Being tree. Becoming #masskindness

Best time to plant a tree: 20 years ago. The 2nd best time: now. 3rd best time: about a year ago.

The tree on the mountain grows larger slowly and imperceptibly. It spreads and gives shade, and thus through its nature influences its surroundings.... The tree on the mountain, like the trees on the earth... represents influence by example. - The I Ching

Across a multitude of beliefs in many times and nations there exists within a rule that is golden. From ancient Egypt to ancient China, religions of the East and West, all the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i), Buddhism, Hinduism, and Wicca and Scientology - this rule. Philosophers from Isocrates to Kant (though he would say not exactly, even so, close enough) to Sartre have thought themselves to this same rule.

Though often encased in doctrinal fog, ritual eccentricities, and murderous unction, this rule is plucked and shined by those believers who insist upon more from their beliefs than bludgeons or watchtowers or iron maidens. Believers not satisfied with critiques of hypocrisy, irony, and folly. Believers determined to believe anyway. Writing as Karen Armstrong does:

All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of  what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, "Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you," or in its positive form, " Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself." Further, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody - even your enemies. [Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life]

In 2009, invoking this rule and the compassion it calls us to embrace, Armstrong lead others to the drafting of a Charter for Compassion that called out the urgent need to make compassion "a clear, luminous and dynamic force" in our world.

Armstrong reminds us that this rule is not some notion, idea, or doctrine. It is method of living. The rule's force derives not from coming to believe it, but rather from learning to live it. She offers a daily discipline of compassion that begins with simple acts of kindness. "This need not be a grand, dramatic gesture;" she writes, "it can be a 'little, nameless, unremembered' act that may seem insignificant to you." Each day look for an opportunity to treat someone as you would like yourself to be treated. The point is not to wait for the opportunity for an act of kindness to present itself, but to seek it out, to be mindful of others.

Of course, we're probably not in the habit of looking for opportunities each day to be kind which makes it challenging to do so. After all, it's not like acts of kindness grow on trees.

Except when they do.

A bit over a year ago, I wrote in the post "Being tree" of an elm planted in Forager's backyard and of the Chinese proverb about the best time to plant a tree (i.e., 20 years ago). "With all the becoming-a-great-tree that only twenty years can bring," I said, "there are twenty years of being-a-tree along the way. All that a tree is it is already, including all that a tree can be."

Last evening this elm became one of The Giving Trees and a site of #masskindness.

The Giving Tree is a public art installation that kicks off The Random Act of Kindness Group of Rochester’s #masskindness campaign. Rochester artists and families are installing colorful “Giving Trees” throughout the city this week [through Sunday, July 17] and on their branches you will find envelopes with a suggestion for a #RandomActofKindness, as well as small gifts that you can take. Find a Tree, take envelope, and share some love.

Want to know more about The Giving Tree? See ABC 6 News here.
The Med City Beat here.

You might also be interested in Journey to Peace VII: Compassionate Caring for All Beings, Sunday, October 23, 2016 2:00-4:00 pm at Assisi Heights. See here.


In Lak'ech Ala K'in

A new city motto, modestly proposed

Emblem from a bill of Continental currency.
Design by Benjamin Franklin.

On another is drawn an eagle on the wing, pouncing upon a crane, who turns upon his back, and receives the eagle on the point of his long bill, which pierces the eagle’s breast; with this motto, EXITUS IN DUBIO EST; — The event is uncertain. The eagle, I suppose, represents Great-Britain, the crane America. This device offers an admonition to each of the contending parties. To the crane, not to depend too much on the success of its endeavours to avoid the contest (by petition, negotiation, &c.) but prepare for using the means of defence God and nature hath given it; and to the eagle, not to presume on its superior strength, since a weaker bird may wound it mortally. - Letter from Benjamin Franklin to the Pennsylvania Gazette, September 20 1775 published under the pseudonym, Clericus.

"Exitus in dubio est" can also translate as "the outcome is uncertain" which may to the modern ear better capture the spirit of the motto in its day. In any case, it would make a decent submission in any contest to re-motto the city of Rochester.

It is certainly better than the current city motto which is...anyone?...anyone?.... Nobody? OK. The current city motto is: "First Class City. First Class Service." Why, when, and how that came to be the motto, I'll leave to others to uncover. It's more than enough for me to know what the motto is because the answers to those other questions could not possibly make me feel any better about it. Perhaps it would look more impressive in Latin - "Primus genus civitatem. Primum genus servitium." - but even so, as they say, patitur in translationem.*

The authors of this motto, and one can imagined the earnest wordsmithing that it required, strike me as having confused an ennobling epigram of unassailable Latinized conviction with one of those motivational posters that frequently haunt staff lounges. That or a sputtering neon sign outside a diner. Admittedly, other than a certain formal resonance, there's little else to suggest the latter, but there is some reason to give credence to the former.

On the basis of a simple headcount, Rochester is by state statute a "city of the first class". In Minnesota, when your population exceeds 100K that's what you get to be. So, "First Class City" is what Rochester is. Given the polysemous nature of language, saying so allows one to suggest other characteristics as well. Fair enough. We have 100+K people and are a nice place to live to boot - please like us. Sounds a little needy, but there it is.

For me it's the next bit that really puts it up on the wall next to the coffee condiments in the break room and at the top of the Monday morning agenda to inspire the week's work and "remind us of why we are all here." You know the drill.

It's the "First Class Service" part that makes me think the motto was written not for the city but for city employees. It's that part that makes me think that whoever wrote this motto not only forgot "why we are all here" but got it terribly wrong. That they are not alone among governments in getting terribly wrong makes its no less terribly wrong.

Now here is where it gets insidious.

If you go to the city's website you'll find the "City of Rochester Core Values." There you are offered a list of bullet points called "City of Rochester Core Value Statements and Standards."  First among these bullet points:

• Customer Focus 
• Identify, plan for, and support customer needs.
• Seek and consider input from our customers to continually improve services. 
• Treat every customer well.

Followed by four more headings labeled Respect, Integrity, Safety, and Excellence all referencing in their sub-points at some point the "customer." These core value statements and standards conclude with:

The City of Rochester will RISE to the top in Customer Focus through Respect, Integrity, Safety, and Excellence.

Now, you can imagine here as well the long hours of wordsmithing, the department head meetings, the e-mails and PowerPoint slides that went into crafting these "core values". And yes we see what they did there with that "RISE" thing. So, yeah, a lot of time was expended. Probably a consultant or two enlisted. At the very least a trained facilitator with experience in doing "this sort of thing". Oh, and Post-It Self-Stick Table Top Easel Pads adorned with ideas captured from the break-out groups and covered with colored dots all to be tabulated and reported out in the afternoon session - so everyone grab a sandwich.

Getting to consensus on "core values" is not easy. But, do you see the insidiousness yet? Sure the insipidity is apparent, but that's to be expected. Even with the best of intentions, misplaced as they might be, core value statements generally end up being pretty insipid. But these are insidious as well.

The core values of the city of Rochester are not about living in Rochester.
The core values are not about the quality of life to which the city might aspire.
The core values of the city of Rochester are about working the front counter at city hall.

So, what's wrong with some primum genus servitium at city hall? Well, if we are just "customers", then I suppose there's nothing wrong with expecting "first class service." And if at its core, city hall values us only as customers - consumers of services - then what better than "first class service" could they possibly be expected to offer us? Setting aside for the moment whether we get that level of service at city hall, note that also absent from these standards is not just any notion of the kind of life we value in this city, but any mention of "citizens".

(Pause for a moment and consider that oversight. Not an uncommon one these days as it turns out. Consider as well the Fourth of July holiday that is nearly upon us. And when you are ready, things pick up again below.)

Peter Block writes in Community: The Structure of Belonging, that the "antithesis of being a citizen is the choice to be a consumer or a client....."

Consumers give power away. They believe that their own needs can be best satisfied by the actions of others - whether those others are elected officials, top management, social service providers, or shopping malls. Consumers also allow others to define their needs. If leaders and service providers are guilty of labeling or projecting onto others the 'needs' to justify their own style of leadership or service that they provide, consumers collude with them in accepting others' definitions of their needs.

Bringing us at last to this new motto for the city which I modestly propose: Exitus in dubio est. "The outcome is uncertain."

The current motto is at least open to dissent - if you haven't noticed that's what this is. But the one I modestly propose is so grounded in the nature of human existence and action that it would require the most virulent nihilist to challenge it's veracity especially in this city.

Stercus Accidit would work as well, but it lacks the imprimatur of a Founder and his admonition that faced with uncertain outcomes we should make best use of the means "God and nature hath given [us]". Our divine endowment as it were, or so we have claimed them to be: "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Perhaps with the uncertainty we face ensconced in the motto of our city, we will not only be reminded of why we came to be here the first place - literally; but we might also appreciate that in doing so:

We, together, become producers of a satisfying future. We see that if we are to be citizens, together we must be the creators and producers of our future. And if we want to be the creators and producers of our future, we must become citizens, not consumers. (McKnight and Block, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods)

So, in the spirit of the Fourth of July, this: No matter how first class the service, we will not find our future at any front counter in city hall. If we are looking for the future there, we have arrived much too late and will have played no part in its creation.

Oh yes, for you augury fans: Sandhill cranes have been spotted in Rochester.

__________

 * "It suffers in translation."

Rochester Agonistes: the rule of thumbs

Metaphors, as we have seen, are conceptual in nature. They are among our principle vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of our social and political reality. - Lakoff and Johnson, "Metaphors We Live By"

I don't care much for "balancing interests" anymore. Why? Because (a) people who say they are usually aren't. And (b) it's a pernicious metaphor wrongly associated with fairness. To be clear, seeking fairness is not wrong. But, insisting fairness is achieved by "balancing interests" is, if not wrong, at least misconstrued, ill-conceived, and not without consequences.

The very notion of balancing begins with divisiveness. Weights and counterweights. One thing set against another thing. The measure of one is set against the measure of another. As a metaphor balancing reduces fairness to portions purported to be measured out equitably.

Balancing assumes - usually falsely - that all things are or should be divisible and then divides them. Balancing divides them to portion them out and then claims to distribute these portions fairly as if fairness is only a matter of what you end up with. Is it? It sounds good. It sounds right. It sounds fair because that's what we have come to believe fairness is. What we miss is what all this balancing requires in the first place. What we miss is what is assumed to make balancing possible. The whole endeavor relies upon asserting a relevant calibration - a shared property - by which a balance can be achieved.

There’s a deeper problem, though: Embedded in the idea of the scales is a picture of a process for arriving at sound decisions—which if the metaphor is sufficiently pervasive we may come to think of as the only method for making sound decisions. A scale is a machine for reducing diverse objects—or in the metaphor, interests and values—to a single shared dimension. You might have items as varied as toasters and giraffes on the opposing plates of the scale, but all the scale cares about—or all we care about when we employ it—is that they both have weight and mass. Every other difference between the items in the balance is irrelevant so long as they have this one shared property, this one dimension along which they intersect, which allows us to quantify each in terms of the other.

It is the calibrating that matters most. Portioning is not impartial. In assuming that by careful calibration it can be impartial, balancing misconstrues fairness as simply a matter of distribution. It mistakenly believes that impartiality is even possible. Even worse, it is mistaken that impartiality is the point. Of course it is fair, we are told, it's impartial. But, calibrating is a very partial choice.

Interests are not balanced by the disinterested. Nor is it the disinterested whose interests hang in the balance. When it comes to balancing interests it's also important to look through all the finger pointing to see whose thumbs are on the scale.

image: M.J. Carlucci

Now if you are thinking that this metaphor doesn't matter all that much my guess is that you haven't tried to get a Holiday Inn built in Rochester recently. Or park a "mobile food unit" downtown. Or maybe you haven't applied for a position on a city board or commission. Or maybe you haven't tried to find a house or an apartment you can afford. If you had attempted or been party to any of these things you would have learned that "balancing interests" matters a lot. "Balancing interests" is the reason you've been given for why it takes so damn long to get anything done and why you end up with so little or nothing at all.

Is it surprising when citizens troubled by these outcomes take up the Old Testament remedy visited upon Adonibezek and start talking about cutting off thumbs? But as satisfying as that metaphor (it is a metaphor right?) might be for some to ponder, it leaves us within the same frame that "balancing interests" creates in the first place. Maybe we need instead something more New Testament - like the scales falling away from Saul's eyes. We should act rather than judge. We need to "reframe" the conversation.

In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry our policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.

Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

As long as "balancing interests" frames our civic deliberations, our outcomes will likely remain all thumbs. And thumbs will rule.

Affordable housing: so what?

Certainly in the case of what the plant needs, the thought of the need will only affect action if you want the plant to flourish. - G.E.M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy" 

Let them eat cake somewhere else

When Neel Kashkari, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis was in town recently he met with some local nonprofit leaders. The meeting has become a bit notorious in some circles since then, mainly for Kashkari’s response to concerns raised regarding affordable housing in Rochester. Hearing that there was “cheap” property thirty miles out, he is reported to have concluded that the solution to the city’s affordable housing problem was clear: people who can’t afford to live here can live out there.

Kashkari is not alone in this view. Certainly one way to solve the city’s affordable housing problem is to conclude that it’s not necessary to provide it.


Surely we would have heard something

You could also take the view of some of the business leadership in town that if there was a problem finding affordable housing their employees would have said something about it to human resources. No one has, so there isn’t.

Of course these are businesses large enough to have human resource departments. Despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary, this view prevails.

But let’s say this view is correct - at least as far as these employers not having heard anything. The first question would be: did you ask? The second: why would they tell you? The third: how many of your employees are stressed about affording the house they are living in or the apartment they are renting?

US Census data illustrates the share of Olmsted County households paying too much for housing has jumped from 7,900 households in 2000 to 14,900 households in 2010. More than one in five owner households and more than two in five renter households pay over 30% of their income for housing. 

What do you need to buy a house for anyway

Kashkari is also said to have said, no one expects a waitress to be able to buy a starter home. OK. Let’s say that’s what no one expects. How about maybe just being able to rent a one bedroom apartment? Anyone expect a waitress to be able to do that? 60% of renters cannot afford the average market rent in Rochester.


So what

Knowing that a plant needs water to flourish does not mean you will water the plant. Unless you want the plant to flourish, you will not bother. Similarly, simply knowing there is a shortage of affordable housing in Rochester - and there's plenty of data to reasonably conclude there is - does not mean affordable housing will be built in Rochester. Unless Rochester wants to provide it, Rochester will not bother.

So: do we want the people who work in Rochester to be able to live in Rochester?