The baseline of our public sector longings.
As we prepare to play defense at an even bigger scale, what's the baseline of our longings?
I recently went to Norway for the first time ever and I saw something that stopped me up short.
It wasn’t this Nobel Prize flag with a …. rat? (a rat?) on it. Okay, this clearly slowed my roll enough to snap a picture and wonder at it.
What stopped me up short, mouth agape, was this sign:
The text next to the taxi icon translates in English to: "If you are more than 20 minutes late because we are not on schedule, we will cover taxi up to NOK 750 ($75 USD). Keep the receipt, go to reuter.no and fill in the refund form."
CAN. YOU. IMAGINE?! I, dear reader, could not.
During the COVID inside-times I spent a long winter self-soothing after kid bedtime by sitting next to the window reading essays about glaciers melting, longing to sit next to them, to mourn the sacred cold as it leaves us. The early pandemic in fire season in California was HOT. I longed for cold and for the ability to trust that a stranger was more likely than not going to follow the recommended COVID precautions.
"These f*ckers are going to kill me," I realized a couple months into the pandemic, before the vaccine was available. I was an immunocompromised person whose kids were struggling with the isolation my risk required.
I wasn't willing to die unnecessarily because some people took personal offense to a strip of fabric over their mouth or mine. I wasn't willing to die because of lies, and I wasn't willing to raise my kids in isolation outside of schooling and socialization and the deep harm that isolation causes. So I started to wonder about the possibility of life in other places in a way I hadn't ever before.
My longing to feel a different way of relating got bigger.
My longing became a puzzle: Where could we go that's queer and trans friendly, good for kids, cold, and where the government and the populous give a fuck if other people around them live? I let myself wonder what it might be like to live in a community where people generally followed established norms of respect. Where most people either earned enough to live a decent life or the state supported those who couldn't. What might it feel like to live in a place with significantly less guns stashed under pillows and front car seats and roaming through the hallways of schools? What would it be like to feel less vigilance when moving through the world? We considered moving, then the vaccines came and it was too hard to think of hurling ourselves into someplace where we knew no one. And so, we didn't. But the longing to feel what it feels like to be in a place where people are cared for better - to FEEL it - remained.
And so my wife and I planned. We saved money and vacation days and strategic-credit-carded for years to make it possible. And then there we were, in Norway.
And what I thought was true was generally true. The number of people visibly suffering was nothing compared to what I see everyday in a city in the US. 100% of cars slowed down and stopped when we stood with our children at a crosswalk. We saw very few people begging for money and living unsheltered, though I know the numbers, I know they're not zero. But it's nothing close to the scale of abandonment we have in the US.
What's the baseline of our longings?
We are 39 days from the inauguration of 45/47 and the worries are BIG. They should be. Many of the bad things of our country and our world will likely get worse before we can shape something (hopefully better) from the rubble. We live in a nation that normalizes collective abandonment and punishment in 1000 different ways.
And I did not come here to fluff up our stress about that. Those are just the facts, whether your vigilance is big about it right now and you're organizing at a fever pitch, or you're buried under a blanket scrolling through your acquaintances' Spotify Wrapped and your pointy finger tripped you into this Substack post.
What I came here to talk about is this: before the ladder descends us into the next layer of burning hot reality, before whatever 45/47 orders up with the oligarchs and authoritarians and sycophants that please him that month, is what's your Oslo-bus-sign moment? How might things work if systems oriented to the care and wellbeing of the people who were part of them?
Until this Oslo Bus moment, I HAD NEVER IMAGINED A WORLD WHERE THE PUBLIC TRANSIT SYSTEM WOULD be left holding the bill, not the parent late to pick up their kid, if the system failed to do its job.
We are about to play defense at a scale and fever pitch we haven't before to protect what's available, what's working, what's currently protected in our imperfect nation. And as we prepare to do that in all the ways we must I am taking a moment to pause and will myself to dream bigger about the baseline of the world I want to live in and how we might get there.
What's your Oslo-bus-sign moment? How might things work if systems oriented to the care and wellbeing of the people who were part of them?
This is mostly a prompt to myself and I invite you in to 15 minutes of dreaming, if you have it in you. What can we long for while we defend what we have now that ought to be defended?
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Oh man... this is just the tip of the iceberg here in the land(s) of the commons. So much to talk about.