lenses and life lessons

[thefuturemesozoic]

In 2006, I decided to apply to live at an intentional community which I will call Sun Valley (not its real name). At the time, I felt like I was in a rut that I didn't see a way out of, and I wanted a change. I wanted to be part of something that that was moving the world towards solving its problems. I didn't expect that my being blind would present a significant obstacle in terms of my being able to live there. After all, egalitarianism was one of their core values. They had rejected the capitalist tendency to judge people by how productive they were, and they wanted to create something better. Or so I reasoned at the time. The main issue I foresaw had to do with another aspect of egalitarianism being one of their core values. Would they want me to liquidate my IRA? If so, then would I be willing to do it? So I contacted them and planned a three-week visit to begin the process of applying for membership.

I mostly enjoyed my visit. I applied for membership, went back home, and waited anxiously to hear whether I would be accepted, asked to visit again, or rejected (the latter technically meant that I would be allowed to visit again after a year). After a week and a half, I was told that I was rejected, and I was read the feedback that members provided, whether they were advocating for me to be accepted, rejected, or asked to visit again. The decision was not close to being unanimous, but enough people had voted that I should be rejected to make that the decision. Among this group, people generally indicated that the problem was that I was unwilling to ask for help and to indicate what I needed, so I left people trying to figure out whether I needed help with things, which was uncomfortable and frustrating for them. One person wrote that, even if I had made progress on these personal points, it would still have been challenging for the community to accept me as a member, but he thought that they would have been willing to go there. Thus, it appeared that, from their point of view, the problem wasn't so much that I had a disability but, rather, that I had some personal issues, so they were not discriminating or being ableist. Still, it is hard to disentangle disability from their concerns about whether I was asking for help. Aside from that, I was eventually told, by someone who was living there at the time, that several people rejected me because of my disability. One person felt that it would be too much of a hassle for them to organize things (in the kitchen, for instance) so that I could find everything independently. There were concerns that it would be too much of a cost, in terms of labor hours, for people to help me through the buffet line during meals, and that I couldn't see faces and would be unable to read nonverbal cues. So it appears that I may have been rejected because of concerns that I would need too much help in combination with concerns that I wasn't asking for help enough.

At the time, I was disappointed about the rejection. I had hoped to be accepted and to move there to begin the next phase of my life, but now that was not to be. In retrospect, however, I feel that the experience taught me some important lessons. Others have argued that capitalism gives rise to disability-based oppression and that without capitalism, discrimination would serve no purpose. Up until the point I applied to Sun Valley, I would have more or less concurred with such analyses, but they cannot account for my experience at Sun Valley. Even now, I would not say that they are wrong so much as that they are incomplete, but the latter is important. Egalitarianism is one of Sun Valley's core values, so I did not face an issue of being seen as unprofitable for a capitalist enterprise. Yet I was seen as undesirable for other reasons. Rather than profitability being the thing that needed to be protected, there were other things of value, such as labor hours and comfort of existing members, that I was seen as threatening. One person told me that the community is risk-averse, and I was seen as a risk. The desire for profit under capitalism can exacerbate disability-based oppression, but so could the desire for other things valued under a noncapitalist system. Capitalism and disability-based oppression (or oppression more broadly) are parallel constructions stemming from what, from a secular view, could be described as human nature. This is not to say that they are unchangeable but, rather, that changing the former would not automatically remove the latter. Along the same lines, when we attribute problems to a system (capitalism) or to an outgroup (billionaires, elites, immigrants/newcomers, whoever), our focus is directed outward, and we can ignore our own role in the situation. This is not to say that it is incorrect or inappropriate to consider the role that a system or an outgroup plays in a situation. At the same time, a situation is often the product of multiple factors, some of which are sometimes overlooked, a point which I would see reinforced later on, as I will discuss below.

Two years after I visited Sun Valley, I wound up relocating from Boston to Austin. Austin was a contrast from Boston in many ways. Bostonians complain about the winter, while Austinites complain about the summer. In Boston, in the city itself, it is common for people to walk or take transit, although cars are much more common in the suburbs. While Austin has buses, people generally travel by car, although using transit is more common when traveling downtown or to UT. I recall being at a Democratic state convention in Massachusetts where some of the speakers commented that Massachusetts was losing population, seeing this as a crisis that should be addressed. Austin has the opposite problem, where it is common for people to wish that the city would stop growing. Massachusetts essentially has a one-party legislature controlled by Democrats, although, for most of the past three decades, it has also had a Republican Governor. There was sometimes conflict between party leadership and rank-and-file Democrats. Austin is a blue city within a red state (though I am not certain how much longer Texas will be red--Ted Cruz did successfully defend his seat from a challenge by Beto O'Rourke, but only narrowly). City officials are frequently at odds with a Republican state legislature and a Republican Governor. I have heard people say that living in another country has given them a valuable perspective, since they now had an outside perspective from which they could look at their country's culture. Although I have not had this experience in this lifetime, I feel that it has been valuable for me to live in a couple of cities that are different from each other. I learned some things that I would not have learned if I stayed where I was. To give one example, having lived in a place where transit usage and walking were common, I feel that I understand what is different about these places that leads most people to walk and use transit in one while leading most people to drive in the other. More generally, living here has led me to conclude that, in many cases, things are not as they appear.

Many Austinites assume that people will not walk or ride transit here because of the weather. To paraphrase a rant I saw on Facebook, California has nice weather all the time, and northeastern cities have in-door stations where people can wait for the train, but people here aren't going to bike in the 110-degree heat or wait outside for a bus on an icy 30-degree morning. While this argument may appear to make sense, it ignores Chicago, to give one counter-example, where people must wait outside to catch a train, even in the winter. The real reason transit is not widely used in Austin appears to have little to do with the weather and much to do with the way the city is built. Firstly, despite anything I have written so far, there is not a neat dichotomy between cities where people take transit vs. cities where people do not. Austinites going downtown or to UT may take the bus, since parking can be expensive in these places, and buses are relatively convenient. Most of the suburbs that comprise greater Boston are as car-oriented as Austin is, although people living in these suburbs are still likely to use transit when going to Boston. People will usually do what they see as making sense for them. Deciding whether to buy a car or not is a large decision, and people may decide that they don't need to buy a car or that their family only needs one car, rather than two. Once the decision has been made to buy a car, it is largely a sunk cost. If one owns a car, parking is free and plentiful, as it often is in Austin, and driving is much faster than taking transit would be, then why not drive? If parking is expensive and taking transit is as fast or faster as driving would be, as it often is in Boston, then people are more likely to take transit. In general, this illustrates that, when a person lacks a full understanding of a situation, it is easy to see an explanation for things that appears to be intuitively obvious while nevertheless being incorrect.

In 2011, I needed to decide how to vote in the City Council race between Randi Shade, the incumbent, and two people who were challenging her, one of them being Cathie Tovo. Tovo was favored by people who strongly believed that neighborhoods should be protected from over-development. Shade had voted in favor of building a new water treatment plant which, at least at the time, I didn't support building. Tovo stated that she would have voted against the plant had she been on Council. The local Sierra Club chapter may have endorsed Tovo, and, at the time, I would have given a lot of weight to a Sierra Club endorsement. After all, they care about the environment, and I cared about the environment, so I ought to support candidates who hold similar values. I voted for Tovo in the first round, but the election went to a runoff, at which point I started to reconsider. I'd read an interview where Shade made a comment to the effect that she would keep in mind that the people who come to City Hall on a regular basis are not representative of the community as a whole and that she felt that it was important to consider the people who were not coming to City Hall. At first, I saw her comment as elitist and anti-democratic. Don't we want our elected representatives to listen to engaged citizens who take the time out of their day to show up at a meeting and make their voices heard? Over time, however, I came to see that she was making a valid point, and, more generally, that my way of looking at things was not helpful in terms of local politics. I was taking an existing lens through which I was looking at things and applying it in a context where it was not useful.

In their book, Cultural Backlash, Norris and Inglehart define populism as "a rhetorical style of communications claiming that (i) the only legitimate democratic authority flows democratically from the people, and (ii) established power-holders are deeply corrupt and self-interested, betraying public trust." This is, more or less, the way I would have viewed things at one point in time. Yet, as Norris and Inglehart note, this definition says nothing about which policies should be adopted. It is a lens, or a rhetorical style, that can be held in common by people holding a wide variety of positions that may be diametrically opposed to one another. On the national level, both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump use rhetoric that could be described as populist. At the local level, I see such sentiments crop up in various ways. Bike lanes were recently added to Shoal Creek BLVD, and now I've seen a Next Door discussion where some people made the point that 70% of people who live on that street opposed the bike lanes, yet our City Councilor, CM Pool, voted to approve them anyhow. From their point of view, Pool is clearly out of touch, and she should be voted out and replaced with someone who cares about the property owners who pay taxes in this city. Another poster pointed out that, for the city as a whole, survey respondents overwhelmingly supported the bike lanes. So, if one looks at this disagreement through a populist lens, as some do, then who are "the people," and who are "the powerful?" Should the opinions of all Austin residents be considered, or only the opinions of residents living on Shoal Creek BLVD? The latter group would argue that their property values and/or quality of life would be negatively impacted by the bike lanes, and, as the people who actually live on the street, they should have the final say. They should not be expected to accept changes they don't want because they are seen as being for the greater good. These are questions that should be discussed, but looking at the issue through a populist lens obscures the important questions, rather than elucidating them. It allows us to avoid asking hard questions about our role in the world, since we see ourselves as virtuous people, with problems being caused by a corrupt elite. When things are not done because of opposition from local residents who fear change and feel that they should not be expected to accept it, the result can seem regrettable when viewed by future generations. In the Boston area, where I grew up, the Red Line terminates at Alewife Station, on the border between Cambridge and Arlington. In the 1970's, there was a proposal to further extend the Red Line, but it was overwhelmingly voted down by residents of Arlington. As Lily Geismer discusses in her book, Don't Blame Us, one group of suburban liberals successfully fought a plan to expand Route 2, some of them arguing that it made more sense to expand mass transit, rather than expanding the highway. Yet, when there was a proposal on the table to expand a subway line, it was blocked by suburbanites in a different town. The window of opportunity to further extend the Red Line is now effectively closed. FTA funding is more constrained than it once was. Austin has similar challenges in terms of transit. In 2000, we had a light rail proposal that was voted down by a fraction of a percent in a referendum. I've heard of some people voting against it because they feared that it would accelerate growth. Now it is nearly 20 years later, the city has continued to grow, and we are once again attempting to plan high-capacity transit, hoping that we will get it right this time.

For the past few years, the city of Austin has been attempting to rewrite our land development code. Our current code was written in 1984 and revised over the years. In 2011, we passed a comprehensive plan in order to assess where we want to be in the future and set high-level goals. An effort to rewrite our land development code, called CodeNEXT, came out of that process. City staff, with help from a consulting firm, produced a series of drafts for a new code. The process had always been controversial, and Mayor Adler eventually stopped the process, saying that it had become too polarized and tasking the City Manager with coming up with a plan to move forward. Some opponents, such as those affiliated with the group called Community Not Commmodity, framed CodeNEXT as a neoliberal plan to allow greedy developers to build as much housing as they wanted to build for maximum profit. They worried that existing affordable housing would be torn down and replaced with luxury apartments, although many of these opponents live in neighborhoods where the single-family homes that they seek to preserve are no longer affordable to the middle class. Alex Jones, meanwhile, released a video titled, "CodeNEXT is Slavery," where he stated that CodeNEXT was an effort to implement Agenda 21, destroy single-family neighborhoods in order to build "coffin apartments" to house the "third world population," and take away our freedom. Alex Jones was, thus, on the same side as the liberal Democrats involved with Community Not Commmodity, each seeing CodeNEXT through the lens with which they view the world and seeing opposition to it as a natural extension of their politics. I sometimes see similar comments on next door in reference to revising the land development code, echoing concerns about Agenda 21 and liberal City Councilors who think that they know what's best for us better than we do. Since the same event can be seen through either a liberal lens or a conservative lens, neither lens can be assumed to show an accurate representation of the factors at play. Incidentally, advocates for in-fill development / smart growth tended to view the last CodeNEXT draft as a capitulation to those who essentially wanted to maintain the status quo, where somewhat taller buildings would be allowed on corridors and minimum parking requirements would be moderately reduced in some places but existing land use regulations within the interior of neighborhoods would essentially be left intact. Additionally, as Randy Shaw points out in his book, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America, there is a generational divide in terms of attitudes toward housing. While not a hard and fast rule, millennials tend to feel that there is a housing shortage and that more housing is needed, while, for boomers, concerns about possible negative effects of over-development are salient. If this summation is accurate, then this suggests that there are situational factors that, on the whole, influence our attitude towards development. Young people are typically trying to find housing and often find this task difficult, while boomers often already have housing that they are happy with and want to hold on to it. When zoning questions are seen as a battle between communities and developers, these situational factors are masked from our view.

A lens can be useful in terms of understanding the factors that contribute to a situation. However, problems can arise when we take our existing lens and apply it to a new situation where it may not make sense. Sometimes, the pre-existing lens is simply not helpful. I recently saw someone tweet that the difference between a capitalist and a socialist view of transit is that socialists favor focusing on peoples' needs, rather than prioritizing profitable routes. This person seemed to be taking their view of the world, that people should come before profit, and wanting to see it applied when designing transit. However, transit agencies are usually in the position of having limited resources available to them and trying to make decisions in terms of how to best allocate those resources. There is a dilemma in that people want transit to attract riders and get cars off the road, and people also want transit to be a lifeline service for people who are poor, disabled, or otherwise unable to drive. These two functions are not one and the same, and there is a tradeoff between allocating resources to maximize ridership vs. covering as much of an area as possible. There is a discussion to be had here in terms of how a transit agency should allocate its resources, but urging a not-for-profit transit agency to "put people before profits" would not be helpful in terms of providing guidance as to how best to utilize limited resources.

Sometimes, we have a lens that may obscure the real issues that are relevant to a situation. The Occupy movement framed economic issues as a struggle between the 99% and the 1%. In his book, Dream Hoarders: How the Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It, Richard Reeves suggests a problem with a different framing: the top quintile is hoarding opportunity in a way that prevents others from being able to get ahead. He cites legacy admissions to prestigious universities, internships, and zoning as examples of ways in which upper-middle-class Americans pass opportunities onto their children. Yet these Americans may see themselves as among the good guys. They may feel that it is the super-rich--the 1%--and/or the uneducated, unenlightened white people who support Trump as being the people who are ruining the country. Such a position, however, makes it possible for us to avoid noticing our own actions that do not align with the values that we perceive as being part of our identity. Reeves pointed out that Obama had planned to eliminate 529 accounts, tax-deferred college savings accounts used primarily by households with incomes in the top quintile, as part of a tax reform package, but, after a discussion with Pelosi, he reversed course, saying that eliminating 529's would be a distraction. The Democratic coalition now includes some affluent families who benefit from these tax breaks. If we see politics as a struggle with the people on one side and the special interests on the other, then it follows that our own actions are virtuous. If we find ourselves, say, fighting a proposed homeless shelter in our neighborhood, or complaining that that audible traffic signal for the blind people is too loud since we can hear it from our house, or shouting, "who will compensate me for the loss to the value of my home?" at a meeting to discuss a proposed bike lane, or saying that we don't want our neighborhood to become a renter neighborhood, then our lens will tell us that we are the good guys. We are the polar opposite of those people who pulled the lever for Donald Trump. We are the people, and we care about the less fortunate, unlike those bad people over there who don't, but our quality of life matters, too. Thus, we do not see the big picture. We avoid thinking about who is benefiting from our actions and who is being hurt. The point here is not that socialists are wrong to advocate putting people ahead of profits or that the Occupy movement was wrong to draw a line between the 99% on one hand and the 1% on the other. The economic gains of the past several decades have, in fact, gone to the top 1%, and corporations do tend to seek profit first and foremost. However, there are multiple factors that can influence a given situation. If we adopt a world view based on a set of experiences, it may seem natural to see a new situation in a way that fits the existing world view, but we may not be seeing things as they are.

When members of the Sunrise movement were occupying Nancy Pelosi's office to demand action on climate change, I saw some people arguing that they should be occupying Mitch McConnell's office instead. From their point of view, Nancy Pelosi and the Sunrise movement were on the same page. Republican obstructionism was the reason for inaction. But, when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez proposed her Green New Deal, Pelosi was casually dismissive ("the green dream, or whatever they call it"). The Sunrise activists felt that, even if Republicans were denying that there is a problem to be addressed, there was also a lack of leadership coming from Democrats, given the gravity of the situation. Socialists see the problem as a matter of corporations controlling both parties and not allowing change. They argue that the focus should be on system change, not climate change. But changes that would reduce CO2 emissions can face opposition that doesn't come from Republicans or corporations. Studies show that jobs being located near transit has even more of an impact than housing being located near transit, in terms of whether people will take transit to work. But I've seen the argument that Cambridge, a city relatively well served by transit, doesn't need more commercial development, since it creates more traffic, displaces existing residents, and places more pressure on their ailing transit system. But a relatively transit-rich city refusing commercial development could result in more development in outlying areas, in office parks with plenty of free parking but little or no mass transit. A California bill that would have allowed more housing in transit-rich areas was recently killed by the Democratic legislator who chaired the appropriations committee, since he feared that the law would alter the character of neighborhoods like his. So it seems unlikely that changing our economic system would, in and of itself, result in decisive action to reduce our CO2 emissions. Democratic lawmakers may fear, and not without justification, that, even when people support the idea of taking decisive action in the abstract, they will become much less supportive when such action starts to have an effect on their own lives or on the lives of those they care about. Thus, there are multiple lenses through which one can see the problem of inaction towards climate change, and, while all have some truth to them, none show the complete picture in and of themselves. In the US, it is a huge obstacle to progress that one of the major political parties is taking a position that is at odds with the scientific consensus. As I discussed here, there is a path open to them by which they could accept the contributions of climate scientists without losing their identity or generally capitulating to the left, although this may cost them support from the fossil fuel industry. Given that the science suggests that we are in a crisis, Democrats should have courage and be willing to lead. At the same time, the general public will need to be fully invested in finding a solution and will need to accept that doing so may not be easy. We may be engaged in activism that primarily focuses on one of these parts. We should recognize such activism as part of a larger scheme with multiple pieces that need to work together.

When making political decisions, it is important that all sides of an issue be considered. It is reasonable to ask others to understand and empathize with us. At the same time, we should seek to understand and empathize with others. We should seek to see things as they are, understanding that our existing lens may not capture the situation in front of us. We should seek to free ourselves of attachments. Of course, we may do all of these things and still have deep disagreements, but this should provide a framework towards mutual understanding and finding common ground.