Context for Caring, Caring for Context

I learned, with tens of thousands of other marchers this past weekend at the People's Climate March, that you can travel by human blob from the US Capitol to the White House  in about 80 minutes. A normal mile's walk takes a quarter that time, and an earlier march moved more slowly. In this case, temps reached 91 degrees and marchers carried parachutes. The heat and the breeze offset each other.  My son, pounding his heart outside the White House, judged it all worthwhile. 

Did we change anybody's mind about how to address climate change? The fact that I set up a dangling rhetorical question betrays how thinly I can tease out an answer. For sure I saw more signs decrying offenses than proposing compromises. Compared to what I try here, the march drew a line: government that claims to represent the American people will not get away with lying about what pollution does to our habitat. 

But how do you get people ready to engage in the dealmaking, restating, listening and experimenting that can make the debate about "coal jobs" into a work session about safe jobs? It starts by understanding what it's like to live in a town where coal built schools and streets, and by understanding what it's like to still believe everyone deserves a livelihood that absorbs what we've learned from science about coal's effect. You can sympathize and stand firm at the same time. It feels itchy, but with good health and lots of company it feels motivating. 

A piece I wrote in January gets at a relevant principle: when you speak to traumatized youth about their trauma in the course of training them for jobs, those jobs become easier to keep and often become the seeds for careers. 

It turns out the insight driving Hopeworks, the organization I covered, spreads throughout funding and reform in public health and job training. Everyone you meet, a learned friend tells me, comes from a context he or she can't unwire- and to steer all of us onto terrain we can co-use, you'd better find ways into that context before you presume to get anyone out of it. 

I hope this page, this story and this writing help us before the heat makes more of us weak. 

The Making of a Room Where it Happens

In my house these days, dish cleanup and homework groove to the bop of the Hamilton cast album. The album conveys the musical's tale of what happens when a person cast aside from the elect yearns to make history. You get tragedy, heroics, and this ongoing experiment we call democracy.  It bolts some lift into your heels when you have to snap on Tupperware lids, to remember that wars and compromises led us to overuse fossil fuel, overbuild sprawl, and grapple in stretches and struggles with the mandate to treat all humans with respect. 

The plot turns on a moment when Alexander Hamilton, the ferocious and far-thinking immigrant, cuts a deal with plantation-bred theorists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Aaron Burr, the show's narrator and the man who killed Hamilton, busts out a show-stopper about craving access to deals like this- knowing how to lay out the terms and arrange the perks to make an agreement among rivals. "I want to be in the room where it happens," croons and growls Burr- and so does my family, with a broom or a pencil or a toothbrush for percussion. 

Well, as in the muddy young republic so it is today in the contracting one. With coastlines shrinking and solar power spreading, more talk turns on who gets a deal then on how the deal assembles. And that flows from the human longing for safety- we need to first feel protected before we can yield up the brain cells to figure out how to build the shelter. This time, though, the tragedy involves millions losing out on paths to durable urban living because they don't get to tap into political calculations.

And in that morass, a quote from architect Louis Kahn points toward some of the agreement techniques we need to teach our kids and ourselves.  An immigrant like Hamilton, Kahn explored how light can bring complex stories to simple walls. My architecture prof in college - or at least my notebook from that prof's lecture- quoted Kahn as saying that "a street is a room by agreement." The architect's romance in this quote never meant to describe political reality, of course- it sets forth goals for public design. When people share a space, they should be able to treat it as a space to which they claim equal rights and for which they divvy responsibility. 

All that depends on education, wellness, rule of law, a sense of history, and a sense of hope. And those psychological assets require a confidence that the systems determining your lot can open and can change to provide more safety, more light and more hope.

How do you teach that confidence? One method involves training young people to read the ecology as one of several systems affecting their well-being. Another involves teaching history, social studies and STEM with callouts for the ways one opinion can mesh with another opinion to produce a third approach. I've tested role-play means of getting kids to think critically about where they can intervene. Schoolwork can also include critical reading, reenactments, projects, service and applied science. Excellence in school- and in internships and in jobs- should reflect how thoroughly a student reads the systems around her and how precisely she pinpoints a way to make those systems more inclusive and stabler. 

Our kids and thousands of others thrill to Hamilton in part because it gives a rush to see the story of making America as a chain of ideals and deals, mutable and full of passion at all times. 

They stick with it because the play's final songs (no spoilers) bet firmly on the possibility of accord. People realize they can share space with their competitors and share credit with people who take different paths. Facing down climate change means laying bare some painful secrets- that prosperity burned our coastline, that safety for a few heightens danger for the many. The more we can use words and models and tools to open those secrets, the sweeter will be the light in all our (water-tight) rooms. 

The Gift of Constraint

Earlier this spring I published an article on an experiment in Westchester, where a stalemated settlement over fair housing became the occasion for a day-long role play with a software that helped adults see what changing one variable in urban design would do for other variables. 

My sources for the article, academics and designers and public servants, all talked about the energy they drew from looking at limits rather than from asserting their wants. 

I can relate every day, as I commute to work along the eastern flank of the Manhattan Bridge. I have a lane, sometimes less in glorious sunshine like New York's seen this week, and a steep pitch. I grimace when I'm pedaling hard, but the shape of my head configures the grimace as something that suggests a smile to people coasting downhill in the other direction. So they smile back, and I smile back back. 

For me, riding to work brings on the alert eyes of a new adventure and the relaxed spine of a hometown stroll. It's a slice through a lot of systems I can't singly change, and a chance to focus on what I do want to change in the next day or two. 

And the context for this experiment consists in a condition most places in America: a lack of easy places to build. (I'd write more here, but I'd love for you to read the article. ) The lingering suggestion leaves me humble. It's that in an America without frontiers, we haves need to get as fluent with the uses of constraint as 20th Century planners were with the uses of want. 

And what I work on here aims to test the idea that most of us really want something that becomes clearer with constraint- a chance to play a game, a chance to share an ideal, a chance to redesign what's brittle around us. 

I hope the article and its heroes help clarify your own useful constraints.