We Shouldn't Have to be Lucky

The calloused ears that don't hear

These days, Toya, Anisa and I are deep into pre-school visits and applications. Meanwhile, most of my friends are logging campus visits and filing college applications. (When they aren’t sending me photos from ski slopes.)

Someone should have told me fatherhood is 18 years of awkward parent orientations.

Institutions

We think institutions are permanent. The good ones, as well as the bad ones. As a result, we try to tear down those we don’t like; embolden those we believe align with our values.

This is the thing, even though institutions are not permanent, they are the foundation of society. From government agencies to private organizations to cultural norms, institutions, and the relationships they weave together, are unique and fundamental to humanity.

Of course, since we are human, our institutions are also a topic of constant debate. Cultural questions, the role of the private sector, the purpose of public agencies. Ideally, these debates take place within our shared political community - our democracy. Which, when it is functioning, provides a process through which to negotiate our differences and find agreement.

The problem is that we take our institutions, and most certainly our shared political community, for granted. In this era of severe polarization, we don’t realize our institutions—our relationships— have been weaponized in service of political agendas. As a result, institutions are seen as belonging to one side or the other. Therefore, we don’t see institutions as public goods.

I want to be clear: one side weaponizes institutions in a much more nefarious way than the other. But I don’t think blaming one side or the the other gets us, or our institutions, to a better place.

Rather, we need to think of institutions differently. Not see agencies, business, culture as institutions owned by one “side” or the other. Rather, try to understand what stake we have in an institution we may not agree with. See, if an institution is a set of relationships through which we build trust, we need to have a stake in all our institutions. Once they are lost, the relationships and the trust they hold is lost as well.

Look around. Houses of worship are being lost to angry politics, businesses and non-profits lost to identity politics, public agencies lost to special interests. The losses weaken our democracy to the point where relationships are confined, if not constricting.

At some level, talking about institutions becomes abstract. Like we are referring to something far away, that we don’t have control over, that we should always question. But strong institutions - as broadly as you can define them - are the backbone of society. Our ability to endure the political winter we are facing requires we have a stake in institutions. Even the ones we don’t always agree with.

Stupid Lucky

In the BBG (Before Baby Girl) times, soon after Toya and I met via the World Wide Web, Miss D. was our neighbor in Washington, DC. Miss D. has lived in her home for about 45 years, she played piano at the Catholic mass up the hill every weekend and, these days, loves getting Anisa updates. More than a connection to the past, Miss D. is our connection to the new life Toya and I forged together.

For those who have been following along, Toya and I moved to the Bay Area in the BBG times. I was coming back to the region I grew up in, getting to know my new gig, living close to family after nearly 25 years on the East Coast. Toya, several months pregnant, was settling into a new coast far away from family and friends, heroically walking Lady through the hills of our neighborhood.

We weren’t alone. But, with so much change around us, it still felt lonely. There was no Miss D.

One weekend morning, Lady and I met B.

Like Miss D., B. has been in her home down the street for 40+ years. And, like my Mom, B. had recently lost her husband of 50+ years. On that first meeting, we found ourselves sharing stories like we were old friends.

Morning or afternoon, rain or shine, we find B. walking the hills of our neighborhood. If I am not on a self-important phone call, we stop and chat — Lady is thrilled with the extra attention.

And when Anisa was born, B. insisted on bringing over some of her favorite children’s books. Which are now Baby Girl’s favorite books.

A week or so ago, B. saw Toya on a walk and asked if we would like a table for Baby Girl. It wasn’t any children’s table. It was a table that required B. check with her three adult children (and their children) to make sure it was okay the table left the family.

See, Grandpa P., an engineer from Cornwall who became a handyman in California, built this children’s table for B. way back in the 1940’s. It was the table B. grew up with. It was the table her children grew up with. Now, it will be the table Anisa grows up with.

Which she is pretty thrilled about.

Aside from the awkward parent orientations, how a community emerges to lend a hand has been the most amazing part of parenthood. Of course, my mom and sisters, along with Toya’s family, have been fantastic. More than that, to be gifted bags (and bags) of baby clothes from co-workers, offered entire play structures from new friends, not to mention gifts from old friends across the country, is truly humbling. It is a surprising moment to find a new institution of relationships.

See, I truly think of myself as Stupid Lucky (I am not smart enough to be Dumb Lucky) and incredibly sad for what I have found at this point in life. Stupid Lucky because, well, life is going well; sad because we shouldn’t have to be lucky. Our institutions should be strong enough to allow all of us to live to our fullest potential.

Our politics stand in the way.

I don’t want to romanticize what Miss D. and our new neighbor, B., endured over the course of their lives. But, when I talk to them and begin to understand how their faith, their work, their community, enriched their life, I am thrilled they are part of Anisa’s institution of relationships. I hope that if we were to dig deep enough into communities across the country we would find similar examples. In the meantime, I feel Stupid Lucky.

Cooking

Did you know Daly City has one of the largest Filipino communities in the US? Neither did I. But we went to an event in Daly City a few months ago and I purchased The New Filipino Kitchen from a local bookseller. From this fantastic purchase I cooked a bonkers Filipino meal the other night.

Reading

Honestly, I am struggling to regain my reading focus after the holidays. But, I am enjoying Salman Rushdie’s compilation of essays, Languages of Truth. One essay in particular got me to thinking about the ugliness of the immigration debate:

A migrant writer like myself can only envy deeply rooted writers like William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who can take their patch of the earth as a given and mine it for a lifetime. The migrant has no ground to stand on until he invents it. This too increases his sense of the precariousness of all things and leads him toward a literature of precariousness, in which neither destiny nor character can be taken for granted, nor can their relationship.

As I read the stories and see the photos of migrants along the southern border, I am struck by how cartels and policymakers alike cast humanity aside in pursuit of money and power.

Migrants are left with less and less ground to stand on every day. And their opportunities to invent ground are contracting. But their stories - their realities - fall on calloused ears.

Watching

In my next managerial life, I want to be Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses.

What a fun show.