Hear no evil, see no evil

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

When we hear this quote, we think of the "great" historical evils; the quintessential example for those of us who grew up in the 20th century is the Holocaust. It's a way of wagging a finger at the moral failures of the ordinary people in those situations, the ones who knew better and should have spoken up but didn't. In our heads, we wonder how they could have allowed such things to pass when they were so obviously wrong. In our hearts, we congratulate ourselves because we are good people who would have done the right thing, if we'd had the chance.

But this quote is not applicable to the "little" evils of our day, things so minor that they don't really justify being called evils. They are "unfortunate" events, when poor and disenfranchised people suffer around the world or in the next neighborhood over. If someone in Ethiopia loses access to their land or water so that a richer country can take advantage of those resources, or if someone in North Minneapolis is struggling to find shelter or food or a safe place where their children can play, this is not a manifestation of evil. It's sad, of course, and it would be great if something could be done, but poverty is intractable and the causes are too complex for us to fix, and all we can do is shake our heads while we sip our latte and realize that we can't really change those things. Quite frankly, those things are distant "third-world" problems; and while we may self-deprecatingly laugh at our "first-world" problems, those are the ones that we have and they are the only ones we can really deal with.

Some might say that the real first-world problem is that we are reliant on the existence of the third world to support our standard of living. Without it, our goods would not be so cheap and plentiful, our lives not nearly so convenient, our growth not so rapid, and our favored status not so clear. That is why third-world problems both cannot be evil and must not have solutions; otherwise, any investigation into their roots might point a finger too near our direction. But even if this were true, it is not our fault. We did not make these systems, and we certainly can't change them. This is just how it is, and we have to get along as best we can.

Martin Luther King said that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but these things are not a threat to us, and they are not truly injustice; that would imply that there is a right and a wrong to these situations. And that can't be true, because if if were, then we would know it, and we would be doing the right thing. We are good good people, not like those other good people, and if there were a true moral question we would be on the right side of it.

Comfort is not the reason good people do nothing. What is wrong with comfort? Comfort is a reward, a sign that we have done well, worked hard, followed the rules, and earned your rest. If other people don't or can't achieve what we have, it is not good for them, but has nothing to do with us. It is certainly not our responsibility to change anyone else's life, or to make sure they are secure. Because our comfort and their discomfort are separate things, and we owe those people no debt. The fact that we worry at all is a sign of our sensitivity, our generosity; we don't have to think about those things at all, but since we do, that shows that we are good people, people who will definitely fix injustice if we see it.

And we know what justice is about; it is about rights, about documents, about equality before the law, about voting. It is about equal opportunity, anti-discrimination, a level playing field, and merit. It is about individual aspirations and the belief that everyone can succeed if they try, and those who deserve it will be rewarded. Sometimes it is about keeping people from being killed, but that is only under some circumstances; there are many reasons why people are killed. But if someone is killed and it really is unjust, justice will allow you to get everything you are entitled to under law. Justice happens in law; and if we have any duty, it is to be honest jurors and vote for good legislators.

But justice is not about what we buy. It is not about where we live, or where someone else lives. It is not about who goes to what school and the kind of education they get. It is not about who owns what. It is not about who is hungry or who is healthy. Those things result from a tangled web of individual, corporate, and government decisions, and you can't even assign responsibility to anyone. Supposing you could - you still would be hard pressed to find anyone doing evil. We are just trying to earn a good living and have decent lives and make good decisions for our kids, and we aren't hurting anyone else. We certainly aren't responsible for what happens to unfortunate people in the world around us. But we are good people, and when we have the chance to fight evil and injustice, we definitely will.

Watching history?

So, unless you're asleep or under a rock right now, you've heard the news about Osama bin Laden. Someone on MSNBC just said that "this marks the end of something, marks the end of ... an important period for the nation." My first reaction is clearly heresy at this moment but: the end of what? Do we know why we're cheering? What do we think was accomplished tonight? And did we learn anything at all from these last 9-1/2 years?

We won't know for a while yet what effect bin Laden's death will have on terrorism around the world. It would truly be a gift if his absence caused the al Qaeda networks' acts of senseless killing to stop. But I am afraid that we remain as unreflective as ever about the context within which those acts are taking place, and the changes we've allowed in ourselves since September 11th.

Will we actually seek to understand the social, economic or environmental drivers that caused bin Laden's message to be so attractive to so many, and will we do anything about those issues? Will we stop using "security" as an excuse to destroy our own civil liberties and civic life, to say nothing of how we treat those who are not American citizens? Will we examine our prejudices toward Muslims, the Middle East, and non-white immigrants that we allowed to persist and intensify throughout this period? Will we confront our own nation's role as an agent of violence and injustice around the world?

As I listen to flashmobs cheering outside the White House, my heart has become incredibly heavy, because we are so busy rallying that we cannot ask ourselves what this should mean to us. Much like the national mood after September 11th, I fear that we'll be whipped into a false sense of unity that cuts off any opportunity to think about who we want to be following this event. We will cheer our military might and congratulate ourselves for the path that got us here, without ever wondering about the assumptions that underlie how we act on our own soil and abroad.

We are overflowing with a frenzy of gleeful hate because we killed the scapegoat on whom we'd placed all the blame for our decade of deep fearfulness. Yes, Osama bin Laden bore significant responsibility for the September 11th attacks; but the story of what happened to us that day - and certainly the story of what has gone on since - is much more complicated than that. It's hard for me to cheer, because I'm struggling to understand: did this moment really make us safer, or better?

Finally! Higher education is not the end-all-be-all

Even though I'm just weeks away from getting my Master's degree, I think this article totally hits the spot:

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.

Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.

We're convincing too many of our children that higher education is the path they have to take to be successful at anything, we're burdening them with tremendous debt loads to buy into the system, and we've decided that going to college is the solution for all that ails us in terms of poverty and inequity for disadvantaged communities. I think higher education has a purpose and can be very valuable - but I also know that I got the most value out of it when I went back to school at 25, at which point I had worked and supported myself for several years and had a much better sense of who I was and what I wanted out of college. We need to recognize and support that there are a much wider range of alternatives for a fulfilling life, and that many of them don't require going to college at 18 - if ever.

This similar article by the same author who posted the above interview with Peter Thiel also discusses why higher education is not the safe route to success that we all keep telling ourselves it is. Here, he quotes Paul Krugman:

The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, non-manual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

Finally, I feel validated, as I've been arguing for years that pushing kids into college just because everyone says that's the thing to do isn't a particularly good idea. If The Economist says so, I must be right! I'd also like to note that I was arguing something similar about the push to an "ownership society" in housing well before 2008. Maybe I should become a predictor of bubbles?

A public schools paradox

I should be writing a paper, but I'm hopping onto the blog for the first time in four months. The impetus? A desperately perplexing civic issue that I needed to talk about in public, in the hopes of finding some new ways to think about it.

I've been wondering for many months now: what happens to public school systems when parents who have the means and/or care to do so exit in order to give their children a better education? As more and more of my friends who live in urban areas start having kids and making these decisions, this question has really been weighing on my mind. In the past few months, I've heard many different friends and acquaintances mention how and why they chose not to send their child to the public school where they were residing at the time. The methods vary - whether they put their child in a private school, a charter school, or changed school districts by moving. The nature of the school systems also vary - some are uniformly dangerous and of poor quality, some have quality that varies widely depending on the school your child gets placed in, and others are just considered less than the best.

This might not be such a remarkable set of stories; but the part that I'm struggling with is that all of these people are also individuals who care about social and economic justice, and who care about preserving a strong public school system. Looking at the research about education and school systems, the key factors that make a difference in a good education and a good school environment are the socioeconomic status of the families attending a school, and the level of involvement of the parents of a school's students in their education. And so, a mismatch occurs between the values of socially-minded individuals and the choices that they make about their families, when inequity of education for others is a highly likely result of those choices.

It's a hard decision to argue against, when you balance the direct consequences for your child with the indirect consequences for people to whom you don't have any specific responsibility - or even any concrete connection. It's also a really hard thing to talk about as a question in our public life together, because everybody gets really defensive and crazy. People who've decided to take their children out of a low-performing school or system get kind of ticked off when you ask about it, and tend to vehemently defend why they couldn't make their child a social experiment for the sake of abstract justice. People who've kept their children in public schools tend to argue that they schools are just fine, thank you, and, by the way, people who took their kids out don't care about schools and are kind of elitist. And of course, I have to defend my right to even be a part of the conversation, because I don't have kids and so I can't really have anything worthwhile to say unless I've been in the situation myself, and also, it's a private decision and none of my damn business.

But I feel like that standoff is just destined to continue the downward spiral of some of our most challenged schools, while we all throw up our hands and decide there's nothing to be done. I want to try and open up this conversation, even if it makes us all uncomfortable, because I feel like we need to develop another set of options from the ones we feel stuck in. We keep throwing money and new educational or organizational models at low-performing schools in the hopes that it will all magically work out into some improvement, without realizing that if there aren't enough people holding a school directly and personally accountable for the education of its students every day, those resources are largely wasted.

I'm not trying to vilify anyone who made the choice to move their children to a school or system that they thought was better. But I am trying to figure out how we don't abandon the children who weren't fortunate enough to make such a move, and how we save ourselves the future costs of that abandonment as a society. I think some of the answer is structural and systemic: changing our systems of school funding so they are no longer tied to the local tax base, and/or directing our statewide/nationwide education resources for facilities, materials, training, assistance and staff to the communities and schools facing the most challenges first; making sure that the incentives for school staff - and board members - are aligned with the achievement of the outcomes we want for our kids (although we've got to think through those incentive systems very carefully).

But I feel like the other part of the answer (and in fact the greater part, because without it the right structural changes won't happen, either) is a way for us as citizens of our localities, states and nation to really own our responsibility to take concrete action to ensure the best possible education for all those children who aren't our own, and especially for the children who won't get to move up and out to "better options." We need to make that concept moot in terms of instructional quality, educational outcomes and adequate preparation for their lives as adults. It might be through running for school board; or it might be through showing up at school board meetings. Maybe we teach, or tutor or volunteer to make up for the gaps while we work on building a better system. Really good afterschool opportunities matter, too; although we can't rely on afterschool to make up for the failings of in-school.

Anyway, I'm really trying to sort this out. How do we as individual citizens, both with kids and without kids, make choices in the short-term that don't compromise our future for the long-term? Your thoughts on the topic would be greatly appreciated!

Water, water everywhere - but only if it's properly filtered and bottled and wrapped in an attractive package

I just found out from a friend that it's Blog Action Day 2010; I'm not so plugged into this whole sphere o' bloggers. The topic du jour is water ... so here goes.

Like food, I only just recently started paying much attention to water. The first piece that sparked my attention was when I realized a) that I ought to be drinking more of it and b) that I really like it. A few years back, I started listening to all the nutrition advice that said I should be drinking a lot more water and a lot less soda; and slowly I transitioned over to water and juice, and then just varying kinds of water (bubbly and non). I like fizzy water, especially if it has a little flavor; but on many days, there's nothing that beats the incredibly refreshing taste of a cold glass of water. (I've never understood, BTW, why people say water has no taste. It tastes like ... water!)

My water justice awakening came through the Boston Faith & Justice Network (also, the ultimate source of my food justice awakening), at their Gratitude & Creation event in February 2009. The event included a session by Corporate Accountability on corporate water rights and their devastating effects on local environments and economies both here at home and around the world. This started me on a trail of water-justice exploring, from the abuses and folly of the bottled water industry to the availability (or lack thereof) of water fountains in public places. I'd always thought that the bottled/filtered water craze was silly and unnecessary (full public disclosure: I do own a Brita pitcher), but around this time it went from "unnecessary" to "unjust."

I don't know that I can make the case for water access better than others who have spent a lot of time doing it. But I think this is one of those clear and easy issues on which a simple behavior shift can have a powerful effect for justice: those of us who are blessed with ample supplies of extremely safe potable water have a wide variety of ways to get that water and carry it around with us that don't degrade the environments and livelihoods of others. So for Blog Action Day 2010, I hope you'll commit to making the water that we all need to live a resources that we all have by right.

Professionalism vs. participation

So, I had my first class of the year tonight - hooray! It is quite nice to be back in school. I think that it's a good sign of how much I really like my program that I haven't been dreading coming back, but actually looking forward to it.

I have to say that I was worried about the class as it got started this evening; the professor has a speaking pace that is very ... slow. He's not monotone, and he's not boring; but after 5 minutes I had a real fear that class was going to feel excruciatingly long. I did feel kind of long, but in the end I felt like he'd presented some interesting topics, and he had an amusing sense of humor (of the dry wit variety, to which I can relate very well as a speaker).

One of the interesting topics he brought up was the conflict between a society built on democratic (and sometimes radically anti-government) ideals and the whole concept of professional public administration. He mention that as a country and a profession we've never quite come to terms with the fact that public administrators, who are not elected or even in most cases appointed officials, are the biggest class of policy-makers we have - far more influential than our elected leaders (not to mention generally more focused on managing the country than political posturing to retain their position). This topic has come up in a couple of classes before, as has the idea of a "politics-administration" dichotomy that is supposed to keep public administrators focused on implementing the policies decided in the political process. But the reality of the complex systems we've set up to govern and manage our society is that our elected leaders don't end up having the time or the knowledge to work out all the details of how our public systems work, and they leave that to the staff of administrative agencies - who become policy-makers every time they create and administrative rule and decide how it should be applied.

On the one hand, there's the argument that we need administrative staff with professional training who can use their discretion based on specialized expertise to determine the minute details that bring vague and far-reaching policies into daily practice. On the other hand, there's an argument that administrators with no direct accountability to the people over whom they exercise power should not have power to make such important decisions about where public resources go and what happens to them when they get there. For the past year, I've kind of thought of this as an academic discussion; but I realized today that it is incredibly personal, and a tension I've been wrestling with for years.

So much of my vocational and avocational philosophy is about community and citizen empowerment, and recognizing the right and the ability of regular people to play a meaningful, dominant role in the decision-making that affects their lives. But at the same time, I'm in the middle of my second degree program that trains people to be professionals in their field - presumably based on the assumption that to do architecture or to manage organizations well, you generally need significant training in the tools and techniques of the trade. The very idea behind these schools is that, excepting the rare geniuses among us, the untrained individual will design or plan or manage or administer very poorly; and in practice, rare genius is rarely recognized unless you've gone to the trouble of getting the credentials to prove what you know.

This is a potentially serious philosophical conflict. How do I argue for open access to governance and decision-making on the principle that we all can participate without the need to be specialists - and then at the same time, defend the value of specialized training in making sure that people are well-prepared to be good decision-makers? If enough of this kind of training can be given to the general public in a simple, inexpensive way that allows them to participate fully, then why do we have all of these specialized schools (and more importantly, why am I spending my money on them)? And if this kind of training can't be gotten expect with specialized study, then doesn't that imply that there is a limit to how much or how well our citizenry will actually be able to self-govern?

Folks will probably argue that it doesn't need to be either-or, there's a balance, different roles for different times, etc., etc. But I feel like there's a little bit of a cop-out there, and a refusal to recognize that the conflict, while negotiable, is still real and sometimes very, very challenging. This is a question that gets played out over and over again, as public agencies are asked both to do their jobs efficiently and professionally and to be accessible and responsive to the demands of the public. It may be almost impossible to satisfy both of those requirements.

I have to head off to class now - but this is an item for further discussion! Heck, I may even turn it into my paper topic; isn't that clever of me?

Humor Fail

A friend just posted this following joke on Facebook. I was sorely tempted to argue with her conclusion there, but I have no desire to get into a social networking comment war. So I'll indulge myself here ... and then link this post on Facebook, so people can comment war me anyway. ;-)

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat."

"I am,"replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You've risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

Of course, the point of the joke is to demonstrate the general superiority of Democrats, and the cluelessness of Republicans that makes political disagreements their fault. Amusing, but specious, for a number of reasons I fell compelled to point out:

1. There's no indication that the lady doesn't know where she's supposed to go; she just doesn't know exactly where she is. Last time I checked, Democrats also sometimes get lost.
2. There's no indication that she doesn't know how to keep her promise (i.e., how to navigate her balloon to reach a destination once she knows the directions), merely that she is lacking a piece of information that would help her complete that task successfully.
3. She doesn't expect the man to solve her entire problem (i.e., take her to meet her friend); she is requesting help with the information she lacks.
4. She didn't blame the man for her being lost; she blamed him for not providing information that was helpful to her.
5. And this is the key problem that the smug Democrat's response obscures: his technically correct data was not something that the woman could use. Perhaps she doesn't use GPS data to navigate; maybe she needs a town name, or a street name, or a landmark, because that's how the directions she has are written.
   

It should also be noted that Democrats are just as frequently full of hot air, balloon-powering or otherwise. :-)

Ultimately, this is a failure to communicate, and it's on both parties. The woman and man were equally at fault getting snitty with one another instead of trying to establish a common language and resolve the situation. The woman could have followed up by being more specific about the kind of data she needs; the man could have sought to improve the usefulness of his information by finding out the kind of data the woman had at the time and figuring out how to adapt his response to that data type and framework to fill the gaps.

Yeah, yeah, I get that it's a joke; but like a racial joke, it's an indicator of a potentially serious underlying problem with stereotyping people who are different from us. The joke will be a lot funnier when the divisions it highlights aren't having such serious consequences for all of us. Which will be good, 'cause I like to laugh!

Waiting for the Kingdom

It's been a very political two weeks - between the Massachusetts Senate election and the State of the Union, I feel very aware of my elected leadership.

This evening's address left me uninspired; the speech was fine, but it made me realize that the power of large government bodies to address our needs as individuals and a society is limited. There's so much about how we interact with each other that can't be legislated. For other things, when you try to legislate them, they become so complex that they are incomprehensible to many - and perhaps - most citizens who might wish to participate in the details of their own governance. (The health care is the obvious, but by no means the only, example of this problem.)

At any rate, I was hit very forcefully with the understanding that real peace, or justice, or safety, or health, will not be achieved until the Kingdom of God comes. That doesn't mean - as the accusation against Christians often goes - that I don't care about or will cease to work and live for as much of that good world as we can find now. But I think that work (for me) will be less about changing policy, and more about building the community of people around me who are modeling justice in their lives every day.

Which is a funny thing to say as a graduate student of public administration. But my sustainable urban commune will be the best managed community in the world!

Solving poverty

This may be an incredibly naïve - not to mention completely unoriginal - post; I'm putting that right out front, in the hopes that I'll get a pass if this turns out to be pure nonsense.

I'm at my second conference in 3 weeks, as my high-travel post-employment period draws to a close and my schedule-free period begins. I'm listening to the panelists and responders in a fabulous presentation on community food systems and environmental justice, which is a topic that has grown increasingly near to my heart over the past couple years. And as I've been attending all these sessions at these two conferences about improving cities and designing communities and engaging all stakeholders, this recurring question of addressing poverty and its affects seems to lurk just below the surface of many discussions.

I mentioned tongue-in-cheek in a previous post that, following my rant against and intellectual non-producer class, I had also come up with a simple solution to poverty. This was only half in jest; as I was sitting in sessions later that day, I really started thinking about what poverty is and how we define it. We typically define it by income - but as with pretty much everything about money, that measurement is merely a proxy for the real issue at hand. To wit, I asked a friend: if you lived in the US and made only $15,000/year but you had secure access to safe, healthy, good quality housing, food, health care and education, are you actually poor? I'd argue not; poverty is not about any specific amount of wealth you have, but about whether your available resources allow you to reliably meet your basic needs.

Well, duh. Who would argue with that? But while we might all agree on that basic definition of poverty, I think we generally put our resources and efforts in the wrong place. The error starts with money, actually; we've forgotten that money is a proxy for real things, not a real thing itself. So we focus on solving poverty through "wealth creation": giving people ways to earn money to buy their basic needs. We think this is a much better long term alternative than just giving people food, housing, etc., directly ... and I'd agree with the idea that we don't want people to be dependent on others to get their basic needs and unable to be more self-sufficient.

Except: the phrase is "Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime," not "Teach a man to work a job that gets him money to buy fish and he eats for a lifetime." The fallacy is that having money to purchase the goods we need makes us independent; but it actually makes us totally dependent on a production and distribution system for basic goods that most of us don't understand and aren't involved in except at the very end stages. Not to mention that we are also dependent on the vagaries of the employment market to provide our income, over which we also have very little control.

I think a real solution to poverty and dependency would take out the money proxy and the middle man's profit that raises the barrier to goods, as much as could possibly be done. My solution to poverty has three pretty simple stages:

1) Provide basic necessities to those who lack them, immediately. Rent all the high-quality housing on the market for everyone currently defined as poor. Hire doctors, rent space to increase clinic capacity and buy equipent and supplies to provide free care for their medical needs. Buy all the food we can from local and organic farmers and distribute it for free to those who need it. Get everyone clothes and shoes appropriate for the climate they live in. Do all necessary school repairs for immediate health and safety, hire a huge number of the best teachers we can find and purchase all the up-to-date materials they need to teach the best classes to the poorest students. And don't tell me we lack the money to do it; we can always find money for whatever we decide is important enough to fund. We just dropped uncountable billions on the most asinine bailouts of the most irresponsible companies in the world; we could feed, house, heal and educate everyone in the country if we actually wanted to.

2) Once folks are initially settled into their homes, having regular healthy meals, receiving medical care and basic education, now we can start skills building, teaching people how to meet these basic needs for themselves: how to grow food; build; keep healthy and treat the sick; make clothes, furniture, and other household goods and tools; and how to share knowledge and civic responsibility with others in their community. I absolutely agree that it's critical to establish a level of independence and self-sufficiency where people can do as much as they can for themselves. I also agree with another principle behind "welfare-to-work" efforts: the time where you can depend on others to keep providing for you should be limited, and extended only in rare circumstances. Let's use 2 years as a time frame to start with, although it might not be the right one; during that time, after basic needs are initially met, anyone receiving services has to be actively participating in training toward being able to provide those services for themselves and others. Over the two years, they should move from being service provider trainees to the highly competent leaders and organizers of these services for their community. They should be building the new homes, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals, and governing and knowledge-transfer systems that they will need for themselves; and the outside helpers who were initially needed to provide those services will increasingly release responsibility and involvement to the people themselves.

3) In order to move from the emergency systems that were initially established to opportunities for ongoing self- and community-sufficiency, people need access to space and initial materials to build from. It's the 40 acres and a mule principle, which we're still paying for not properly implementing at the time: you can't just set someone loose from a position of systemic oppression, not give them some resources that can generate their future, and expect them not to end up back in a system of oppression in the near future. I actaully think the more difficult part of this process won't be the material goods, but rather the space question. Our conception of land and property ownership and its conncetion to status make us loath to consider giving it to others without making them pay for it, to say nothing of yielding up what we've already laid claim to. Land control and exclusion have been key tools for those who are in power (or want to be) to maintain dominance over another person or group. Sharing and/or giving back use, rights and control over land is a critical component of addressing poverty in the US and abroad, and without recognizing and responding to that, we will never solve the problem.

4) Almost finally, there has to be the flexibility to determine the kinds of exchange systems that people want to establish related to meeting their basic needs. Beyond a fairly basic level, it's highly likely that any one person or family will need help from other members of their community in continuing to meet basic needs. (None of us are actually self-sufficient, even the most wealthy.) There should be a variety of accepted and easily facilitated ways to exchange between communities members - and preference should be placed on those systems that don't require money. Money not only represents distance between people and the goods or services they consume, but also between people themselves; it's a way to make exchange possible between people who don't know or trust each other enough to exchanges goods and services directly. We should encourage communities to form relationships that allow exchanges of trust with one another; this is true social capital, the stuff we're always trying to create in our communities.

5) Really finally, while a traditional capitalist market for manufacture and exchange may arise and thrive for non-essential/luxury goods, certain things must be protected from the vagaries of markets and ensured for our citizens at all times. This sounds like total blasphemy to our capitalist ears, but we already do this with one important aspect of essential citizen services - public education. We've made a societal commitment to providing public schools for every child no matter where they live or how rich they are, rather than leaving that up to someone's ability to generate a certain level of income. (Mind you, we've tied quality to income through the way that we fund and maintain said schools ... but at least part of the system was trying to head in the right direction.) What's odd is that we seem completely unwilling to provide that same universal assurance of access for other services even more essential, and without which it's unreasonably difficult to take advantage of public education: we recognize a right to education that must be protected, but not to housing, food, clothing or medical care. How do we expect a homeless, hungry, naked and sick person to get through schooling or training well?

I call this solution simple, and I think it is. It's tempting to say that we're going to need a huge new bureaucracy to manage all of this; but I'd argue that we have plenty of existing bureaucracy that can not only be used, but also simplified to focus on easily and quickly meeting these goals. The problem may not be so much complicated as just plain difficult, because of the radical change in our priorities and will to achieve them that all of the above assumes. (Yes, I'm back to radicalism again.)

At any rate, I've been writing this post all day, and missing pieces of conference sessions, so it's time to close out. I'll be thinking about this some more ... People may call me crazy, and hypocritical because my life doesn't look like this yet - but I still think there's a gem of truth here to be dug out and shared, and that it's important to shake it free.

What to do?

So, I just finished up this conference of young urban leaders from around the country, who are all doing pretty good things. As usual, I started holding forth in a conversation about the radical restructuring of our society; and a fellow Vanguard quite reasonably asked how much I was doing some of these radical things in my own life. I made some response about works in progress and the need for a community to exchange with, blah blah blah. The honest answer is that my life is still not particularly radical ... But I appreciate the question, because it prompted me to reflect more on this new radically just and sustainable lifestyle I keep talking about, and whether or not I'm really moving toward it.

There have been some changes, albeit pretty incremental (darn those incrementalist for being right! at least this time). I pay more attention to my energy use, waste disposal, and the source of my food (often) and clothes (much less often). My Lent resolution helped me get back into tithing, and realizing that I have abundant resources I can give to others. But I live mostly the same: same nice house and neighborhood (no sharing the lot of the poor by living among them), frequent spending of my disposable income on non-necessities (no curbing my expenses to give away even more), lots of accumulated possessions (no large-scale disposition of stuff to simplify my life). I'm a big one for insisting that making radical change is just a matter of firm decision; but apparently it's a decision I have no small amount of trouble making.

This is a frustratingly slow process that often makes me feel quite hypocritical. If there's anything that this recent experience with my faith and job has taught me, it's that the Lord will change my heart and give me the grace to make the right choice at the right time; I suppose I'm just eagerly awaiting the period where he starts to strip me of some of these cultural and material encumbrances. Wait, maybe I don't exactly mean eager ...

*****

This is sort of related to the above, but also not. I've always thought that my real vocation should be philosopher more than anything else; I want to be able to think and talk and write about things and encourage others to think about them, too and put them into practice. It's kind of why I want to go back to grad school, for the freedom to think more.

But as I was also railing in the above-mentioned conversation about people who generate intellectual "products" but no useful goods or services to meet the basic needs of themselves or others (i.e., dependent on a producer class so I can be an intellectual leader whose needs are provided for in exchange for my beneficent wisdom and rule), I decided I'd better start learning to produce some things. So I'll see if I can use this free time to become a philosopher-maker (as opposed to philosopher-king).

In another bit of randomly inspired goal-setting, here's what I'd love to do by the end of the summer:

1) Learn to cook. I can prepare some very basic meals, but I lack a general understanding of how to cook meat well (especially poultry) or how to season anything with some modicum of deliberateness. I'd like to feel like if you dropped me in a kitchen with a random assortment of common meats, vegetables and spices, I could create something passably tasty.
2) Learn to make something with my hands. My first thoughts are learning to sew or knit ... I feel like I lack a basic level of self-sufficiency with not being able to sew properly. I also feel like I could make cool, useful things for myself or other people if I could knit.

*****

My last set of revelations for the day, besides a simple solution to poverty, had to do with the need to get really civically involved in my city. I need to know and have talked to my alderman; I need to start attending some of these public meetings and keeping myself informed; I need to subscribe to my local paper. I was also railing at a different point during the day about how we aren't active enough as citizens and we don't acknowledge our responsibility to be consistently engaged in our own governance. Again, if I'm to avoid being a total hypocrite, it's about time I did some more of that active citizenship myself.

I don't hate markets. I just don't believe they bring justice or balance.

Commerce - in the broad sense of people making exchanges with other people for things that you want - has been around for millenia, and seems to be a pretty fundamental human social activity. It's not a bad idea at all; in fact, it's essential because very few if any of us have the skills to do everything we need in our life for ourselves. Markets - again, in the broad sense of vehicles for facilitating these exchanges on a larger scale, whether they are physical or virtual - are a very useful tool.

But none of that says anything about how our society - which includes these markets and exchanges - should function. Markets are just things, like forks, that don't have much value except in how they are used and the results of that use. If I use my fork to put food in my mouth and I get fed, it's a great tool; if I use my fork to stab you in the eye and you end up blind, it's not a good thing at all. Forks are not intrinsically good ... but they are generally considered positives in our society, because they result in vastly more feeding and than stabbing.

Markets are not intrinsically good either; so in the evaluation of our "free market" economy, we have to ask how they are used and what they produce. Right now, our markets produce two main things, in my opinion: lots and lots of throwaway goods, and exponentially growing inequality in access to resources. In fairness, the market also results in lots of "jobs", but the quality of those jobs varies widely, and the distribution of that quality also tends to be very unequal across different groups of people.

What makes a good market are the underlying principles that are built into its rules (and their enforcement). The rules surrounding appropriate use of forks place a severe penalty on using them to stab people, so stabbings are few. The lack of rules in the definition of our current markets of exchange to penalize environmental damage or gross pay disparities between a CEO of a company and the factory workers who make that company's products mean that those behaviors are rampant in the way that people operate in our markets.

The rules that we have in our markets prioritize individualism and self-interest; make lowest cost and biggest profit the highest goal with the best reward; encourage low quality and continual waste; and ignore diffuse costs in evaluating costs and benefits. The rules that we should have need to prioritize honesty and integrity; respect individual liberties but prioritize the public good as the goal of the market; require equitable sharing of the direct and diffuse rewards and costs of the market among the individuals and groups who participate; set high quality standards for the content, function, useful life and production methods of products and services exchanged. Finally, these rules must be enforced; the value placed on goods and services exchanged must be tied to these principles so that the best behaviors are rewarded; and penalties for violating these principles, in spirit as well as in letter, must be severe.

Some folks will argue that all of this fetters the market's "free" operation and keep people from exercising their preferences. But let's be real: the market is not free. It is very directly influenced by subsidies, regulations, loopholes, and indirectly influenced by cultural standards, that privilege certain behaviors over others. Those who are currently benefiting the most from the existing system would like to convince us that protecting the system protects our right to choose; but what they are protecting is their right to determine our range of options to maximize their own benefit.

If we're going to institute rules for our markets - which we will always do - then let's institute the ones that make our markets and the people who participate in them healthy, stable and sustaining. And if we're not willing to do that, then let's at least admit that we are choosing to be sick and broken, and take responsibility for the destruction we wreak. The current state of our system is a surprise only to those who were deliberately ignoring the reality of the world around them.

Racism - it's everywhere!

Or so the NAACP would like you to believe.

Now, I'm a fan of many things that the NAACP has done and continues to do. But its existence, much like the careers of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, seems to have become largely dependent on finding racism in as many places as possible ... Thus you end up with a vast network of people who may be much more invested in perpetuating th sense of a problem than finding real ways to address the problem - and therefore causing themselves, or at least their current way of operating, to become obsolete.

The latest example of this race-mongering is this dratted New York Post cartoon. The furor over this is driving me crazy, because the response of so much of the "black establishment" is textbook: cry racism and demand apologies first, have rational or thoughtful dialogue about the matter much, much later - if at all. It's far more politically profitable to raise a fuss insisting that this cartoon was about President Obama being a monkey and getting shot by racist police than to explore the notion that this cartoon didn't have anything to do with race, and maybe we all need to dial down our offendable sensitivities just a tad.

Because it wasn't a cartoon about race; it was a cartoon expressing frustration about the stimulus bill, using a local event as a vehicle for commentary. The monkey being shot was an actual monkey (a chimpanzee, technically) who had gone on a little rampage in Stamford, CT and had to be taken out by local police. The connection between monkeys and the stimulus bill was not because Obama is black, and therefore chimp-like; it was an allusion to many varieties of jokes about monkeys at typewriters spewing out gibberish, but over time being able to produce coherent language inadvertently. The "monkeys at typwriters" in question could be construed to include President Obama as one of the originators of the priorities of the bill, but the group toward which the anger is directed is primarily composed of the bill's authors: Congressional Democrats and their aides, the vast majority of whom are white.

I understand the long history of insulting comparisons between people of African descent and monkeys, and the resulting sensitivity among the African-American community. But one's sensitivity to other people's past injurious actions doesn't automatically justify outrage at a completely different person's present actions, which may have a superficial similarity to the past but are not at all alike in intent or meaning. Robert Downey Jr.'s role in Tropic Thunder as a white actor who gets plastic surgery to be able to play a black character isn't about ridiculing black people and perpetuating awful stereotypes (the goal of "blackface" actors in the early 20th century); it's about ridiculing popular stereotypes of black people, with the apt foil of an actual black actor in the movie who comments on the nonsensical portrayal. The use of blackface as a medium to undermine everything that blackface was about isn't insulting, it's brilliant (not to mention insanely funny).

Understanding such nuances is critical to properly responding to the situations we confront as individuals and a society; but the current era of political so-called leaders who are up in arms about this cartoon would rather go for controversial and attention-grabbing soundbites than actual understanding that would advance our dialogues about the lingering issues of race in this country. Why do the hard work of sifting through the complex layers of racial stereotyping and misunderstanding in which we all participate, when you can get just as much airtime with far less effort by calling everyone who gets your dander up a racist?

The ultimate problem is that we still do have very difficult and damaging race (and class) issues to deal with in this country, and this kind of tempest over nothing takes away resources from the hard work that needs to be done. It also makes it far more difficult to call out actual incidents of racism; like the boy who cried wolf, if we call everything that upsets us racism, then we won't be believed or paid attention to when something serious and truly problematic comes along. The race-mongers may secure their jobs for a time while raising constant alarms and continuing not to create meaningful solutions ... But the time will come when people get tired of being told to constantly be angry and afraid, and their false "leadership" will be exposed for the fraud that it is.

Second verse, same as the first

I would like to go on record stating that this new stimulus package is a crock of baloney. It is not as completely irrational as the TARP of late 2008, but its likely effect in addressing our economic woes is just as debatable.

I'm tired, and cranky, and just want to go to bed. Many other posts of the last few weeks have fallen by the wayside for such reasons. But I feel like if I don't get some of my thoughts out on this, I'll just stay angry and irritable thinking about it.

All of these plans have been based on one, incredibly wrong, assumption: that the kind of economic system we now have, based on consumption through debt to entities around the world that we can neither understand nor have any clear relationship with, is a good one that needs to be maintained. A good third of the bill, reportedly, is about tax cuts trying to get people to spend more on buying stuff they probably don't need; all these consumer goods that supposedly drive our economy. Very little attention seems to be paid to securing the things that we have and do need - making sure we can get shelter, food, health care, education, employment, efficient and effective transportation - or investing in being able to provide those things in more secure and healthier ways.

Rather than trying to promote "spending" in a broken economy when people are just trying to figure out how to get from today to tomorrow or next week, here's what I think the bill actually should have focused on (= where the bulk of the dollars should have been allocated):

1. Housing stabilization. Not getting people with extra reserves of income to spend money moving from one place to another, but making sure that those who need it can stay in the place they're in if it's a good one, and that those who have no places or are in unhealthy places can find good housing to occupy. This would involve assuming mortgages where people are in danger of defaulting and writing down the terms to be actually affordable on people's current incomes with very, very low interest rates (if interest at all ...), and also working with landlords who have mortgages that are causing them to charge unaffordable rents to offer them write-down terms if they pass those savings onto their tenants over the period of the write-down. In places where new housing production is needed to provide adequate shelter for an area's population, provide subsidies for developers of new, affordable housing, especially developers (like non-profit community development corporations) with a history of making strong, equitable, community-based housing investments for the long-term rather than for a quick payoff. Finally, where foreclosures have occurred, provide subsidy that assists those same developers, and other potential owners willing to make commitments to housing affordability, to purchase and renovate those properties and make them available to new occupants, with a priority on making sure that those who have already lost homes (particularly those struggling with finding new, stable, adequate housing at affordable costs) are appropriately re-housed - in their previous communities, whenever possible and preferred by the previous occupant.
2. Direct aid. For vulnerable populations (such as families, the elderly, the homeless, the disabled), provide increased subsidy to make sure they can obtain all their basic necessities such as food, clothing, medical care, associated housing costs (like heating), transportation, etc.
3. Infrastructure repairs and improvements. Address the crumbling stuff first - roads, rails, bridges, public buildings, and schools that are falling apart, unsafe or unhealthy to use. Make sure the funding for these repairs is adequate to provide high-quality, durable materials that will stand the test of time and use, not quick fix crap. Next, invest in new things that need to be built: like new schools and educational materials for areas that don't have enough of them; or establishing sustainable transit networks in sufficiently dense locations (for pedestrians, bikes, and buses first, and then rail where appropriate) where new and existing transit modes are given the necessary and up-to-date infrastructure, amenities and equipment to be efficient and enjoyable for users. Do not invest in new construction of roads and highways that promote and service sprawl; where there are traffic backups, see that as an indication that there is sufficient density to look at mass transit, and don't provide the infrastructure support for new, non-smart growth development. Don't invest in new corrections facilities just for locking people up; instead, invest in facilities that have a focus on the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders as safe, productive, welcome contributors to the communities they will go to when they leave.
   
4. Investment in the development of sustainable systems, products and practices. We need to find new ways to build, get our energy, produce our food, move ourselves around, and manage our natural and man-made resources of all kinds. Create a nice, big fund for research, testing and implementation of the kinds of systems, services, goods and practices that will help us create a socially, environmentally and economically sustainable society. The criteria for receiving these kinds of funds should make sure that proposals have a clear plan of testing out, evaluating and implementing change, and a set of "triple-bottom-line" sustainability principles should be created to determine which proposals seem to have the clearest and most far-reaching sustainability goals in mind.
   
5. Workforce training/re-training. All of the above will need an incredible amount of manpower; and we happen to have an incredible number of people unemployed or underemployed. Provide adequate funds for training, and then resources for job placement, that helps those in need of work to become the implementers of the above programs - whether they are counselors and social workers helping to make sure people get access to the right aid and that it gets distributed in a timely manner; or financial service providers helping to work out the new affordable mortgage terms; or building industry professionals from designers to construction workers carrying out our infrastructure projects; or entrepreneurial teams working to come up with proposals for distributed local food production or community energy production or public and private transportation based on sustainable fuels. Each one of the above priorities has a million (in this case, not an exaggeration) jobs embedded in them, not to mention helping to deal with the most urgent effects of the economic crisis.

Each one of those priorities also offers tremendous opportunities for businesses willing and able to reposition themselves for a new economy based on sustainable production, so it's not like I've forgotten that there's a commercial sector out there. Those who are adaptable to a new way of doing business will find resources available to them and will thrive in the new environment. Those business that aren't compatible with the priorities of a sustainable economy? You've had your time; so long.

Now, come on, I just did that in, like, an hour and a half. Granted, I'm not writing a 647-page document ... but that's probably a good thing, because my proposal is much more legible, and legislators (not to mention their constituents) might be able to read it all and understand exactly what was going to happen before they decided to vote on it. My plan needs more details about how such things are administered, particularly the part about assuming and writing down mortgages which is not my area of expertise at all. But if the priority is making this clear and easily implementable with participation from the average citizen as well as the professional lawmaker - rather than CYA, obfuscating language and a number of hidden pet provisions - then I still suspect my bill would come in under 100, with some good, hard work and tight editing.

I am so disappointed in our political leaders. The bill that was passed isn't about change of any kind; it's supporting the same kind of failed efforts, and not addressing the core of the real issues facing the people of the country. Not "the economy", some nameless, faceless entity no one claims responsibility for or control over; but the direct needs of actual human beings who are struggling and suffering. The bill, in both its House and Senate versions, pays some brief and inadequate attention to some of the priorities above (2 and 3, a little bit of 5 and even less of 4), but these things are like sidebars to some nebulous vision of "stimulation" that I can't even get my head around. The net result is going to continue to be more people losing their homes and jobs, and getting some occasional pats on the back from the government in the form of "improved" aid that is almost insulting. An extra $25 per week in unemployment can certainly be helpful on the margins of people's need, but is barely a dent in dealing with the overwhelming nature of the costs of sheltering, feeding and caring for one's self and one's family. That laughable provision was clearly created by people who have no idea what it is like to face actual hunger or homelessness.

The reason this bill gets so little out of so much ado about nothing? It was created using the same kind of failed process. All the partisan posturing from Democrats feeling able to ram through the bill however they liked and not needing to pay any attention to Republicans ... that sounds like good old party politics, the same kind that got us in the mess we're in now. The same kind of divisiveness, the same lack of creativity and thoughtfulness in crafting a solution that could have true buy-in from all stripes of citizen representatives - not to mention the citizens they represent. Obama tried for a while to do a little outreach, but his comments have seemed to fall right back in line with the overall Democratic mantra of, "We won, we get to do what we want, bite me if you disagree, and don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Some change. Where's the ingenuity to say, "If the way were going about this is still resulting in the same kind of party-line politics, then we're not doing what we set out to do in representing all the people who need to have a voice in this, and we have to come at it from a completely different place?" I'm sorry, I didn't realize that was all talk until the politicians came into power and didn't need to consider those who might disagree with them, like you pretended to in order to get elected. I suppose it's my own dumb fault for expecting the same group of people to behave any differently than they usually do. For those who think they have a "mandate" for this nonsense, here's a newsflash: I did not vote for you to do this kind of shoddy thinking and hasty mish-mashing on a bill that could have had a significant effect on the lives of tens of millions of people, but now won't. I didn't vote for you to insult and ignore colleagues who represent 40% or more of the people of this country. I didn't vote for you to pay lip service to making fundamental changes in our broken systems.

I voted for you to represent the best interests of the greatest number of people in this country. I voted for you to make sure to take care of those who are most in need. I voted for you to create a new kind of civic debate that allowed us to explore all options and find the best solutions. I voted for you to be leaders.

That's your mandate. See if you can remember it.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Yesterday. Man, was it cold!! I do have to say, for the first couple of hours as we stood there freezing and packed in with the masses, I was seriously doubting the wisdom of the trip. I had visions of sitting at home, cozied up with food, a hot beverage and some warm blankets. My poor nephew was crying because his feet and hands hurt, and tearfully pleading to go home; I was this close to agreeing with him and getting the heck out of Dodge.

Hooray for the Museum of Natural History!! Thank you, Smithsonian, for being free, warm and open at 10AM when I couldn't take one more minute. We were saved from missing a historic moment - or worse yet, experiencing it miserable and ungrateful - by a quick tour through the beloved "rocks room" (the Gems & Minerals exhibit, for those who don't know the lingo ;-) ) and a rest on the second floor stairs. We re-emerged in time for the ceremony refreshed and in much better spirits.

What to say about the rest of that experience? Lowlights: still cold; Bush being booed; trying to get on the Metro to go home. Highlights: the music; my nephew waving his flags; my mom so excited and happy; President Barack Hussein Obama!!! That's still amazing every time I say it.

Afterwards, I pretty much crashed out at home, only finally waking up to go help my sister get ready for the Youth Ball. She looked absolutely gorgeous, which made it so doubly ridiculous that she (and many other ticket holders) got turned away from the ball because of overcapacity at the venue. It is still totally unclear to me how the organizers let that happen (I think something about a concert with Kanye West), but it was unforgivable. Their loss, because my sis is awesome and they missed having her beauty grace their presence.

Today. I am tired, and possibly getting sick, but happy nonetheless. I think I only finally got the excitement of it all while listening to the radio this morning - President Barack Obama!! - and then viewing my photos and videos (on my awesome shiny new camera). It was amazing to see the new first family come out of the White House on TV last night, and I do feel tremendously lucky and inspired to live in this country and to have witnessed "the moment", as everyone in the media is calling it. So it only took me a day to catch the spirit. :-)

I am going to be exhausted today and tomorrow, but it really was totally worth it, and not to have been missed.

Tomorrow. As I mentioned last post, this is where the rubber meets the road, for us as well as the President. We have to change the way we do politics, the way we think about the economy, the way we treat each other and the planet, how we hold ourselves and our leaders accountable. We have to come together around a shared vision for our future; the President's role is to articulate that vision as well as he can, and keep calling on us to make it happen with him. We have to answer the call.

January 20th, 2009 - a day that goes down in my history. I will tell my kids: I was there when.

Inauguration Bound!

I'm on the second leg of my Boston to DC pilgrimage to the presidential inauguration, riding a bus from New York. Being trapped on a motor coach for more than 4 hours provides an excellent opportunity for blogging.

I think it was only this morning when the excitement hit me a bit. Up until then, I think most of my physical and emotional energy was consumed by getting through the work week and then trying to prepare for the trip; the hassle of logistics pushed reflection to the side. I did this in the weeks before I went to Paris for a summer, too; up until I was on the plane, headed to France, the realization that I was going to live in another country for 5 weeks, and how big a deal that was, never quite sunk in.

When the driver announced the bus destination, and stated that we were going to see Obama, a big cheer went up among the passengers. I've never been to an event like this, where you have millions of people from all over making this journey to celebrate something that they think is so important. It reminds me of what started to convince me to vote for Obama back at the beginning of this year: the passion he inspires in people, passion that translates into action and a common sense of purpose with so many other people.

If the Obama presidency becomes one of the greats in American history, that will be why: because he mobilized people from all over to participate in making the country better, to take initiative rather than sit back and watch things happen to them. I hope his supporters don't forget that now the election is over; already, it's easy to shift into our usual routine of the cult of personality and the importance of a single individual leader. Obama does not have the answer to the problems of the economy or any other part of our national predicament, and no plan he comes up with is going to suddenly make everything work. Slogans like "we are the change we need" can't just be campaign rhetoric; we have to understand they they are the truth, and the power to change the course of our nation rests with us.

Encouraging a national service day among his supporters is a nice start; but once in office, will Obama be able to think beyond the vast machinery of government bureaucracy to suggest, encourage and enable grassroots solutions to the present and future challenges? Will he fall into the pattern of protecting and shoring up broken systems, unable to envision or generate support to establish new ones? Will he actually be able to build bridges between so many fractured interests and provide a convincing vision for the future that will rally a wide spectrum of citizens? Will he really be open and honest about how he governs, why he makes choices, what the government does well and what it does poorly, what needs fixing, what needs elimination, what needs supporting, what needs restoring? Will there be viable, real-impact ways for a common citizen to have a role in these decisions that affect her life?

I'm afraid because the inertia of our systems and the sense of their overwhelming complexity and lack of clarity can be crippling. Taking half-measures or no measures to address both the symptoms of our nation's troubles and the root causes could be a successful short term
strategy to keep one's self popular and in office. Polling, image management, and political maneuvering could quash the inspiration and resolve to believe and bring about a new way of living together, of providing for our common needs, of governing ourselves. The more Obama learns to be successful in the existing frameworks, the less he may have the initiative to change them. And if we, too, can't muster up the will for change, all the potential of this great moment would be lost.

I'm not down or disheartened; I am truly excited about what is happening and where I will be this week. I just want to keep reminding myself that the work didn't end on a Tuesday in November; the real work begins on a Wednesday in January.

Lest we forget: Four things that Bush did right

I sent this letter in to the Metro today; I've no idea if it will be published, so I thought I should post it on my blog for posterity.

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It's easy, in an era of sound bites, hyperbole, and hyper-partisanship, to get into a mode of all-or-nothing as we view the end of George W. Bush's presidency. Either he was among "the most abysmal failures of government" in our national history, as Elliott Kaplan claims, or he was the sole defender of American freedom in an era where we were constantly assailed from without (by terrorists) and within (by illegal immigrants).

I'd love to believe that, with the election of soon-to-be President Obama and his apparent goals of unity, openness and post-partisan thinking, we'll soon be able to take a more fair and balanced look at the world and the people around us, and be able to understand not only the weaknesses and errors but also the strengths and accomplishments of those who differ from us. In that vein, I'd like to recognize and applaud President Bush for four things I think he did very well during his time in office.

1. Women and Minorities in the Administration - Some may want to claim that Clinton was the first black president; but George W. Bush is the first president I've seen to bring significant numbers of women and minorities into high-level Cabinet and advisory positions throughout his administration. Off the top of my head, we saw both the first African-American man and the first African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State and the first Hispanic Attorney General. Much of the rest of the Cabinet was equally diverse, and many of Bush's top aides and advisors were also women. If you don't think people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice helped to pave the way for Barack Obama to be a viable Presidential candidate, think again.
2. President's Council on Service and Civic Participation - "In January of 2003, by Executive Order, President George W. Bush announced the formation of the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. The Council was established to recognize the important contributions Americans of all ages are making within their communities through service and civic engagement." (http://www.usafreedomcorps.gov/council/about/index.asp) I'm the executive director of a non-profit that facilitates pro bono work by architects and other designers, and I know of this council because of the work they have done to encourage some of the largest corporations in the country across all industry sectors - including Target, UPS, Deloitte, Citi, IBM, Intel and GE - to pledge more than $100 million in pro bono service and skills-based volunteering by their employees.
3. Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives - While many people like to look down on this initiative as an inappropriate blending of church and state, I think what's not understood is that this office finally started to recognize and provide additional support for the many organizations of all creeds in our communities that were doing critical work to fill in the gaps of needs not being met by our numerous layers of government programs. Local community organizations, both faith-based and not, are often much more able to establish the direct relationships and deeper understanding of needs within their community than any public agency trying to deal with issues at the state or municipal level. Supporting such organizations and enabling them to do their work better is an exceptional idea, and more necessary than ever in such disastrous economic times.
4. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon - In 2002, the DOE and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory held the first of their Solar Decathlon competitions, encouraging teams of architecture students from around the country to design and build attractive, energy-efficient solar powered housing. The results, displayed in a "solar village" on the National Mall every two years, attract more than 100,000 visitors for each competition to see how our next generation of designers envisions a sustainable housing future for our nation. In 2005, the program began attracting entries from architecture schools around the world, and work is in progress to bring the program to Europe in 2010.
   

I certainly don't support everything that President Bush has done, and I have high hopes that the Obama presidency will be an opportunity to deal with the terrible decision that have been made over the past 8 years in terms of our foreign policy, domestic civil liberties, and numerous other areas. But I'd like to keep the things from the last 8 years that were good - and that can't happen if we refuse to see that there was any good at all.

An historic event

This might be the "where were you when ..." event of my generation.

I'm having trouble taking in the significance; it feels like an ordinary election one moment, and then the next I'm struck by the import.  Jesse Jackson may not have thought he'd live to see this; my 91-year-old grandfather almost certainly didn't.  But he got a ride to the polls courtesy of Obama NY, and joyfully cast his ballot for not only our first black major party candidate, but now our first black President-elect.

Wow.  To be honest, I'm not sure that I thought I'd see this so early in my lifetime.  I'm still pretty young; and if I have kids in the next few years, it's not just that they'll live to see a time when a black man could be President; they'll be born while a black man is President.  They'll always live in a world where that's considered totally possible.  Amazing!  I totally want to have some Obama babies - as if I wasn't motivated enough to have kids.  ;-)

Obama isn't just a President for black people, nor is this just significant for minorities.  This really is a symbol of a different kind of America than we've been before.  Not everything has changed of course; Obama isn't Jesus, nor even a magician, although he's been touted as the second coming of everyone from Lincoln to FDR to MLK/JFK/RFK.  But we broke through something, with this whole election including Clinton and even Romney and Palin, showing that a wider segment of America could be our leaders than ever before.  It's not as wide as it should be; but the progress is visible, and it gives me hope.

John McCain recognized this, in such a gracious, public servant oriented concession speech; that's the McCain I wished I'd seen this election (although the crazy booing crowd kind of made it clear why he felt he had to lose that part of himself to try and win over his party).  And Obama's speech reminded me of the first time I heard him speak: not at DNC '04 but when he won his Senate seat, and spoke not as a partisan victor but as the sincere representative of his whole state, including those "whose trust I have yet to earn." 

Oh, do I hope he means that and can act on it.  This day is so much different from the heartbreak of 2004 for me - not because of a Democrat winning or George Bush being gone, but because I don't hear the vitriol, the undisguised bigotry from both sides of the "red/blue" equation.  Even Fox News commentators started to find nice things to say about Obama!  You do wonder where all that goodwill was for the past few months ... but I'll take it anyway, because it's a welcome change.

In the streets last night, I heard the kind of celebration we Bostonians reserve for a World Series or Superbowl win: strangers call and honk to each other as they walk or bike or drive past, and you hear this low roar of cheering as a constant background, rising and falling in waves.  Now I know I'm in Massachusetts, and not even everyone in my state was celebrating, let alone everyone in the country.  But I believe that we can find enough in common as far as what we want for our lives and our country to move forward together, and to find partners in former political opponents.

This is a big deal.  There will be armies of pundits breaking this down seven ways from Sunday over the next several weeks, and they'll do their best to kill all the magic.  But I will remember this day, where I was when it happened, and how unbelievably special it is.

Debate #2: The Debatening

First off: woohoo for Tom Brokaw for finally cutting somebody off when they keep trying to take too much time! Stick to answering the questions rather than trying to squeeze in your talking points and attacking one another, boys.

Obama gets a better grade on that than McCain does, although he's starting to run off the rails again. But at least for a little while, at least 50% of each answer was actually related to the question that was asked. What low standards I've developed!

• I'm glad that Obama gave somewhat of a mention to energy consumption as a sacrifice; it's also interesting to note that neither candidate really addressed the excess consumption problem that we have as a society overall.
  
• Nuclear power is the best solution to climate change?!? Oh, oh ... it's beyond response.
• Enough attacking each other!! Answer the question, answer the question, stop attacking. McCain is the worse culprit on this, but he is by no means alone.
• I am bummed that MySpace is not allowing me to submit a question online.
• Ooh, someone thinks we should be peacemakers instead of warmakers! I'm not too impressed with the candidates, but I think I like the audience members. Let's elect one of them!
• McCain has a curious definition of peacemaking as shedding blood. I'm not totally a pacifist, but I don't include fighting in my definition of making peace. The peace gets made later, and not with guns. I think that's one of the key problems with the way that international "peacekeeping forces" are named and used. Are we actually addressing any of the issues that would help keep or make a long-term peace?
• Seriously, we wouldn't have a time problem if these two men would answer a direct question. I know why Senator Obama thinks we didn't do a proper job in Afghanistan; but the question asked was, "Will you respect Pakistan's national sovereignty?" He did get to the question eventually, and I think it's a pretty dangerous answer ... on the other hand, McCain's answer that boils down to, "I might do it, but I won't tell you beforehand" is still the same pile of dishonest horsespit that it was two weeks ago, although he was smart enough to say it less obviously this time.
• I cannot believe that Obama asked for extra time not to add something substantive to the Pakistan question, but just to attack McCain some more. For shame!
• Can we still start a Cold War without the capitalism vs. communism global line-up? I mean, I know we could start a really bad WWIII, but I don't think it technically still qualifies as the/a Cold War.
• I agree with one criticism that Sarah Palin made of Joe Biden which also applies here to Obama: when you're asked what you want to do in the future, the bulk of your answer should be what you want to do in the future, not what someone else did badly in the past.
• The opinion column in the Metro today was about the almost unilateral US support of Israel, and I think I really agree that this support has to be re-examined and moderated to recognize when Israel is in the wrong. Of course, that would have to apply to our other allies, too!
• It's interesting that Iran attacking Israel is called a "second Holocaust" ... there's a difference between one well-armed sovereign nation attacking another well-armed sovereign nation and a government carrying out systematic incarceration and genocide of its one-time citizens. I'd think Darfur is much more of a Holocaust than any attack on Israel; but of course, those are black people, so they don't count enough for us to act.

I remain less than impressed; I do think Obama gave better answers, though, and related better to the audience. I'm not as irritated as I was last time, but I'm still a little meh.

DWB

So I was in Philadelphia this weekend, celebrating my sister's recent engagement and upcoming nuptials (11 months from today!). There were many highlights in the weekend; but one of the lowlights, unfortunately, was my first-ever Driving While Black experience.

Folks in the racial majority may find it hard to believe that such a phenomenon exists; like so many examples of racial bias, it is very subtle and difficult to "prove" for doubters. But like porn, you know it when you see it: whether it's the way the cop sticks so closely to your car, or the fact that he follows you for 10-15 blocks down a narrow one way street that no one in their right mind who knows Philadelphia would use to go across town. I guess when he saw three black girls in an out-of-town Hyundai sedan late on a Friday night, he figured we must be up to something. He finally stopped when he realized that I knew what was going on, and started making turns to shake him off; I suppose that following us at that point really would start to count as police harassment, given that we weren't actually doing anything that justified such attention.

I'm glad that this kind of stupidity doesn't happen to me very often, but it's also not the first time. I've been followed anxiously in stores, or rapidly approached by salespeople asking, "Can I help you?" in that way that really means, "You must be lost, because I know you don't belong in my store." I'm glad that it's only an annoyance for me these days, as opposed to the more overt and serious ways that such situations played out for my parents and grandparents. Wouldn't it be great if my kids didn't end up experiencing it at all?

The best news I heard all day

I'm not sure I could be happier about this news, except if someone had also found the leadership to put forth a rational plan that protects and takes care of ordinary citizens before the ultra-rich financiers who built this mess: www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/business/30bailout.html.

What I find so interesting is the continued overwhelming opinion among voters, if the NYT comments area is any indication, that this bailout plan was total nonsense and not at all in the interest of anyone except the heads of financial services firms trying to get away with something. Objections range from the mere fact that it has been cobbled together without any reasonable analysis of its consequences or effectiveness; to the failure to cap salaries and exit packages for financial services executives; to the fact that it does absolutely nothing for the people suffering most from this mess in losing their homes, businesses, jobs, etc.; to the ridiculous vagueness of the oversight on this process; to the lunacy of putting in charge the very people who allowed this to happen in the first place; to the unbelievable debt burden left on American taxpayers ... and the list goes on and on. I've yet to see a reader comment that finds this plan to have any hallmarks of leadership, wisdom, justice, or even good common sense. I can only hope that constituent pressure will continue to keep lawmakers from voting for this piss-poor mish-mash; I am a little worried that the vote was as close as it was.

Also interesting, this related article in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23krona.html?em. Sweden's leaders seemed to have their priorities much better aligned than ours in the US.