A couple of weeks ago I got an impassioned email plea from a group called Save Our Safety Net. “The Washington city budget faces massive cuts that would do the worst damage to the poorest members of our community!” it said. “Call council and say that the city needs to raise taxes!”
The email had a laundry list of, indeed, last-ditch social service organizations that keep people from literally dying on the streets. It was horrible. So I, barely in the city a couple of months, did what I was supposed to do: went to the rally, lobbied city council. I signed the petition.
“You know, I just moved here from Philly,” I told one of the organizers. “We just went through this. Same horror movie: lost revenue, no political will to raise taxes, and so on.”
“How did it turn out?”
“Well, actually, it has been rather a miraculous thing so far. The community really came together, even altered the budget process itself. We ended up forcing the city to raise taxes with an administration that was never going to do it, through the most democratic process I’ve ever seen in a city government.”
“Wow.”
“Except that, despite the fact it started in 2008, it’s not actually done…”
The Philly budget saga has been going on three seasons now. Winter, spring, summer…and now, it threatens to stretch into the fall. There is a Republican state Senator in Pennsylvania named Dominic Pileggi whose greatest legislative achievement last year was blocking health care reform that would have insured 42,000 impoverished Pennsylvanians, and this year, starving the Philadelphia government by blocking approval of the sales tax increase that would keep the city operating. He should not be in public office at all.
I get very defensive of projects I have worked on. I am mad about this. Amnesia sets in really fast – and it’s been a busy year – but all you have to do it rewind to the chill dark of last December to remember the civic mood in Philadelphia when Mayor Nutter came out with the first pools-and-libraries cuts. I have never seen so many depressed progressives in my life. Really bad bar graphs in winter. That Obama/Phillies high wearing off reaaal fast, and those thirty seconds that Nutter had to prove to the grandmothers of West Philadelphia that he was going to be different from all the other mayors falling off the shot clock.
Remember that?
I was talking to a libraryista this week, and he was going on about Nutter pro-business grumble grumble nothing ever changes…and I realized that people are already forgetting everything that happened after that.
So I am going to sketch out a brief chronology to remind you:
- Mayor Nutter announces budget cuts
- Friends of the Free Library begin campaign
- Firefighters begin campaign
- Lawsuit filed to keep libraries open
- Mayor holds disastrous town halls where people show up, and scream at him
- Mayor holds PhillyStat, round two of town halls, where people show up again, I think these were a little more sedate.
- Coalition to Save Libraries formed, bringing together library advocates, community groups, and other endangered city services
- Bowing to pressure from Philadelphians, Mayor designs and then holds round three of town halls with facilitated process designed by the Penn civic-engagement DJs to take public input to design the city budget.
- Despite deeply ingrained and not unwarranted distrust of their elected officials, hundreds of people show up AGAIN to design the city budget in these fora
- Coalition to Save Essential Services formed, which was a different yet overlapping Venn diagram from the Coalition to Save the Libraries
- Library lawsuit successful, happy New Year!
- New branch of FFL forms in West Philly as a result of the organizing - I think there might be others. At any rate, many branches of this organization were strengthened by the fight.
- Mayor redesigns budget, including tax increases initially including sales and property tax increase.
- (here’s when I skipped town, so my knowledge of the remainder of the story is a little thin, and needs to be augmented)
- Philadelphians find out that property taxes = bad. Again, they take the time and make the effort to organize, go to city council, lobby, go to the umpteenth rally.
- City council hearings result in more participation
- City council cancels the property tax increase
- Mayor rewrites budget
- Mayor sends budget to Harrisburg. Dom Pileggi sits on it.
- Mayor calls for rallies to put pressure on Harrisburg and YET AGAIN AMAZING PEOPLE SHOW UP AND USE THEIR VOICES, including a bazillion social service organizations, taking day trips out to Media.
- …and this is the quick version.
This has all been amazing. This actually all happened. Hundreds and even thousands of people worked very hard to make all this happen. The amount of learning that has gone on by so many people who had no idea what a real estate transfer tax was has been pretty incredible. It’s the kind of thing that changes a city forever. I tell people in D.C. how proud I am of Philly, that we decided as a city what the budget should look like, that we chose to come together and make sacrifices in order to keep homeless shelters and HIV treatment clinics open.
Just the effort required to make this happen is beyond belief, sometimes. Civic engagement is really hard and really time-consuming. People who aren’t political weirdos actually would rather be doing anything other than showing up to a town hall and talking about L&I; this shit has been going on so long, organizers have had to tear people away from Eagles, Sixers, and Phillies games consecutively. And they did it.
Comparatively speaking, our nation’s capital is completely disempowered. Its the capital of the richest country on the planet, and here we were in the DC office building at 13th and Pennsylvania, begging them to not cut the Grandparents Caregivers program! Apparently DC has, for the last 20 years, allowed national and multinational corporations doing business in the District to get out of paying a portion of their taxes. It was like Philly for many years.
“That’s ridiculous,” I told the chief of staff to my city councilman, Councilman Graham, Ward 1. “This is D.C. It would take the Apocalypse for Starbucks to close its stores in Adams Morgan.”
“For years, we couldn’t get anyone to build anything here,” he said. “Getting a Starbucks in your neighborhood – well, that’s when you know you’ve made it.” He smiled.
I was shocked at his assessment of his own district, and its potential power. Ward 1 includes Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Mount Pleasant, Columbia Heights, and most of the other really expensive real estate in the district. If there had been a bad financial history for the city in the past, there had been no recalculation since. The city government of Washington, D.C. is afraid. It doesn’t even get self-determination – they face a possible APileggaclypse every year with the federal government! Cities have been beat down for a long time, and even with Mr. Urban President, there are still gonna be a lot more bad bar graphs ahead until things change.
It’s time cities stopped being afraid. Cities just need to figure out a way to own it again. And soon.
----
The DC budget fight, which really just begun as a public campaign a month ago, is so differently aligned that the comparisons almost can’t be made. I will write them down eventually though, because there is something to learn. One thing that they do have that Philly lacks is a really smart policy thinktank – the DC Fiscal Policy Institute– that is an appendage of the federal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, whence came Peter Orzag. It’s one benefit of having the federal policy class here. There’s also a much more well developed local blogosphere here than in Philly - but with an equally bad digital divide, which still hampers organizing in both cities.
Mais…. ou sont les operatifs?
I’m going to get involved because I miss city politics. It’s the antidote to cynicism, the political space where one can best see the effects of good work – even if cities are the least financially capable, often, to accomplish their own goals. I feel terrible for all these kids on the Hill, little mites in a gigantic federal power structure that they can barely understand, let alone affect. A lot of the people who come here have no experience with local politics – they are often suburbanites, or come straight out of grad school.
There is no reason, really, that they couldn’t learn. And take it back when they go home later. That would really change things, long term.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
The Future of America, and How to Stop It
So I was on the Chinatown bus from DC to Philly last Monday, and I was reading a book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by a guy named Jonathan Zittrain. It is one of those required reading tomes for most people who work in my field, and Zittrain is one of those required panelists that cycle around in what you could almost call a karmic wheel from one conference to the next – that is, could almost call a karmic wheel, were anyone ever to actually break the cycle of panelist death and rebirth, achieve nirvana, and be freed, in a blinding flash of light from behind a cloth-covered table at some convention center, the lav mic left behind dropping gamely into the empty seat.
Apparently, that has yet to happen.
The book is a great explanation of how the Internet works and what flavors it comes in; I suspect that there is going to be a really scary part about information control, commercialization, etc. later on in the book, that will spur me on to further action. But so far, I have only gotten to the fun parts, like the case of Captain Crunch. Before there were computer hackers, there were ‘phone phreakers’ – people who hacked the phone system.
This guy Captain Crunch was a man who spent years jerking at the skirts of Ma Bell, and whose greatest phreak was accomplished with a whistle found in a box of said cereal. The AT&T phone system was not digital, but analog, which means that you hacked something not with 100110010, but with actual sound. Captain Crunch discovered that these cereal-box whistles, when blown into the phone at the end of a call, signaled to the AT&T system that the line had been reset, and then was free to call anywhere in the world for free and talk as long as he wanted to.
So I was reading this book, and getting a little sleepy, and thinking about what I was going to do the next day at the Media Mobilizing Project, and maybe feeling a little bit of a smarty pants for being able to toss around this new term ‘generative network’ in some work context down the road – maybe even Tweet it in some adorable little bon mot – when I look up and see the enormous sign that says “HARLEM TURN RIGHT”. Then there’s one for BROOKLYN. Then if there’s any doubt that I am not actually in Philadelphia, there’s TRI-BOROUGH BRIDGE… and so on. And so on. It’s about 10 pm. Shit.
“Yeah uh Lauren, I don’t really think I need that place to stay tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks though. I just…overshot my destination a bit,” I say, blushing and sweating into my smartphone. “Yeah. I got on the wrong bus and I’m in New York. Yeah, I’m such a winner.” Pakistani and Chinese families exit the bus en masse, secure in their own sanity and their survival instincts, warm, pudgy, holding white plastic bags of ingredients. “Yeah. I know. Well actually you are right. It is kind of a cool thing. Yeah. Hell yeah. I’d been wanting to come up here. I don’t have to be back until the morning anyway. I’ll just wander around!”
At this point the night turned into an all-night kaleidoscope, which runs through the wasabi peas I ate in the terminal, through a bar called the Redhead which served me the oldest cocktail in America, through the Bowery Poetry Club (I had no idea they still did that in New York), through a congee restaurant (congee is like Chinese grits), then the last few hours, where, as I end up doing over and over again between the hours of 4 and 7 in the morning whenever I am in NYC, I sit on the street with homeless guys, smoke cigarettes, talk, and watch the sun come up over the city.
There are more people living on the streets of New York now than I have seen in 15 years. They are almost all black men. They are lined up on the sidewalk in the Bowery in row after row of crumpled cardboard boxes like an IKEA warehouse of human beings. (Model # ANTHRO). “It’s just the recession,” one guy said to me. Fair enough. But New York is where all our sins come out in the wash, I think. It is the Empire State, after all.
For all of the ‘social conditions’ that lead to ‘homelessness’, these mass encampments are very much a form of protest, perhaps not as political as Tent Cities, but defiant in their own way. If the city of New York – and our culture in general - is going to treat poor black men like trash, then these guys are out there on the street to confront it, parked underneath the pale hipsters laughing and scurrying by, their very presence saying yeah, if we are trash, then we are going to be here, we’re not going to let you forget it, we are going to be the wave of human trash that engulfs this city, engulfs the tourists, engulfs the financial sector until the entire island is buried under a tidal wave of human throwaways. Their very actions are a form of witness. All I can do is treat people with respect, and hear what truth they have to offer, since between 4 and 7 in New York, I am homeless too. I consider this a particularly important stop on my listening tour of the universe. No better place to really discuss healthcare reform - or the fate of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
At any rate, the guys I hung out with were way more worried about me (especially once they’d heard the story), and called me on my cell several times to make sure I got back to Pennsylvania. Survival instincts are hard to define.
The two days before, I had been in Detroit. I didn’t get to see much of it when I was there. However, I was fortunate enough to land in the tangle of leftie community organizers who are trying to cope with the massive shocks that the entire city is going through (and who had the political dirt).
I had no idea how bad it was. Detroit high schools have a 75 percent dropout rate. But from some of the problems and solutions I heard being discussed, it became clear to me that Detroit is very much a preview, a dress rehearsal of sorts, for the coming long-arc collapse of the American economy over the next 50 years. My lifetime. I don’t think I am over-exaggerating in any way to say that it will be the unique challenge of my generation to determine the nature with which we confront this coming storm – whether we remember and uphold values of community, sharing, love, and enlightenment, or if we descend into, even more than we already have, into selfishness, individuality, violence, and brutality. The immensity of this task is almost too much for me to think about, sometimes. I cannot say that I am not scared for us. But we have no choice. This is our home.
As pessimistic as this all sounds, I want to write this so I can hold up Detroit like a candle. I think there is a lot of darkness there, but I think what people are doing is kind. The spirit with which they are confronting their region’s economic cratering is to move towards their neighbors, not away from them, and it is centered on what is good in life.
If that is the epicenter, then I have hope.
Who knew? The Motor City!
Apparently, that has yet to happen.
The book is a great explanation of how the Internet works and what flavors it comes in; I suspect that there is going to be a really scary part about information control, commercialization, etc. later on in the book, that will spur me on to further action. But so far, I have only gotten to the fun parts, like the case of Captain Crunch. Before there were computer hackers, there were ‘phone phreakers’ – people who hacked the phone system.
This guy Captain Crunch was a man who spent years jerking at the skirts of Ma Bell, and whose greatest phreak was accomplished with a whistle found in a box of said cereal. The AT&T phone system was not digital, but analog, which means that you hacked something not with 100110010, but with actual sound. Captain Crunch discovered that these cereal-box whistles, when blown into the phone at the end of a call, signaled to the AT&T system that the line had been reset, and then was free to call anywhere in the world for free and talk as long as he wanted to.
So I was reading this book, and getting a little sleepy, and thinking about what I was going to do the next day at the Media Mobilizing Project, and maybe feeling a little bit of a smarty pants for being able to toss around this new term ‘generative network’ in some work context down the road – maybe even Tweet it in some adorable little bon mot – when I look up and see the enormous sign that says “HARLEM TURN RIGHT”. Then there’s one for BROOKLYN. Then if there’s any doubt that I am not actually in Philadelphia, there’s TRI-BOROUGH BRIDGE… and so on. And so on. It’s about 10 pm. Shit.
“Yeah uh Lauren, I don’t really think I need that place to stay tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks though. I just…overshot my destination a bit,” I say, blushing and sweating into my smartphone. “Yeah. I got on the wrong bus and I’m in New York. Yeah, I’m such a winner.” Pakistani and Chinese families exit the bus en masse, secure in their own sanity and their survival instincts, warm, pudgy, holding white plastic bags of ingredients. “Yeah. I know. Well actually you are right. It is kind of a cool thing. Yeah. Hell yeah. I’d been wanting to come up here. I don’t have to be back until the morning anyway. I’ll just wander around!”
At this point the night turned into an all-night kaleidoscope, which runs through the wasabi peas I ate in the terminal, through a bar called the Redhead which served me the oldest cocktail in America, through the Bowery Poetry Club (I had no idea they still did that in New York), through a congee restaurant (congee is like Chinese grits), then the last few hours, where, as I end up doing over and over again between the hours of 4 and 7 in the morning whenever I am in NYC, I sit on the street with homeless guys, smoke cigarettes, talk, and watch the sun come up over the city.
There are more people living on the streets of New York now than I have seen in 15 years. They are almost all black men. They are lined up on the sidewalk in the Bowery in row after row of crumpled cardboard boxes like an IKEA warehouse of human beings. (Model # ANTHRO). “It’s just the recession,” one guy said to me. Fair enough. But New York is where all our sins come out in the wash, I think. It is the Empire State, after all.
For all of the ‘social conditions’ that lead to ‘homelessness’, these mass encampments are very much a form of protest, perhaps not as political as Tent Cities, but defiant in their own way. If the city of New York – and our culture in general - is going to treat poor black men like trash, then these guys are out there on the street to confront it, parked underneath the pale hipsters laughing and scurrying by, their very presence saying yeah, if we are trash, then we are going to be here, we’re not going to let you forget it, we are going to be the wave of human trash that engulfs this city, engulfs the tourists, engulfs the financial sector until the entire island is buried under a tidal wave of human throwaways. Their very actions are a form of witness. All I can do is treat people with respect, and hear what truth they have to offer, since between 4 and 7 in New York, I am homeless too. I consider this a particularly important stop on my listening tour of the universe. No better place to really discuss healthcare reform - or the fate of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
At any rate, the guys I hung out with were way more worried about me (especially once they’d heard the story), and called me on my cell several times to make sure I got back to Pennsylvania. Survival instincts are hard to define.
The two days before, I had been in Detroit. I didn’t get to see much of it when I was there. However, I was fortunate enough to land in the tangle of leftie community organizers who are trying to cope with the massive shocks that the entire city is going through (and who had the political dirt).
I had no idea how bad it was. Detroit high schools have a 75 percent dropout rate. But from some of the problems and solutions I heard being discussed, it became clear to me that Detroit is very much a preview, a dress rehearsal of sorts, for the coming long-arc collapse of the American economy over the next 50 years. My lifetime. I don’t think I am over-exaggerating in any way to say that it will be the unique challenge of my generation to determine the nature with which we confront this coming storm – whether we remember and uphold values of community, sharing, love, and enlightenment, or if we descend into, even more than we already have, into selfishness, individuality, violence, and brutality. The immensity of this task is almost too much for me to think about, sometimes. I cannot say that I am not scared for us. But we have no choice. This is our home.
As pessimistic as this all sounds, I want to write this so I can hold up Detroit like a candle. I think there is a lot of darkness there, but I think what people are doing is kind. The spirit with which they are confronting their region’s economic cratering is to move towards their neighbors, not away from them, and it is centered on what is good in life.
If that is the epicenter, then I have hope.
Who knew? The Motor City!
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Allied Media Conference
This weekend I was fortunate enough to go to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit.
There are a lot of conferences in this world, but I think this one is a bit different. It is probably best described as a spiritual experience packaged and arriving in the form of a conference. It is a conference where all the attendants feel - and verbalize - that their art is a form of responsibility towards one's community... folks who exhibit in their art love for the human race, via an unshakable commitment to truth. Everyone there was a teacher of some kind or another, and I was very fortunate to have learned from them. It was true generosity of spirit.
It has taken me a long time to understand that telling the truth is an act of love. For a long time, I thought that NOT telling the truth was an act of love; such are the conditions of so many families, and I think that silence is seen as something that makes the daily small brutalities of our lives supposedly easier.
I am beginning to realize that there should be no line between personal truth standards and popular media truth standards.
The media as it exists now can only be counteracted by an astonishingly brave and powerful and simply unending onslaught of truth - for every violent story they want to tell, we must tell 10 more that are human, and warm, and real. (E.g. the TV show "Nip/Tuck." - how many other stories are going to have to be told to counteract that show? "Transformers 2"? It's all massive cultural damage.)
Thankfully, it's happening. I want to talk about all of it, but right now I am tired and should sleep, and will just post something charming and funny and smart, made by a group of hypercool kids in New York City called Global Action Project.
It's the season finale of "America's Next Top Immigrant."
There are a lot of conferences in this world, but I think this one is a bit different. It is probably best described as a spiritual experience packaged and arriving in the form of a conference. It is a conference where all the attendants feel - and verbalize - that their art is a form of responsibility towards one's community... folks who exhibit in their art love for the human race, via an unshakable commitment to truth. Everyone there was a teacher of some kind or another, and I was very fortunate to have learned from them. It was true generosity of spirit.
It has taken me a long time to understand that telling the truth is an act of love. For a long time, I thought that NOT telling the truth was an act of love; such are the conditions of so many families, and I think that silence is seen as something that makes the daily small brutalities of our lives supposedly easier.
I am beginning to realize that there should be no line between personal truth standards and popular media truth standards.
The media as it exists now can only be counteracted by an astonishingly brave and powerful and simply unending onslaught of truth - for every violent story they want to tell, we must tell 10 more that are human, and warm, and real. (E.g. the TV show "Nip/Tuck." - how many other stories are going to have to be told to counteract that show? "Transformers 2"? It's all massive cultural damage.)
Thankfully, it's happening. I want to talk about all of it, but right now I am tired and should sleep, and will just post something charming and funny and smart, made by a group of hypercool kids in New York City called Global Action Project.
It's the season finale of "America's Next Top Immigrant."
Sunday, July 12, 2009
How to Document your Life, Part I.
“I don’t understand the impulse other people have to document their own lives so much,” I said to a friend. “It’s ridiculous. These online photo sites and all this incessant scrap-booking. Why take all that time out of actually living?”
“When you’re older, it matters,” he said. “I don’t know, but... it just becomes more important.”
Hm. Yeah. It seemed too broad of a generalization. But I’ve been thinking about it since.
Documenting one's life. How does one document one’s own life? Does one, and how, and why?
How can one have the clarity, will, and insight to curate the permanent exhibit of one’s own story? And who are the museum goers?
How much is picture … how much is sound … how much is written?
When do you let others speak about you – and is the act of choosing your character witnesses dishonest?
And isn’t it what I am doing right now?
As I write this, I am sitting outside on a deck overlooking the inlet between peninsular Florida and Clearwater Island. It is night, 78 degrees, my feet are bare, and behind me is a string of lights in the shape of multicolored beach balls. If I wanted to document this particular night, it would be difficult. It sounds simple: I went to dinner with my extended family at a seafood restaurant in St. Pete’s two days before my cousin Jennifer (a wedding planner running her own wedding) is to marry the man to whom she is already married.
There is a large underwater iceberg of passive aggression and cultural conflict going on but those are not the things to document, for me. Such things make an ugly haiku. The things I would like to take down are: Lindsay ordering coconut shrimp, Mark telling me about the healing side of the financial services industry, Josh suggesting we go to Crabby Bill’s seafood restaurant on the night when Uncle Bill was, indeed, a little crabby, and no one making a crack about it at dinner; and the crickets, now, at night.
Most of all, I think I would want to tape the sound of the crickets.
My life is so salty and Ferris wheel and grainy and it speeds back into the past so quickly, like the wake from a ship. I am actually beginning to argue with the entire idea that one should document.
There is this polished stone fossil on my desk called an ammonite, an ancient cephalopod that swam around in the ocean that covered the Sahara Desert 350 million years ago. Now its remains sit on a desk in the office of the Media and Democracy Coalition on 19th Street NW. Whenever I get too worried about some burning question such as “Is the IPhone ‘Wanker’ app going to replace the old print business model for pornography?” all I have to do is look at that little curly petrified bastard sitting on my desk. And I breathe in, and breathe out, because sharing office space with something 350 million years old has a way of putting one's woes in perspective.
In Basin and Range, John McPhee writes about the behavior and psychology of geologists. One of the most amazing things in the book is this: most of what we know about the geological history of the planet comes from the corpses of the plants and animals that died and were preserved in the various layers of the earth. Their remains have allowed us, as humans, shuffling around with our little brushes and magnifying glasses, to discover which layer of sandstone is as old as the other - they move around too much to easily count. It takes the shape of a creature to match it in time.
The other completely amazing things McPhee writes about is the attitude that geologists develop toward time. Geologists, as an effect of their profession, become almost shamanic in their attitude towards time: they transcend it, in fact. Having to think, day in and day out, week after week, in scales of hundreds of millions of years completely alters their attitude towards the importance of their own lives...towards human civilization itself, he writes.
“In some ways, talking about (deep time) makes you know that your life is a blip, nothing,” one of the geologists says.
“But in another way... it's like you live forever.”
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
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