1. The price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in the U.S. will hit $6 a gallon sometime this Summer, and perhaps $10/gallon or more by the end of the year. Measures will be taken by the federal and state governments to temporarily alleviate the financial burden on some people, but nothing sustainable. Some people will not be able to get to work at all, while others will have to carpool more, take the bus, ride their bikes, and walk.
2. The U.S. will initiate military action against Iran, probably in the form of heavy air-strikes. There will be no clear notion of victory or desired outcome other than to significantly destroy the country’s own infrastructure, especially targets related to nuclear facilities. This action might be justified to the American people by…
3. An apparent attack on one or more U.S. locations, resulting in significant loss of life or infrastructure.
4. The U.S. airline industry will significantly cut back or even cease flight schedules as we’ve known them, and air travel will (once again) become a privilege reserved for the rich and famous who can afford private flights. Any frequent flier miles you’ve accumulated will become worth near nothing.
5. Most grocery stores will significantly scale back their inventories and restocking schedules, and significantly raise prices on what remains. Obtaining food from non-local sources, even basic staples, will be difficult at best, and most communities will begin to take emergency steps to feed their residents.

Hey, look, I don’t like the thought of these things happening any more than the next person, but perhaps there’s some value in naming what might be, even if it seems a bit outlandish or gruesome. Maybe if we believe these things are possible, we might feel more prepared to prevent or deal with them if they do happen.

What do you think? Too cynical? Worse? What are some other scenarios?

This is not an isolated incident. This is not a bump in the road on the way to a better Richmond. These things must not go unconsidered in the context of larger trends. This is about more than coffee shops, and an adequate response requires more than our sympathy and wistfulness.

I’m grateful for the fact that, on the whole, I really enjoy the things that I do for my “work life,” and in many cases, would choose to do them even if I weren’t being compensated. Sure, they might take a slightly different form than they do in my role at Summersault (and in Summersault’s role as a for-profit company acting within and benefitting from the global economy), but I generally get to apply the skills and expertise that I posses to challenges, projects and organizations that I think are having some sort of positive impact on the world I live in. More importantly, I feel privileged to know that my “work life” and “personal life” are intertwined in ways that don’t usually feel uncomfortable, and are often very complementary. The relationships I have with the people I work with, the missions of the organizations I’m involved with, the projects I take on, the values I try to live out, the larger goals I have for my life…all of these things are improved or furthered by the larger notion of “How I Spend My Time,” and with every passing year, I see fewer distinctions between what I consider “work” and what I consider “personal”.

I suppose this is a manifestation of an ideal that I have for the world at large – that we can work toward a version of humanity that does not require people to spend time doing things they would not otherwise choose to do, just so they can have access to groceries, housing and other basics (and often at the expense of other great experiences like strong community, strong families, playfulness, seeing the world around them, laughing out loud on a regular basis, etc). I hope we can instead follow a vocation, which as Frederick Buechner beautifully put it, is “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I think that when we have to save up all of those things we’d like to do, and the possibility for living out our deep gladness, for a planned vacation, we may not be living our lives to the fullest, responding to our true calling in the world.

There are plenty of cautionary statements to go along with this ideal. For example, I’m a privileged middle-class white male who can say these things on my quaint little blog that’s hosted for free at a company I started with resources acquired and derived from the struggles of many others before me, while plenty of others fight for basic survival – food, water, shelter – every day. For there to be any chance of an equity amongst humans where balance and interdependent communities of people living out their true vocation can thrive, we must first find peace with justice, a culture that doesn’t thrive on destruction, and an economy that doesn’t depend on exploitation and oppression.

But no matter the hurdles to getting there, I think there’s a version of humanity that does not require us to carve out a work life for ourselves that is separate from our personal life, that doesn’t necessitate as many vacations from our vocations. In fact, humans lived this way for quite some time before our modern culture came along and said we needed to make enough money so we can buy an iPhone or two. In that time, we knew what it was like to live, work, and play all in the same context of a community of people who were literally making a living together, no daily commute necessary. If they heard stories of what we call “making a living” these days, even in the cases where we start our own companies that provide exceptional opportunities for a harmonious life, they’d still probably say, “Ha – suckers!”

What kinds of vacations do you take? What’s your vocation? Where do they meet?

“Advocates [of the fee] say it’s crucial for a city that’s expected to add another million people in the next 20 years.”

The reactions include frustration at the economic implications, outrage at the imposition on personal liberties, concerns about the logistical implementation details, and an overall sense of “well, somebody better do something or we’re going to grind to a halt.”

But no one seems to question the idea that adding a million people to the city is what must and will happen, and everything else must work to accommodate that.

All over the country and indeed the world, when we talk about growth and development and success, very few decision-makers seem to question the premise that the continued growth of our population is the desired trend that we want to accommodate. All of our cultural processes that work to meet our future needs assume that we will need more housing, more buildings, more streets, more neighborhoods, more jails, more healthcare facilities, more agribusiness, more imports, more oil, more cars, more energy, more EVERYTHING. After all, how can more humans be a bad thing?

For any given geographical area, if you take the problems that it faces with its current population numbers (poverty, crime, famine, unemployment, inequality, traffic congestion), and then add more people, it’s fairly proven that those problems will only get worse. And sometimes, it’s not a matter of a linear worsening – the effects of population growth are often exponential.

But few people say, “what if we didn’t keep adding millions of people to our global population every year? What if we came to understand that unchecked population growth is at the core of so much of our economic and social strife these days, and decided to do something about it? What if we made it so that NYC got less congested because there were less people there?”

Our solution isn’t to ease off on the baby making or city building or to otherwise explore alternative models of a sustainable future – we just charge you a few extra bucks as you head down the road. Who cares if it costs $8 more to be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth, and subdue it?

But the bottom line for me is that that our system of education in the US is almost entirely broken, ill-conceived in the first place, and that calls to make incremental improvements to a broken system feel largely like a waste of time.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be improved or fixed, it will be with new minds, not new programs put in place by old minds.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite.

It seems like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect – that the system would be trying to put kids ON the job market. But imagine what would happen today if educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed. There would suddenly be tens of millions of kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The unemployment rate would go through the roof.

It would be catastrophic. It’s not only essential to keep fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers. This age group pulls an enormous amount of money – hundreds of billions of dollars per year — out of their parents` pockets to be spent on books, clothes, games, novelties, music, and similar things that are designed specifically for them and no one else. Many enormous industries depend on teenage consumers. If these teenagers were suddenly expected to be wage earners and no longer at liberty to pull billions of dollars from their parents` pockets, these youth-oriented industries would vanish overnight, pitching more millions out onto the job market.

We all know that most of the modern education system forces students to spend many years of their lives learning things they instantly forget once they’ve passed the tests. People don’t remember things they have no use for. So why do we force our kids to go through this exercise? Because we have to give them something to do during the years they’re being kept off the job market. And it has to look good, like it really matters.

What do people think about the failure of schools? They think the schools are incompetent and underfunded, and that kids are lazy. What stories do we tell ourselves about what the schools would do if they had more money? They could get better teachers and pay teachers more, and more money would inspire teachers to do a better job. The lazy kids? More money would be spent buying new gadgets and better books and prettier wallpaper, and the kids wouldn’t be as lazy as before. And so these new and improved schools would turn out new and improved graduates.

But what happens when these new and improved graduates arrive in the workforce and start competing for jobs that the rest of us are trying to hold onto? The answer shows us why schools do such a poor job of preparing graduates for the workplace (or graduating students at all): they’re doing what we actually want them to do.

People imagine that we want to see our children enter the workplace with really useful business skills, but if they actually did so, they’d immediately begin competing for jobs with their older siblings and their parents, which would be catastrophic. And if graduates came out of school with advanced skills, who would bag the groceries? Who would do the sweeping up? Who would do the filing?

Instead, we produce workers who have no choice but to enter our economic system, presorted into various grades. High-school graduates are generally destined for blue-collar jobs. They may be intelligent and talented as college graduates, but they haven’t demonstrated this by surviving a further four years of studies (that are generally no more useful in life than the previous twelve years). Nonetheless, a college degree wins admittance to white-collar jobs that are generally off-limits to high school graduates.

What blue-collar and white-collar workers actually retain of their schooling doesn’t much matter, in either their working lives or their private lives. Very, very few of them will every be called upon to divide one fractional number by another, parse a sentence, dissect a frog, critique a poem, prove a theorem, discuss the economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, define the difference between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets, describe how a bill passes Congress, or explain why the oceans bulge on opposite sides of the world under the influence of tidal forces. Thus, if they graduate without being to do these things, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. Postgraduate work is obviously different. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, scholars and so on actually have to use in real life what they learn in graduate school, so for this small percentage of the population schooling actually does something besides keep them off the job market.

The deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people, not the needs of our children. They exist to serve the needs of our economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits our economic needs perfect. What we’re seeing at work in our schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency.

In grades K through three, most children master the skills that citizens need in order to get along in our culture – reading writing and arithmetic. These are skills that, even at age seven and eight, children actually use and enjoy using. Millions of years of natural selection have produced human creatures who are born with a ravenous desire to learn anything and everything their parents know and who are capable of feats of learning whose boundaries are literally beyond imagination. Toddlers growing up in a household in which four languages are spoken will learn those four languages flawlessly and effortless in a matter of months. Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. To make them learn things they don’t have a use for, you have to send them to school. That’s why we need schools – to force kids to learn things they have no use for, which in fact they do not learn.

Our schools have been failing for many decades. What do you call a system that’s built on the presumption that people in this system will be better than people have ever been? Everyone in this new and improved system is going to be kind and generous and considerate and selfless and obedient and compassionate and peaceable, and THEN we’ll beat those low graduation rates? What kind of system is that? Utopian.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be fixed, it will be with new minds who want to create a mode of education that truly serves the kids we are educating, not us and our economic systems.

(Many of the concepts and phrases in the above rant are quotes or paraphrases from Daniel Quinn’s book My Ishmael, and I have merely transcribed them here in a format relevant to the local news. Still, I take responsibility for any interpretations or mutations made.)

All merchandise must fit inside the bag, all at one time to qualify for the 15% discount. No modifying of the bag is allowed. We will allow products up to twice the height of the bag to qualify for discount as long as they fit inside the bag. Multiple items must all fit inside the bag. No stacking allowed beyond the height of the bag. All merchandise must remain in its original packaging. Merchandise cannot be disassembled to fit in bag. Limited to one bag per guest (or household) per purchase per visit. (In keeping with the spirit of the sale, please do not ask the cashier to split your purchase up across multiple bags. You may make multiple shopping trips during the week, but only one bag of savings per trip.) Bag must be surrendered at time of purchase.

For those of you mapping out your trip to Menards in advance using the product dimension information you can find online: the bag is approximately 17″ high, 11.5″ wide, and 7″ deep. Under the terms of the program including the double-the-height clause, this means you can accommodate 2,737 cubic inches, or 1.58 cubic feet, of product material. My initial calculations show that the following items will not fit in the bag: the body and teachings of Jesus Christ, personal happiness, peace, justice.

What will you put in your bag?

Our very approach to solving the “problem” of unsustainability is grounded in a mindset that prevents sustainability from emerging. Always anchored to the past, the future is envisioned as being bigger or better. But such an approach will always keep us rooted in the past. To escape from the past, one must think in an entirely different way.

The current ideal of sustainability, as sustainable development, is not a vision for the future. It is merely a modification of the current process of economic development that its proponents claim, in theory, need not cause the terribly destructive consequences of the past. Sustainable development is fundamentally instrumental. It suggests new means, but still old ends. Sustainable appears as an adjective; the noun is still development.

As I look at sustainability efforts in my own life and at sustainability as a local progressive value, it’s important to me that someone out there has the right words to say what so many people are afraid to say: there are ways in which the survival of life on Earth is in conflict with traditional economic development, a.k.a. the continued growth of our civilization. Many sustainability efforts are purely or primarily anthropocentric, and therefore fail by definition.

This essay doesn’t have all the answers, but it’s got a good grip on that particular problem.

As a resident of Richmond for eleven years and a business owner here for
nine years, I’m very much invested in the growth of our community. But growth means different things to different people. Shortly after the newspaper coverage of my pledge, I received a message from a prominent Richmond businessperson and political figure indicating his frustration with my actions. I thought the conversation we had that proceeded would be useful to post here, more than a year later. (I’ve removed any identifying information from the exchange; he can identify himself if he so desires.)

As…a fellow small businessman I was very disappointed in your anti-business position in the newspaper. Evidently you don’t understand how our system here in America works or you don’t care. Richmond has been, is and I’m afraid always will be anti-growth and anti-opportunity because of citizen attitudes like yours. If we are ever to give our people a chance to live a better life we must become COMPLETELY pro-growth, pro-opportunity and pro-business. When business people attack business people there is no hope for our economic future.

My response:

“If you read the text of the pledge I put forth, I think you’ll find that it is in no way anti-business. The Palladium-Item has sort of spun it as a petition to keep businesses out and prevent growth, but that’s largely their attempt to sell papers, and I think they ignored the subtleties and spirit of the pledge itself in their reporting and editorial.

So, I wasn’t attacking anyone, and I don’t think being pro-growth, pro-opportunity, and pro-business are mutually exclusive with being able to preserve and protect the other aspects of Richmond that make it such a great place to live, and that help to attract businesses here in the first place.“

His response came back shortly:

I’ve lived here [for many decades] and I’ve heard arguments like yours a million times. Richmond was 38000 people in 1938 and it still is. What you say simply does not work! Real investors don’t care about what you say they care about! They only want two things – a high return on their investment and high security for it. Richmond provides neither because of a no-growth attitude. History proves that people with your attitude dominate what happens here – No Growth! No Opportunity! Your attitude has always won and that keeps Richmond just like it is. It really is sad that you can live a lifetime in a community that never even begins to reach its potential because of its attitude!!

My response:

“I respect that perspective, I really do – and I can’t even begin to understand how frustrating it must be to see that kind of stagnation over [so many] years. I definitely don’t claim to have all the answers or solutions – I certainly don’t have all of the context that you do when it comes to how our community operates.

What can we do differently that we’re not doing now?“

From there, we decided that we should get together in person to continue the discussion. We haven’t been able to do that yet, but I hope to some day.

I’m SO grateful to this man for taking the time to communicate with me directly and openly about his thoughts, as much in conflict as we started out being. So many others have responded by talking about me behind my back, using their (sometimes considerable) influence to harm me or the businesses/organizations which which I’m affiliated, and other nasty things that don’t belong in respectful discourse about the issues and choices that matter to us so much.

I’ll have more thoughts on this soon. But if you were having it today, where would you like to see the conversation go from here?

These days, I am apparently part of the same decaying organic matter as everything else. I have some company from other Chris Hardies out there, some of them surprisingly close to me in either geographical, occupational or metaphysical location. Here’s a survey:

Christopher Hardie is the Director of Residence Life at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA.

Chris Hardie is the Local News Editor for the La Crosse Tribune in Wisconsin, and editor of StrayVoltage.org. He has apparently won various awards for his reporting on the agricultural and health concerns related to stray voltage. That is likely the same Chris Hardie who is the Publisher of the Coulee News also in Wisconsin.

Chris Hardie is a Windows Network Engineer living in New Orleans. He’s involved with the website thornhill.org, which is dedicated to the research of the Hardie family tree. I *really* need to bust out my grandfather’s geneology stuff and get it online sometime.

Chris Hardie is a young Canadian hockey player with the Minto Hockey Association.

Chris Hardie is a Briton with a very simple website.

That may or may not be the Chris Hardie who lives in Shropshire, England. His family is from Glasgow, Scotland. He may have a real estate holdings company he’s associated with, but I don’t think it’s related to the Australian-based Hardie Holdings.

That Chris Hardie is probably not the same Chris Hardie who is the Director of Residential Property at Brodies LLP, a commercial law practice in Edinburg, Scotland. It’s important to recognize that that Chris “demonstrates a fresh and enthusiastic approach which endears him to a loyal client base.” Go, Chris!

Chris Hardie is a web developer in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada, who has been popping up in various technical mailing lists asking questions about various design issues. Chris is excited about standards-based website design and open source content management systems, as am I.

James Hardie (my first name is James) is a world leader in fiber cement siding, backerboard and pipe. When I go to the local Lowe’s home improvement store, I often see big signs with my, er, his name on it.

Did I miss any? Speak up, Chris!

The good news (from a purely selfish and egotistical perspective, anyway – are there others?) is that of the 374,000 results in Google when searching for chris hardie, I’m still number one. Boo-ya! Take that, Chris! But really, I’m happy to be sharing cyberspace with my fellow Hardies and hope I can meet them all – online or in person – at some point.

Another good that comes from this is that we couldn’t have asked for a more starkly painted contrast of the whole “commercial interests” versus “preservation and green space” theme. Even the Pal-Item’s editorial cartoon today shows the simple image of a tree (labeled “nature”) cut down by a chain-saw (labeled “commerce”).

At some level, we all know that it isn’t the big bad businesses that have come in and cut down our trees because they felt like it – instead, it’s the profit motive driving them, and that profit motive is based solely on the pretty safe bet that we as a community of consumers will pay them for their efforts. In the end, it’s our culture, our purchasing choices, and our relative complacency in these matters that brought those trees down and that will retroactively justify and support the choices of the “decision makers” involved. And so while we have purchased it at a great cost, we now have before us a very visceral manifestation of the impact and importance of our choices as consumers and members of an interdependent community – locally, regionally, globally. The good we can take away from this is to weigh those choices more carefully the next time around, with the forthcoming Richmond Village as an ever-present reminder to do so.

The bitterness will no doubt continue, and the strong opinions will no doubt lead to more tension and narrow-mindedness on all sides of the issue. But making Richmond a better place to live depends on our ability to learn from the experience, use that knowledge intentionally and wisely as we move forward, and ceasing to take for granted the reality that, above all else, it is our choices as individuals and as a community that shape the landscape – physical and metaphorical – of Richmond’s future.