Month: September 2023

Probably the angriest I’ve been in many years, was when I felt like I had to defend the integrity of my Burning Man camp. I’m not done apologizing to folks for how I did this (I truly was misguided) – yet I also found it instructive. If what pulls us to anger is defending what matters to us… then we all must be feeling like a lot of what matters to us has been under threat recently.

I certainly have. Every time I look at the news, there seems to be another threat to our democracy. There seems to be another threat to the rights, respect, and/or quality of life of average Americans. Even knowing that my news feeds have learned that anger keeps people engaged so they can show them more ads… is the news inventing these things for us to be angry about? I don’t think that’s exactly the case.

I’ve been thinking about how our history determines our future, in the sense of our politics. For me, the way to go about ending homelessness in my region is to bring together a wide array of people in the community and unite them around the common goal of ending homelessness. However, what I’m just wrapping my head around is that a lot of these people (even if I’m just meeting them for the first time) have bad blood already. They are nursing slights, hurts, upset and offense from previous attempts to make headway on homelessness in our region. So far I’ve been adept at getting these folks in the same room at the same time, but how do I help them to forgive each other? Or, at the very least, be open enough to working together again? How do I help these folks leave the hurt of yesterday behind, so that it doesn’t become the hurt of tomorrow as well?

Probably a lot of these folks felt like they had to defend what really mattered to them, from each other. Probably a lot of these folks felt like their ideals were under attack. I was in a conflict resolution training recently, and the trainer wrote that the Conflict Cycle starts with some sort of event, and then someone perceives negative intent behind that event. They act on that perception, and then people react to them. Then there is another event… and we are now in an ongoing cycle of conflict. Hence, the name. What struck me differently this time around was that someone has to perceive negative intent. I know that happens a lot in our community – people perceive negative intent pretty regularly.

One could argue that trait actually varies significantly across our political spectrum. That people on the right perceive negative intent from anyone who isn’t on the political right, and those on the political left perceive negative intent even from their own allies. Not sure how true this is, but a take to ponder further.

I think we need to stop thinking about Democracy as if we are done improving it. I fear that, in America, we’ve gotten so accustomed to revering the constitution and the founding fathers that we’ve forgotten that we can actually make our democracy better. And by better, I mean more effective at embodying the will of Americans.

An idea that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind is the idea of neighborhood representation. This is the idea that every neighborhood would elect someone to represent them to every elected official and government institution. The goal being that no one in America would be more than one degree of separation from someone who has the power to set policy and address their concerns about government. Of everyone reading this, how many of us have that experience now? I’m guessing it’s very few. Because of the nature of my work, I know quite a few elected folks in my region… and in my experience that is really rare. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that conspiracy theories and distrust of government is so high when so many of us are disconnected from the process and the outcomes of the process.

I also think we need to break up our two big parties. I have heard the “big tent” argument from Democrats, and I think we’ve all discovered that our current political climate would be much better if we had 4 to 6 viable political parties in this country instead of two. This would mean breaking down all of the institutional advantages that the Democrats and Republicans have, while making it real easy to start a new party and removing the barriers to running for office. It would probably mean completely undoing our primary system, and scrapping the electoral college. If we had an assortment of parties, we could avoid a situation in which extremists take over one of the two major ones. It is also much more difficult to paint anyone that isn’t in your party as wrong, evil, not a patriot, etc… especially if each party has to partner with others to get anything done.

These are just my ideas, but we need to have more. How else can we make the structure of our democracy more conducive to actual democracy? I think if we are unwilling to make our democracy more effective, we provide ammunition to the people in the world that argue that democracy is too chaotic. That the best governments are autocracies, dictatorships, or worse.

I do believe that it is a human right to have a say in how your government operates. I do also think that democracy has to be a lifestyle, a way of life. It is not sustainable to live our lives as little dictators who vote occasionally on who will dictate over us. I think that means working to achieve buy in, consensus, and agreement in all aspects of life. At work, at play, in our families, and in our communities. That means not forcing our desired policy outcomes on people.

That also means seeking out accountability. It is only the un-democratic who avoid accountability. If we seek out accountability, we are willing to own that we have messed up. We are willing to grow. If we avoid hearing that we are wrong or that we did something that is not okay… we are just going to continue doing those things, but in more sneaky ways.

We are also going to avoid holding our political leaders accountable when they do things that are wrong, because we don’t want to be held accountable ourselves. We become enablers.

The political discourse in America does feel like it can be broken down around accountability right now. The left seems to want to hold everyone accountable, the right seems to want to avoid accountability entirely – and to say “we’re not that bad, the left does the same bad stuff we do!” Of course, there are certainly people on the left side of the political spectrum who want to avoid accountability. It is an impulse we all must get over, after all.

A glaring weakness that is showing up for me recently is that I do not seem to have the patience to see where folks are coming from… or at least not as much as I used to. Whereas in the past I would be more understanding of people and their behavior, I am now much quicker to assume bad intentions. Or to just be angry with people. I do think that a big part of this for me has been Donald Trump. Being bombarded every day by clearly negative intentions from him and his allies makes it hard to have patience for anyone who resembles that sort of thinking. Covid added a layer of stress to that. So did the fires locally.

But another thing that I think robbed me of my patience has been starting a new homeless services agency. For me, that made every day high stakes. Will what I do today lead us to get a contract? Will I miss something that will endanger our financial stability? Am I working too slow? Am I too aggressive? Am I not aggressive enough? Will any of our program participants die? Will I assemble a team that works well together? How do I do everything while being a husband and a father, and having friends and a life? Did I miss something that is going to have catastrophic consequences? Will the people in the rest of my life be able to adjust to how different my life is? Will the powerful people in my community work with me or shut me out?

Will I get vilified by other service providers? Will I get vilified in the press? Will I get stabbed in the back (metaphorically)? Will I get stabbed in the front (metaphorically)? Will I be able to maintain any semblance of health while doing this? How much time with my family am I willing to miss? How much time with friends? Will I make a fool of myself? Will I let down my funders? Will I have to fire people I really care about? Will this adventure destroy relationships I have with people? Will I make myself unemployable and broke? Will my family leave me? Will I die early from the stress of doing all of this? Am I doing so much that something is going to inevitably come crashing down?

Am I going to be the focus of a targeted attack?

These are the worries that I haven’t been allowing space for on this journey so far. But there is a saying that I know to be true; what you resist persists. Being unwilling to air these fears out has meant that they have not gone away. Maybe writing them all now will start me on the process of re-balancing myself. Will I even remember what it feels like to have a strong emotional equilibrium?

Regardless, there are things that I have learned on this journey. The most valuable thing, I believe, is that I am as capable as I believed I was. I yet may be even more capable. Knowing that has changed my life irrevocably. Knowing that has caused me to consider what bigger differences I can make in this world. Given all the stress, frustration and fear… I find myself saying “What else can I do?”