Lessons Learned on Suicide Hill
by Jack Cashill
“We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing—in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
—Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, 1990
On snowy winter days I walk the trail that parallels Brook-side Boulevard in Kansas City if for no other reason than to watch the sledders rider down Suicide Hill.
Formally known as Brookside Park, this humble slice of Kansas City had to have been carved out as parkland for no greater purpose than sledding. It is just about all hill, a wonderfully hellish 60-degree drop with a natural brake at the old trolley bed below.
If there is snow, there are sledders on Suicide Hill, often hundreds of them of just about every age, sex, and race locally available, on every kind of imaginable conveyance from dinner tray to inner tube, some of them sitting, some kneeling, some standing or trying to, some lying flat out feet first, some head first, some solo, some in tandem, some in groups of three or four, some with friends, some with family, and all of them smiling or even laughing as they reach the bottom of the hill.
Not all of them reach the bottom. Some wipe out on the way down, especially the adventurous and the ill-prepared. On a crowded day there is the occasional collision as well and a breathtaking amount of near misses. Yet for all the potential mayhem, one hears scarcely an ill word among the sledders and sees nary a fight.
The beauty of all this controlled chaos is the absence of a single posted rule or regulation, let alone a referee or security guard. In a harmonious neighborhood like Brookside, where kids routinely have two parents, many of whom sled with the kids, self-rule is the order of the day.
Although phrased in the negative, political philosopher Edmund Burke suggested two centuries ago why Suicide
Hill works as well as it does.
“Society cannot exist,” said Burke sagely, “unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without.”
On Suicide Hill that control comes from within. Good parents don’t need regulators to help them negotiate the risk-reward factor in their own or their children’s lives.
SPEAKING OF SNOW, I cannot tell you offhand which of our polar icecaps is expanding or contracting, but I can tell you for sure that the number of serious scientists who dissent from global warming orthodoxy grows by the day, despite the obvious career risks that dissent brings.
At last count, for instance, more than 19,000 scientists have signed a petition to Congress arguing “there is no convincing scientific evidence” that human activity causes climate change.
“The proposed limits on greenhouse gases,” the scientists contend, “would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”
I had presumed that as the pool of dissenting scientists expanded, and their evidence became more self-evident, the climate change Chicken Littles would stop their squawking or at least confine it to their native habitats on either coast.
I was wrong. Neither the scientists nor the half dozen or so snowfalls this December have done anything to quiet the fear mongers. In fact, the noise grows louder and more local by the day.
Within a seeming matter of months, climate change chatter has insinuated itself, if not into the operational planning, at least into the public relations posturing of virtually every industry here in River City.
The pressure that this anxiety brings to bear on industry has already begun to deform local decision-making, nowhere more starkly than in the decision of the state of Kansas to deny Sunflower Electric Power a $3.6 billion coal-fired power plant in industry-starved western Kansas.
If present trends continue, concerned citizens will be picketing the Plaza next Christmas, protesting the sooty carbon imprint of those damnable Plaza lights. And unlike this year’s delightful anti-fur protestors, it is doubtful they will entertain us by protesting sans chemise.
DESPITE THE SEMI-NAKED FUR PROTESTORS, no one relocates a business to Kansas City because of the area’s scenery or sex appeal. We have little of either.
What we do have is room and sufficient humility to share it gladly. We also have a fair share of common sense, a goodly work ethic, and a healthy appreciation of progress, virtues in short supply in more naturally favored domains.
Site selectors, in fact, have historically thought of greater Kansas City the way I think of Suicide Hill: affordable, accessible, unglamorous, sane, and self- disciplined.
This is our entrepreneurial advantage. It is what keeps us competitive. As the greener states in the land of the free rush willy-nilly to regulate themselves into recession, we would be wise not to yield our advantage, but to exploit it.
To do so, however, we have to challenge the collectivists in our midst, those well-meaning souls who know better than we do what we should ride, smoke, eat, wear, weigh, consume, burn, generate, and inhabit.
These folks drive too much of our agenda on everything from light rail to embryonic stem cell research to anti-smoking to compulsive greening. Too often, they do so from within those very organizations created to protect local business from scolds very much like themselves.
In their defense, of course, they would tell us that “going green” (or whatever) is “good for business.” In my experience, however, the more often I hear someone tell me something costly and counterintuitive is “good for business,” the more inclined I am to hold on to my wallet.
In all seriousness, before we yield our wallets to accommodate the fears of these people, would it not make sense to submit those fears to some kind of objective review? The Kauffman Foundation or the Greater Kansas City Chamber would, I think, make a likely mediator.
Instead of staging still another hysterical conference on “solutions,” Kansas City could sponsor the first dispassionate debate on the “problem.” Our goal would be to determine, in fact, whether there really is one. We would invite both the orthodox scientists and the dissenters to make their best case on climate change and the consequences thereof.
If, in fact, we can identify no crisis, we would move to a second stage. Now, we would ask those local activists who insist that going green is good for business, even in the absence of crisis, to show us the ROI, if there really is any.
Kansas City would make a fitting site for such an event. We see the world more clearly than our coastal rivals and yield less freely to fads.
It is a good opportunity to remind the world why they call Missouri the “Show-Me State.” 
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.