Support Your Local Business

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Tonight marks my last meeting on the board of Somerville Local First.

After three and half years, I’m stepping back in order to focus on my studies as I begin a Ph.D. program this fall.

But the work goes on.

Somerville Local First builds a sustainable local economy and vibrant community. We work with business owners and entrepreneurs, providing technical assistance and networking opportunities. We educate community members on the value of shopping locally, and we bring the community together in celebration of our local charm.

(Pro Tip: Somerville Local First is hosting a Back to the Future, 50’s-themed prom on June 26._

There are lots of reasons while local is important.

Local businesses create more and better jobs. Locally sourced products tend to be more environmentally friendly. Locally owned businesses are better for the local economy – bolstering the tax base and benefiting from owners invested in the community.

But more even than that, local businesses are important because –

Local businesses are who we are.

Local businesses determine the character of a community.

Whether quirky or traditional, upscale or casual, it’s the local businesses that stand out when thinking about what makes a community unique.

Anyone can have an iHop, but only Somerville has the Neighborhood Restaurant.

A community with local businesses is one where people know each other. Where neighbors say hello and the guy behind the bar is an old friend. Indeed, they are communities where everybody knows your name.

In our increasingly anonymous, standardized world, you can’t undervalue the importance of that.

Nobody wants to be a cog in the machine or a brick in the wall, and local businesses help fight that tendency.

There’s something profoundly radical, something subversively democratizing, in the local movement.

In response to the trend of big box stores putting mom & pop shops out of business, the local movement seeks not only to counteract the negative environmental and economic impact, but more fundamentally, the local movement seeks to reclaim our communities as our communities.

There may be red states and blue state, liberal brands and conservative brands, but local businesses remind us – we are all just people.

People with different interests, experiences, and affiliations, of course, but people who share a community, and who can find – literally – common ground, even if they can’t seem to agree.

If we are ever to solve the great problems of our country, if we are ever to unite and find ways of working together and improving together, we will need local businesses to get us there.

So, yes, even as I step back from leadership with Somerville Local First, the work goes on.

The work always goes on.

Please consider supporting this work by making a donation or attending Prom.

The Value of “Just Talk”

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

As I was reeling yesterday from the seemingly unending stream of assaults on people of color in this country, I was struck by a concern which I’ve often heard echoed:

Yes, there is something wrong in this country, but the real question is what should we do about it?

In many ways, one more blog post decrying the national tragedy of police brutality and our unjust criminal justice system seems vain. It is almost certainly issued in vain, unlikely to affect any real change, and it would most certainly be vain of me to think it might have an impact.

But I keep writing.

I don’t know what else to do.

To be clear, I don’t think my commitment to social justice is fulfilled by a few strong words and inciting posts. But I also don’t think writing is completely superfluous.

It does have value.

And I don’t mean my writing – I mean everyone’s writing, or more specifically, everyone’s self-expression on this topic. In whatever media fits them best.

That has value.

We’ve grown so accustomed to relying on professionals and experts, we’ve become so focused on the institutions and the systems, that we’ve nearly lost track of the individual. We’ve forgotten about our own agency.

Our systems and institutions are broken, and we must surely find ways to tackle those challenges, but even with a terrible police response, we ought to remember –

The police aggression at a Texas pool party was started by a white woman yelling racial slurs.

Our problems aren’t about a racist cop, and they’re not about a racist police department. They are problems endemic within our society.

We each play a role in perpetuating, experiencing, or interacting with racism, and the solution must come from all of us.

We shouldn’t let the cop off the hook, and we shouldn’t let the police officer off the hook, but we should also look at ourselves and look at our communities.

We should ask how we can do better, individually and collectively.

We should share our stories, we should share our views, we should learn from each other and we should work together.

We should talk together as much as we should decide how to act together.

Indeed, the question may be “what should we do?” but to find real solutions, we must ask that question together.

The World Goes On

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

This morning I woke up to news from McKinney, Texas, where over the weekend a police officer broke up a pool party, throwing a 14-year-old girl to the ground and pointing his gun at nearby teens.

There was news out of New Jersey, where state troopers shot tear gas into a crowd outside a concert, arresting 61 people and turning ticket-bearing customers away.

From my home town of Oakland, CA, there was news that police shot and killed a man who was sleeping in a car with a handgun on the seat next to him.

And then there’s news of Kalief Browder, a young man arrested at 16 for stealing a backpack. The charges were eventually dismissed, but not before he spent three years in prison without a trial.

At the age of 22, Kalief committed suicide this weekend.

This is the world we live in.

I listened to these stories on the news this morning, interspersed with tidbits on race horses and football players. I listened to these stories of death and destruction, stories of our own criminal justice system turning against us.

And for a moment I wondered how I was supposed to get up and go to work today as if nothing had happened.

Now we all experience moments of tragedy. Through personal tragedies and national tragedies we persevere.

And there can be great power and strength in that. In soldiering on despite the torrent of tragedy, in pushing through a world which has ceased to make sense.

For many of us, that’s part of the healing process. When nothing will ever be okay again, step one is desperately pretending that everything is okay.

But this morning felt different.

These were black men and women being attacked, these were black bodies who were suffering.

The message wasn’t that we were facing a deep national tragedy, that we somehow had to get through it together and soldier on despite the gnawing despair within each one of us.

The message was that it was someone else’s problem, that it was other communities being affected. Their world might be crumbling down, but my world went on.

I was supposed to get up and go to work because my world hadn’t changed.

The police aren’t coming for me.

My world goes on.

But my world has changed. It changes every time an innocent person is shot in our streets and every time our criminal system is about less than justice.

My world has changed.

These are our neighbors, our streets, our laws. This is fundamentally about our society, and everyone’s right to exist equally within it.

And until we each realize that, until we see it as our collective world shattering, until we accept that it is our responsibility to make our society better, until then –

The world will just go on.

As if nothing has changed.

Voting Rights

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

In any democracy, the question of who gets to vote has important implications for a group’s power and voice within a society.

Voting has taken place within modern America since at least 1607 when the English established their first permanent settlement at Jamestown. At that time, six men from among the colony’s 105 settlers participated in electing Edward Wingfield as president.

While a 5.7% voting rate among colonists may sound like a dismal start to what would become our nation, those six men represented 100% of eligible voters.

In the United States’ first presidential election, held in 1788–89, there were 43,782 popular votes cast from a population of 3 million. Incidentally, “only 6 of the 10 states casting electoral votes chose electors by any form of popular vote.”

At that time, of course, the constitution didn’t provide any guidelines on who could vote. By convention, only white male property owners over the age of 21 had the right to vote. That was the popular understanding of “the people” at the time.

Since then, our definition has expanded.

In 1870, the 15th amendment gave black men the right to vote, and in 1920, the 19th amendment allowed women to vote as well. Then, in 1971, amongst the protests of the Vietnam War, the 26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18.

So throughout our history, our understanding of who are “the people” and who should be allowed to vote has shifted.

And each expansion of voting rights has been met by skepticism by those in power.

In Some of the Reasons Against Woman Suffrage, Francis Parkman argued “Whatever liberty the best civilization may accord to women, they must always be subject to restrictions unknown to the other sex, and they can never dispense with the protecting influences which society throws about them.”

You can perhaps imagine some of Parkman’s supporting points: “everybody knows that the physical and mental constitution of woman is more delicate than in the other sex.”

In his five page pamphlet, Parkman argues over and over again that women are not fit to vote, that most do not want the vote, that giving them the vote would destroy the moral fabric of our society, that the right to vote is a “supreme device for developing the defects of women” which “demolish[s] their real power to build an ugly mockery instead.”

This history is particularly compelling, because as the definition of “the people” continues to expand, we continue to see similar arguments.

People under 18 shouldn’t vote because they aren’t capable of being informed voters. They shouldn’t have the right to vote because most young people don’t care about voting. They shouldn’t have the right to vote because it is our job to protect them and nurture them – giving them the right to vote would be like letting them vote on whether to have cake for dinner.

But such arguments have proven to be flawed.

Those are the rationalizations of a society that has gotten used to putting a segment of the population in it’s “proper” place. Changing that place may disrupt social norms, but history has shown that change to always be for the better.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World (?)

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

There’s a famous adage – or maybe it’s just a Tears for Fears song – that everybody wants to rule the world.

That sounds like a reasonable declaration for a particularly desperate day – when it seems like everybody is just out for themselves, willing to push people over to get to the top.

But there’s another way to interpret this phrase.

Someone once told me a possibly apocryphal story about Ray Bradbury. The author was 18 when the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast originally aired. I am told that after hearing the reports of alien invasion, young Bradbury and his brother packed sandwiches and sat out on a nearby hill.

Because the world was ending.

And it wasn’t just that the world was ending, it was that his world was ending. I’ve never found any documentation of this story, but I’ve always remembered it, and remembered Bradbury’s argument that his own death meant the end of the world.

It wasn’t a self-centered argument, but rather a commentary on the nature of reality and autonomy.

Each person has a unique perspective – not only does each person bring their own unique experience, each person experiences life uniquely. Perhaps the color I see is not the color you see.

We have developed effective mechanisms for translating across these experiences – so you and I may agree the sky is “blue” even if we experience that blueness differently.

But fundamentally, our experiences are different. Our experiences are unique. My world is not synonymous with your world.

Given that approach, wanting to rule the world is no longer about domination of everyone’s world. It’s about domination of one’s own world.

Everybody wants to rule their world.

Everyone wants freedom and autonomy. And everyone wants the right to have a say over their own existence and experience.

Of course, sometimes our needs and desires – our worlds, if you will – come into conflict, and we require collaborative tools such as politics to mediate such conflict.

But fundamentally, I suppose, it’s true – everybody wants to rule the world. And everybody has a right to.

Where the Streets are Reclaimed

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

There was some news coming out of my hometown this weekend. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf instituted a ban on nighttime protests in response to Sunday’s #SayHerName protest.

Mayor Schaaf argued that “there have been no changes to any city policy or enactment of any new ordinances in any way to prohibit peaceful protests,” however, it seems clear that this is a novel interpretation or implementation of city laws.

After night fall, Oakland Police Officers will “block demonstrators from marching in the streets.”

This, despite the fact that “Oakland crowd control policy specifically states that OPD will facilitate marches in the street regardless of whether a permit has be obtained as long as it’s feasible to do so.”

Of course, since its implementation, there have been protests every night as citizens peacefully test the limits of the new regulations.

Now, too be fair, Mayor Schaaf is in a difficult position. She was harshly criticized at the beginning of the month for the vandalism which occurred at Oakland’s May day protest.

And I don’t imagine Oakland to be a city where keeping demonstrations peaceful is easy. Oakland has long been known for its riots – for social justice and Raider’s games alike.

Some of that reputation is overblown racism from the wealthier side of the bay – but as an Oaklander myself, I have to admit, even riots make me a little proud.

So, reasonable or not, the city government sees two possible actions: minimally impinge on protestors rights, risking significant property damage, OR minimally impinge on property-owners rights, ensuring the safety of homes and businesses but restricting the freedom of protesters.

From that point of view, I’d expect most city officials to go with the property-owners. The first responsibility of any government is to ensure the safety of its citizens and their belongings. Justice will almost always take a back seat to that.

I see similar logic coming out of Baltimore and other cities – when a portion of the population turns to looting and vandalism, best impose a curfew. Keep the law abiding citizens out of the way, and clean up the trouble makers. That’s the best solution for the folks who don’t want any trouble.

In someways, that approach is not dissimilar to the shutdown of Boston which occurred following the 2013 marathon bombing. Police were searching for a suspect, a lot was uncertain, and they asked the rest of us to stay out of the way while they got their work done. Seems reasonable.

There’s just one thing: perusing a man who set bombs off across the city – even hurling explosives at police as they fled – is not the same thing as protecting a city from itself.

These are Oaklanders out on the street protesting. These are Baltimoreans and New Yorkers, and folks from Ferguson.

Whose streets? They chant. Our streets.

These are our streets.

I’m not convinced the problem is really a zero-sum game as it’s been laid to to be. Does it really come down to a choice of restricting freedom for protestors or restricting rights of property owners? Are those really the only choices we have?

That implies that government’s role is primarily to protect the rights of the majority. That whenever conflict arises, it is the minority who must suffer. It’s James Madison’s fear of factions all over again.

Our government was designed to prevent this.

But perhaps it could do a better job. Perhaps too often the rights of the minority are subjugated to the rights of the majority.

Indeed, they are – that’s why we protest.

Double Standards in Coverage and Response?

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

My newsfeed is full of stories questioning the role of race in covering the recent incident in Waco, Texas, where a shootout between rival biker gangs left nine people dead, seven hospitalized, and many more wounded.

Some of these memes have been straight up erroneous, arguing that our country’s racial double standard is clearly demonstrated by the fact that nobody was arrested following this shootout. That’s a tough sell, though, since 170 people were arrested and are each being held on $1 million bond.

Other articles question the language used to describe these white perpetrators – people in Baltimore were described as “thugs” why not these gang members?

That’s a really interesting question and I’d love to see more data on the words used to cover different incidents. For me, the absence of the word “thugs” is not enough to see a clear distinction in media coverage.

After all, the mayor of Baltimore apologized for using that word, and frankly, I’m not sure “gang member” is much better – to me it sounds like a thug with a better network.

(Although I do have to question NBC’s decision to use the word “rumble” – what is this, West Side Story?)

All of this is not to say that there aren’t terrible racial inequities in this country. If the news coverage has been biased, than we should think carefully about how all crimes should be covered.

But while news coverage is important, I’m far more interested in a different question – how do institutions treat people differently?

The shootout happened at an event for which a “coalition of motorcycle groups had reserved the outdoor bar area.”

Just right there that sounds different.

These are groups known for illicit activity and violently defending their territory. Yet their freedom to assemble remains impinged.

Frankly, I think that’s good. While it may come with some risk, there’s a reason that right is guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

However, it’s a right that can be easily taken a way by mandatory curfews for an entire city.

Police arrived on the scene in Waco “within 30 to 45 seconds” of the first gunshots. They opened fire on the warring gang members only after “some bikers turned their weapons on law enforcement.”

From what I can tell, police responded swiftly, strongly, and appropriately – none of which were true in Baltimore. In that city, police set up a situation almost destined to turn into a riot, and then didn’t have enough force to shut down what they created.

Baltimore was a hot mess from top to bottom.

It’s hard to tell empirically just what led to the different responses. Baltimore is a city know for its corruption and mismanagement. Texas is…a place where its not surprising that they have no qualms about hosting a gathering of armed criminals.

It’s almost impossible to believe that race wasn’t a factor in this differing response, but I also wonder – are there lessons we can learn more broadly from Texas about institutional support and police response?

That is to say, we shouldn’t just be asking whether media has a double standard. We should be asking that of ourselves and of all our institutions.

Death for Tsarnaev

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Today, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013.

I honestly didn’t see this coming.

The death penalty is unconstitutional and highly unpopular in Massachusetts. Victims and their family members have spoken out, asking that Tsarnaev be given life instead. And one juror’s vote against the death penalty is all it would have taken for the sentence to have come back as life in prison.

But Tsarnaev has been sentenced to death.

In the end it is perhaps a greater mercy.

Despite the dreary specter raised by “death” – I imagine a ghastly figure quietly welcomed to suck away Tsarnaev’s cold soul as the the solemn sentence is proclaimed – our system provides numerous protections to safeguard those facing this most monstrous fate.

Safeguards which those only suffering life in a dank, dreary hole don’t enjoy.

Tsarnaev’s case will automatically be appealed.

Lifers get no such privilege.

So perhaps death is a greater mercy.

Had I been a juror in the case, I can’t say what I would have done. Life or death? Death or life?

When you can’t tell which is the greater punishment it is hard to choose.

And this is not all about Tsarnaev. Imagine any trial, any defendant, any case where the crime is great enough to come down to the question: life or death?

Death or life?

When you can’t tell which is the greater punishment, there is something substantially wrong.

How can we choose, for Tsarnaev, for anyone – how can we possibly choose? Life or death. Death or life.

We cannot. Not in good conscious. We cannot know what sentence is right or just when we cannot even tell which sentence is harsh and which sentence is mercy.

We must step back, we must reevaluate the whole system. We must fix this institution which takes the lives and deaths of so many of our fellow citizens.

We can discuss what we hope to accomplish – what outcomes we hope for from punishment or from rehabilitation. We can discuss what is good and what is right, and we can seek to find the best justice we can.

But regardless of your philosophy on the way our criminal justice system ought to work, it seems clear to me that it doesn’t work –

Not when you can’t tell the difference between life and death.

Decision Making

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

Any functional society must have some process for decision making.

That’s not to say it needs to be a hierarchical process – there’s some interesting work on self-organizing networks, for example – but at the end of the day, if something’s going to get done, someone (or someones) needs to decide to do it.

I mention this because it seems this tension is at the heart of democratic work. Creating spaces where all individuals can interact as equals does not easily translate into spaces where things can get done.

The United States, for example, is a representative democracy – average citizens have opportunities to elect their representative, but don’t get to weigh in on every single decision.

And that’s arguably for the best. Even if you assume the general populace is capable of making good governance decisions – a rather deputed claim – the time and effort that would go into reaching general consensus would likely not be worth the cost.

Given the current dysfunction of congress, one might even be inclined to shrink the number of people with decision making power. If 535 people can’t agree on anything, perhaps 5 could.

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein argues that more than three people can’t make a decision. With the support of a conscious super computer, the book’s three protagonists use that logic to (spoiler alert) covertly reshape the future of their moon, using deception, misdirection, and any other tactics they deem necessary.

It’s an intentionally ironic bent to this libertarian novel – that the heroes who will do anything to be free, who care for an individual’s autonomy above all else, actively replace one managed democracy with another of their own design.

A managed democracy is indeed, as Heinlein says, a wonderful thing… for the managers.

But where does this leave us?

Nowhere good, I’m afraid.

Personally, I’m not prepared to cede my freedom to a group of three who’ve taken it upon themselves to envision the perfect world for me.

For practicality’s sake, I’d gladly cede decision making power on the day to day stuff – but perhaps that’s just what I’ve grown accustomed to.

Perhaps more generally, though, I’m not ready to cede the point that more than three people can’t agree on anything.

Dialogue is hard. Deliberation is hard. But I hardly think the result is unobtainable.

I guess the trick is to not only identify different types of decision making structures, but to determine which structures are appropriate for which situations.

I am comfortable in a hierarchical structure where some decisions out of my hands. Personally, I find such structures both useful and valuable.

But we can’t just cede all our power to such structures, comfortable that all will works itself out in the end. If we do, the agency of the individual would almost certainly degrade, and that would be a tragedy indeed.

Partisanship

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Sarah Shugars

In the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to attend talks by many current and former U.S. Congressmen and Senators.

One topic that comes up time and time again is partisanship. Now that congress has apparently devolved into a shouting match, a snowball fight, or straight up yelling “you lie” during a State of the Union – how do we fix that? How do we go back to a better time when congressman disagreed about issues but still treated each other with respect?

Well first, let’s not sugar coat the past and pretend that our country has never seen a duel between a sitting Vice President and a former Secretary of the Treasury.

But, regardless of the past, I think it’s fair to say that we do have a problem in the present. Congress is more dysfunctional than most family gatherings and it certainly gets less done.

So what do we do about it?

Well, that’s where everyone seems to agree. If we could snap our fingers and reset the rules, here’s what congressmen from both parties have offered as keys to bringing civility back to congress: campaign finance reform and independently drawn districts.

Supreme Court decisions, most popularly Citizens United, helped open the flood gates to essentially unlimited, untracked spending in campaigns. There’s a great moment in West Wing when a character describes the effect of the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme court decision:

You don’t put “vote Bartlet” in the ad, you can pay for it with unmarked bills from a bank
heist if you want to.

So we should probably do something about that.

The second tactic is about ensuring there are competitive districts. As Nate Silver describes, “In 1992, there were 103 members of the House of Representatives elected from what might be called swing districts: those in which the margin in the presidential race was within five percentage points of the national result.”

But in 2012, there were only 35 such districts remaining.

In other words, “Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party.”

Representatives from these one-party districts then become polarized as they move away from the center to fight off primary challengers.

Especially since the hardliners of given party are more likely to vote during a primary, one-party districts continually elect representatives who appeal to the extreme of the given party.

The solution, I’m told, is to have independently drawn districts. Reducing gerrymandering and increasing the competitiveness of those districts.

This all sounds very good and rational, but as some point while hearing a congressman describe this need it occurred to me –

I am a party hardliner.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish Congress could get more done. I wish there was less bickering and more action. But let’s be honest: I want to win.

I want the other guys to stop being stupid, and I want my guys to win. I like that my representatives are radical. I like when they use fiery rhetoric and put the other guys in their place. That’s what I love about my representatives.

Of course, I’m fortunate enough to be represented by the likes of Mike Capuano and Elizabeth Warren. But clearly, I’m not the only person who feels this way.

A 2013 study found that only 16% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, but 46% approved of their own congress person.

Perhaps that’s just the 46% of party radicals who vote in the primary, but still I question whether a move towards the middle is really the solution we should all hope for.

After all, even that old lion of the liberals, Edward Kennedy, was known for being to work across the isle.

Perhaps we need more moderates, but I certainly don’t want all moderates. Perhaps not even a majority of moderates.

The problem of partisanship, I think, is deeper than that. We see it play out in congress, but the challenge is really to ourselves –

Can we, as opinionated party faithful work across difference to understand perspectives and have civil conversations? Can we accept rational facts as well as emotional rationalizations?

Can we move past that urge to win and find it within ourselves to accept that we all want to make this country better, we all want to make this world better? Can we recognize that we’re going to have to work together to make that happen? That we’re going to have to work together to get anything done?

I don’t know, I’d like to do that.

But let’s be honest – I still want to win.

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