Introduction: Reclaiming Our Humanity
This introduction begins a new blog series on Reclaiming our Humanity. This series stands as my own response to myself, and recent posts I have written naming various ills and evils of our world. I began with broad strokes in “The Trifecta of Evil” and picked apart 3 specific issues, and then I started delving into power here and here.
I document and name the pathologies and toxicities I see within myself, my culture, my world. Facing these hard things is a first step in reclaiming our humanity, and our re-entry into a healthy and generative place within Creation. Denial and nostalgia are significant obstacles to our spiritual and cultural growth and development.
Rather than feed any scapegoating or make it easy to detach ourselves from complicity, I decided to discuss the systemic, that whole which is larger than any data set of parts. Concern about the loss of our national security and safety nets has had me thinking about what we have built, what we are inheriting, what we are passing on in regards to our systems of care. The first post in this series was called “Our Deep Systems of Inhumanity” and was an attempt to name the deep brokenness in a few of our least functional systems, education and healthcare. The second post called “Reclaiming Our Humanity: Systems are People, People Are Systems” spoke broadly about systems themselves, and how I’ll use that idea in context.
We will be well served to more deeply understand the systems around us, how we encounter them, what we can do to affect them. We must engage the powers in order to transform them, we must engage the powers to recall them to their highest purposes. We must stand free of their control over us, the use of fear and momentum, expectation and convention, to dictate our behavior. For we have all we need to build generative and life-giving systems.
Reclaiming Our Systems
I’ve been struggling with how to talk about systems in ways that aren’t overwhelming or off-putting. Thinking like this can feel both intrusive and cold at times. We can examine the patterns of systems, the factors they touch, and the internal momentum every system requires to exist -and this is manageable to do if we isolate a single system and focus in on it. I’d been thinking of commonly encountered systems like transportation or urban growth patterns, and recalled how deeply these affect each other, and about the other systems that each itself affects.
Almost any pairing or grouping of systems will be like this. There will be real and authentic ways in which they interact. The essence of systems is to *be* interlocking; nothing exists in a vacuum -period. Compartmentalization is only good for short-term coping and hypothetical examination, and so just starting to think about systems at all can feel like unpeeling onion layers that never end.
In addition to my seminary degree and decades of ministry experience, I am also formally trained as a city planner and have a graduate degree from a program *still* committed to big picture comprehensive planning. I emphasize still because a disturbing trend I noticed beginning then, the specialization of planning education into themed areas like ‘economic development’ or ‘site planning,’ has led to a planner class that cannot truly plan any living system. These people become dependent on models and best practices and such area specific knowledge that they cannot speak to other aspects of city and regional life.
I get it. It’s what I started with -seeing the systems as their own living organisms is messy. It’s much easier to separate it all out, and yes of course sometimes that IS what is required. Occasionally, one has to isolate a system, or a section of a system -say pedestrian pathways within a transportation grid- but real integration has to happen or the newly tweaked system will, literally in the case of streets, crash into the other system pathways.
Actually, transportation is the perfect place to discuss systems, and how they move and shape us without our awareness, and how small actions can adjust massive systems.
I used to live in an apartment in Chicago at one of its 6-corners. These intersections are famous in Chicago. They were formed by the diagonal city-wide streets that are a hallmark of Daniel Burnham’s City Plan for Chicago. Typically, 3 busy streets intersect at these corners, and the traffic patterns are wild. I used to spend hours on the roof of the building, watching the ballet of cars beneath me swoop and swerve and seemingly narrowly miss each other at every turn.
But there were never any car crashes. In the 2 1/2 years we lived in that apartment, and in the hundreds of hours of traffic I watched, no one ran into anyone else. No pedestrians were hit. No one drove up onto the curb. No one even ran a red light. All of these things happen regularly in Denver, where I now live. Two weeks ago, 5 pedestrians were killed around the region in a 24 hour period.
These 6 corners of Chicago, the pattern they place into the transportation grid, may have been created and built 100 years ago but are now an organic part of driving there. Soft right, hard left -those mean something in Chicago because the pattern is set.
Transportation patterns and systems are also used to further great injustices. Entire neighborhoods are destroyed for highways, or cut off from the rest of the city by massive thoroughfares. For several years, I lived in Oakland, CA, in the JAMMI neighborhood -named for its transportation placement, Just Above the MacAurthur Maze Interchange. When the Bay Area experienced a large earthquake in 1989, several highways exits and entrances were destroyed. The ones around my neighborhood, a place primarily made up of black and brown folks and the home of the Black Panthers, were never fixed. These places were walled away, the community cut off from a primary system of movement.
Examples of this pattern exist in virtually every American city. When Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, MO several years ago, his death highlighted the systemic injustices his community had faced, and a primary mechanism at work began when new highways isolated Ferguson from the rest of the St. Louis region.
We make choices with the patterns we set, and the systems we build. And when we are unintentional about them, the patterns and systems seem immutable and as if we cannot affect them. They seem to carry us along. That is their intent, after all, and some of these systems we need to keep. Some must be dismantled.
One of the most visible places to observe chaos theory is in traffic patterns. A car wreck can change traffic for miles around it, the ripples of one act touching hundreds of lives. It is possible for a single car to slow the pace of traffic flow, or to speed it up. Dispersal is amplified in aligned actions, and this velocity effect can be seen in any mass movement pattern, from bird flight to vehicle travel to avalanches.
This actually brings me great hope, for it reminds me that even within a system, we can change it.