebriated black belt in tongue yoga.)

How and why we came to change spaces is a story for another day.

Suffice to say, however, that we are happily situated, despite the fact that we still lisp or spit, endeavoring to enunciate the names of some of the local villages.

And in general, we, like most people, rank “moving” right down there with root canals on the Fantastically Fun Pastimes List.

Still, relocation has its positive aspects, encounters with “thin spaces” being one of them.

To explain: Since slicing open boxes and finding doorknobs packed together with one’s double boiler (yes, really) is an exercise requiring a limited expenditure of mental energy, in the act of unpacking, you can and do find yourself considering space in new ways.

Certainly, you can deliberate for ages as to where, precisely, to locate Aunt Dorothy’s tea service.  But far more importantly, you find yourself wrestling with ideas about precisely what certain space around you can mean.

To dwell in a space, (which is to say, centering your being there, as opposed to utilizing home as simply a crash pad) means, I think, to combine a spiritual relationship with a spatial one.

The Celts defined “thin spaces” as those confluences of time and space in which we can catch a glimpse of—call it what you will—perhaps, the Infinite.

Thin spaces might be akin to what Thoreau experienced at Walden (in a space he built measuring merely 10 by fifteen feet).

Thin spaces might be something like biblical accounts of mortals sensing a Presence they called God.

If I read the idea correctly, these spaces are said to be “thin” because for brief moments, the barriers between “here” and “there” are less like a wall, and more like a curtain of gauze that allows us to see Something Else at least dimly, if not face to face.

I admit, few if any of these musings would be the stuff of “House Hunters,” or “Curb Appeal” or “Divine Design,” or any other cable show purporting to demonstrate the quintessential must-have kitchen, or the ways and means of engendering a raging case of house envy among one’s friends.

What entertaining the possibility—and it is only that: a possibility—of “thin spaces” does accomplish, however, might be the idea that Winston Churchill noted: First we shape our dwellings, and then, rather magically and imperceptibly, our dwellings shape us.

It’s intriguing, and worth considering: the idea that spaces—be they homes, or specifically designated houses of worship, or simply the created world—can be “thin,” allowing us to glimpse some bit of what may be beyond our immediate realities.

Even more intriguing is the idea that it just may be that in such home-y, or homely spaces, the Infinite resides: waiting for us to wake up and get it: Abundant possibilities; possibilities that are abundant.

Eyes to see and ears to hear, if you will.

Meanwhile, where on earth are my grandmother’s butter knives?

Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net