Two roads diverged in a wood…
Election Day is finally here and I am tired and anxious to put what has been an exhausting and acrimonious campaign behind us. But what’s next? Will we be able to talk to each other and constructively move forward together or have we so poisoned our commons that our divisions will continue to grow? Jokingly I introduced the idea of running for president on a ‘Front Porch’ party platform, but after looking at today’s polls, it is clear to me that those two people who support my candidacy are not sufficient to make me competitive. I officially suspend my campaign, but I still think elements of my platform are worth considering as we chose between the two remaining candidates.
The title to this post comes from the famous Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. These words have been an important piece of our ‘front porch” puzzle. We are at a fork in the road as a country. This election, to a large degree, will determine whether we seek out best possible future on a well travelled path illuminated by historical capitalistic conservative values and a less travelled path illuminated by progressive social interests and values. I am not denying the many others issues separating us that are both personal and policy related, but this conservative-liberal distinction underlies them all. This polarized view of reality is rooted in a busyness perspective. From the front porch, we should see that there are many other paths forward that have never been travelled at all.
Front porch dialogue is about providing a new stage for meeting that invites pioneering efforts to explore uncharted paths that resolve our polarized views. These paths naturally become visible if we can take off our intellectual masks and come together in the presence of the deeper reality that we face in common. This deeper reality is eventually undeniable no matter what your busyness perspective, and the vote you have or will cast in support of it, might be. The platform on which I was running was a front porch. I claim no special insight and my platform offered no specific plans that would cure our ills. Now that I am no longer a candidate, I feel free to offer more insight into my perspective by offering observations and questions that might help us lead our way into the uncharted territory ahead of us and free us from following preexisting political party maps. Here is what I see —
• There is a technology tsunami coming in the form of artificial intelligence that will fundamentally change the nature of the work we do, how companies make profit and and how companies look at employment of people.
• Population will continue to increase creating more demand for jobs as those jobs might be less available because of emerging technology. How wil we occupy our time?
• The more crowded we get and the more interconnected we become, personal freedoms will have to be compromised and social consideration given more weight. Freedom has always been constrained by liberty that respected our influence on others. You are ultimately not free to yell fire in the absence of fire, smoke in a room where others do not want to breath the smoke, or refuse to where masks when a failure to do so puts others at risk. We can debate these issues now, but it will be a losing battle as time goes on. If you look at a map showing so-called red and blue states, this crowding reality and its influence on political perspective is evident. High density states and unban areas tend to be blue and low density, more rural areas tend to be red. The questions is not about our freedom, but more about our liberty. We have to live together and we need to talk about what this means.
• Wealth accumulation in the hands of the few who own the technology will accelerate and lead to social unrest. Inherent dissonance between unencumbered capitalistic market ideas and personal freedoms associated with democratic ideas will be unavoidable as there will be more ‘have nots’ that ‘haves’ and numbers count when we vote. The half’s will be wise to take the initiative in negotiating a wealth redistribution contract and not resist it to avoid more dramatic movements towards socialistic government. This probably means a willingness to accept higher taxation to support a more robust social safely network in the face of an assumption that people should only get what they work for. An increase in taxation might be the price the ‘haves’ will need to pay to retain their access to jobs and work – essentially bribing people to stay out of the workforce so the ‘haves’ can keep their jobs.
• There is a debt tsunami in our future. If interest rates ever rise, and they will, we will not be able to afford our debt. We need to break free of this idea that we can spend our future to maximize our present and replace it with a belief that we need to invest in that future. This shift in perspective is unlikely given the current attitudes about term limits in Washington and the influence of quarterly results on Wall Street. If things continue unchanged, we will never invest in anything that has present cost and future benefits. Such things as repairing or replacing existing infrastructure, reinventing our healthcare system, reimagining an economy in the face of artificial Intelligence, fundamentally reinventing how we educate our youth and assuring environmental protection will not be addressed.
• The evidence that our climate is changing in problematic ways as the result of human influence seems undeniable to me. But no matter where you might stand on this issue, can we afford to be wrong in how we place our bet here? Are we disciplined enough to accept short term personal economic sacrifice in terms of increased taxes and environmental sourced business regulations that decrease current profits to hedge that bet?
• It seems to me that no matter how fast the impact of Artificial Intelligence will be felt, future generations will have to change how they occupy their time in light of the changing nature of work and career. What will those changes be and how do we prepare to deal with them?
• We will have to soon face the reality that we are a society first and an economy second. The economy must support what we want to be. Today it feels like we have reversed ends and means, placing economic metrics ahead of social justice, security, the preservation of our planet, moral values, our relationships and the pursuit of happiness. If society breaks down, there will be no economy. How do we create an economy that can survive in the emerging enviroment and still meets our individual needs?
• We have lost front porches where we can take the time to find presence with our humanity and reimagine what we want to see in the mirror every morning as we get ready to face our busy days. Do we have the courage to sacrifice and discipline our lives in ways that revalue service, our perspectives on consumption and the importance of the health of our commons (our country). Trust is essential here and I am not sure how we recover it.
• Our education system is a disaster in many forms and needs to be dramatically reimagined. In light of the above concerns or issues, what will an educated person need to do, be and know to live a meaningful and productive life in the emerging world? I think the idea of a focus on practical skills and capacities might be desirable and necessary, but it is not nearly sufficient. A more liberal education (not a political perspective here) that includes the arts and humanities that focus on deeper thinking and communications might be more important now. In this light, STEM education might need to be better balanced – perhaps add the arts to make it a STEAM education. I think the pandemic shutdown has given us a glimpse of a coming world where we will have more time to be with ourselves. Perhaps the focus of education should be rebalanced to include a first person ‘front person’ dimension as a counter balance to the traditional third person perspective. It might be productive to consider a shift in attention from information acquisition to inquiry and dialogue skills necessary to prepare for more time on the front porch.
These were some of the planks in my platform, but I guess they left me with little to stand on. The political debate I have been observing has been more about sound bytes and insults that perhaps, by design, keep us focused on the here and now and not on a possible future. Candidates follow polls by necessity that keep us in simple choices concerning visible paths forward. Our questions now is who are we and who do we want to be? Hopefully we will move forward together in peace after the election is decided tomorrow. It is up to each of us —
