Why Am I Doing This?
An essay about family, judo, science, anime, Steve Irwin, and how I am voting in November. Please go to iwillvote.com
It was not the first such message. I’ve gotten many through the years, but this was the most destabilizing. These messages had increased recently, correlating with the ramping up of the 2020 Presidential election. I had spent the better part of a year working with one of the major political parties on their national platform and had dived headfirst into helping on the presidential campaign. Out of the blue, an old friend asked me why? Why was I supporting my chosen candidate, and more so, why would I be working so hard for them? The conversation that followed destabilized me for a few days. These conversations, almost always with someone I’ve been close with for many years, are hard because I know what the real underlying question is. It’s not how either of us feels about an issue in the news cycle or judicial appointments. The real question is: are we still friends? In some cases, are we still family?
What follows is a little disjointed. It is probably barely publishable as it is. In many ways, when we try to piece together our lives and the underlying themes, things do not all mesh together well. So the best way to think of this is that these are thoughts in my head that all appear when someone asks me about my politics.
“If we can teach people about wildlife, they will be touched. Share my wildlife with me. Because humans want to save things that they love.” Steve Irwin
Science has been my favorite topic since I was a little kid. It started with a love of dinosaurs. Like many little kids, I found them fascinating. I had plenty of dinosaur toys and could recite passages from Jurassic Park verbatim. As kids, though, we don’t understand death. More than that, we don’t really understand extinction. When I was told that dinosaurs were extinct, I couldn’t really understand it. In fact, I resisted understanding it. Vehemently understanding it. Understanding extinction would mean developing an understanding of death. This is an existential thing to think about as a child. It is an existential thing to write about now. Death itself is hard to grapple with. The complete elimination of a species from existence is a step further.
To fall in love with dinosaurs means that pretty soon, you will be very interested in living animals. The topic I loved above all else was natural history. I just loved animals. I still do! I loved learning about the environment. Nature documentaries and learning more about animals is still my passion. I was particularly enthralled with reptiles. When I first saw Steve Irwin, he was instantly my hero.
Like many kids, I wanted to become a paleontologist. This desire actually stayed with me until well into high school. I debated with myself between whether to become a paleontologist or a veterinarian. My mother had recognized that I had a way with animals from a young age and had actually pressured me to seriously consider veterinary school. This was not least because, in her mind, she would have to pay for it. I actually remember a serious conversation with her when I was eight years old about whether or not I wanted to go to vet school. Her point stuck with me: “wouldn’t you rather save animals that are still alive?”
I entered college, still somewhat considering paleontology, but officially pre-vet. I struggled to balance school and my dream to go to the Olympics in judo. My grades were initially poor, and I pretty quickly removed myself from the running of potentially going to vet school. (Strangely enough, it is harder to go to vet school than med school). I struggled with my biology major for a couple of years. By my junior year, I had figured out the balance, but I was already starting to consider whether I needed to transfer schools.
A week after a particularly bad showing at the US National Championships, I walked into my mothers’ office. My mom has had a long career in higher education, and I told her I wanted to transfer schools to get a fresh start. She had no trouble with that choice.
I intended to finish my biology degree. Perhaps I was stubborn, but I knew that I wanted to be a scientist. I knew that whatever science I did, I wanted it to be related to biology. With a fresh start, I thought about what I wanted to do. I briefly considered medical school but gave up on that knowing my grades from before I transferred would be a hindrance even if my GPA had reset. I thought about going into biotechnology. Massachusetts has an amazing biotechnology sector, and truthfully that is where many of my peers ended up. If I became a teacher, I might be able to continue to pursue my Olympic dream after college. My favorite class that first semester at Merrimack was ecology. My love of animals and natural history really pulled me into it. The thought that I might be able to have a career there had been passing through my mind, especially after a particularly fun lab where I spent the better part of a day up to my chest in saltwater.
It was getting close to when I would have to make a decision. I would have to decide my concentration for my biology degree. I remember giving one last thought to using it to go into paleontology and dropped it. I thought about my mother asking me about saving animals that were still alive. I thought maybe it should be something in conservation. A vet can only save as many animals as they can touch, right? I could work on saving animals at a larger scale as an ecologist.
One night I sat in my dorm, and I asked myself: “What is the biggest problem that I could work on?”
The next day I walked into my ecology class. The first slide on the lecture read “Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.”
I am reminded every day of my time in the Olympic movement. I’m reminded when an old friend reaches out. I am reminded when I step on a scale and think its time to start training again, if only for the sake of vanity. I am reminded when I need to stop writing because arthritis in my hands reminds me to take a break. I am ultimately reminded in nearly all the things that I do that I am a judoka first. There is something different about being in judo versus other Olympic sports.
There are those who separate judo as a sport from judo as education. It is in my experience that to do this is a uniquely difficult accomplishment. As practitioners of other practical martial arts will tell you, combat sports training is an education in and of itself. What separates judo from Brazilian Jiujitsu and other arts is that in my experience, is an underlying emphasis on how one conducts themselves off the mat. The two principles of judo that most American black belts are required to understand are that of “mutual benefit and welfare” and “minimum effort with maximum efficiency.”
I used to read “The Father of Judo: A Biography of Jigoro Kano” every year. I usually read it in the summer. It was, for me, one of the easiest ways to access the teachings of Kano. For those who don’t know, Jigoro Kano was the founder of judo. He viewed judo as more than just a martial art or a sport. He viewed judo as an educational tool. You see, Kano was a teacher. His mission was to mold students so that they would go out and improve society. What I learned from these repeated readings was that to truly practice judo meant to go beyond the mat. It was to take the lessons learned there and try to make society better.
“The purpose of the study of judo is to perfect yourself and to contribute to society.”
— Jigoro Kano
My father's favorite athlete was the Celtics player Bill Russell. One of the reasons why he liked Bill Russell was his reputation. Russell had a reputation for trying to make everyone around him better. For looking for ways to improve his teammates. He is, to my knowledge, the only NBA player to win a world championship while both playing and coaching. This is as good a time as any, by the way, to mention that my father was a judo practitioner and reinforced my thinking regarding judo's philosophy. His politics are largely in opposition to mine. I have no idea if we’ve ever voted for the same candidate. Despite the political differences, my father values his relationship with his son to such a degree that he remains among my greatest cheerleaders. I love my dad and the rest of my family very much.
“Legacy, what is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see
I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me
America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me
You let me make a difference, a place where even orphan immigrants
Can leave their fingerprints and rise up.” The World was Wide Enough in Hamilton written by Lin Manuel Miranda
I would be lying if I did not think about my own career and ambition. My favorite musical is Hamilton. While I approached Hamilton as someone in their early 30s, young but generally already formed as a person, there were elements of it that I identified with. Whether it was the line “When you got skin in the game you stay in the game” or the weird giddiness when Hamilton says, “I was invited to the constitutional convention,” as a political nerd, there were parts of it I was just drawn to. The defining difference between the two main characters (Burr and Hamilton) mirrored how I have approached my time in this space. I do not want power for power's sake. I am here to achieve something.
Beyond my concerns around climate change: I truly, truly believe that America has the ingredients to be the nation we have mythologized it to be. I believe that this could be a place where the poor are taken care of. Where your station in life does not preclude you from success if you put in the work. When you understand and internalize that the primary reason you are who you are, is because of a law passed shortly after you were born, you begin to understand how you can make institutions better serve people. You begin to see the possibilities for what the government can do.
One of the insults I have received through the years has been the questioning of my patriotism. I do not carry with me a loud patriotism. I see no value in jingoism. My patriotism is quiet. It is a patriotism built on actions rather than worlds with a foundation of ideals for how to make things better for those around me.
“Let them say of me.
I was one who believed, in sharing the blessings, I received.
Let me know in my heart, when my days are through
America, America, I gave my best to you”
When we talk about intellectual influences, especially in spaces where “prestige” matters, we try to cite lofty intellectual titans like John Rawls, while Rawls certainly has had a major influence on me personally, it would be a lie to say I woke when I was thirteen years old and decided I was a Rawlsian. The media we consume growing up, I would argue, probably has a greater role in shaping us.
I’m a giant nerd. I love superheroes (Spiderman is my favorite) and have a deep love of anime. Anime, as an artistic tradition, is just exceptionally amazing to me. Animation as a whole is a fascinating medium because it allows people to construct experiences in a much cheaper manner then what you would need for live-action. This lower barrier of entry has allowed for amazing films that may be otherwise impossible to create, especially for their time.
Like many a millennial anime nerd, I grew up watching the action animation block Toonami and would stay up late to watch Adult Swim. This was how I discovered my favorite show: Rurouni Kenshin.
There are plenty of great action cartoons. There is plenty of well-done samurai oriented anime. Rurouni Kenshin is an example of the shonen genre of anime. It’s focused on action and was known for having an exceptional emotional and technical narrative to its fights. While plenty of shonen pulls that off, Kenshin was different in that there was always a third portion: a Socratic dialogue.
I won’t bore people too much here, but most of the key characters in Rurouni Kenshin represent different political or philosophical perspectives. Kenshin himself overall embodies the work of John Rawls. The ultimate villain for the stories' most famous arc was a social Darwinist. Their climactic showdown was ultimately over a philosophical disagreement about how you treat people less fortunate than you. While the dub below has slightly problematic language, in some ways, this scene says more about how I look at political problems than any position paper I’ve ever written.
There’s a quote from a movie I saw around the time I began judo. The quote was, “Great conquest and ambition without contribution are without significance.” The line is uttered by Kevin Kline, who plays a teacher in the movie “The Emperors Club.” It’s a movie about a bunch of privileged schoolboys and the value of thinking about the context that your efforts exist in. It was about questioning whether what you are doing is just for glory or if it serves a real purpose and what that journey does for you and others.
Years later, when I rewatched that movie, its context felt different. The first time I saw it, I was the same age as the schoolboys. Now I am closer in age to Kevin Kline. I think about what, if any, contribution I could make to make society better. When I try to evaluate that, I often philosophically work backward from the works of the moral philosopher John Rawls. I won’t bore anybody here, but when I first read about the idea of the “curtain of ignorance” in college, it changed how I thought about morality. It changed how I prioritized my time.
It may seem odd to read this and be running into references to anime, movies, and musicals, but I think of these influences often. It is not easy to be up at 2 AM working on communications copy for a candidate who does not know you exist. It is not easy to find out that your friends were doxxed by white supremacists. It is easy to stay home from a march when it is over one hundred degrees. It feels impossible sometimes to explain to people why you went to certain protests. It is certainly cheaper to not donate any money to causes. In those moments, I think about these influences.
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
While I’m doing my doctoral thesis right now, I consider this a different experience from when I did my two master’s degrees. I refer to that period as when I attended graduate school. In contrast, I refer to my doctorate as the most masochistic hobby I ever chose.
The hardest thing I have ever done was graduate school. Graduate school was difficult for me because at no step was it easy for me to be there. I had shot myself in the foot academically during my freshman and sophomore years of college. So just getting in was a hard task that involved applying two years in a row.
By some unknown miracle, I was accepted to the Harvard Special Students and Visiting Fellow program. The program acted as a post-bachelors program for me and allowed me to gain access to the most prestigious program in the world. Harvard holds a very special place for me. It is where I trained to become an activist. I will never forget walking around the campus and seeing a sign. It read:
“Care about climate change? Want to do something about it?”
It provided meeting details, but unfortunately, I had already missed the first meeting. I couldn’t find anything about the meeting on the web, and I remember feeling bummed. There was this sense of freedom I had that first semester at Harvard. I wasn’t tied to the Olympics as I had been. I could go into political activism if I wanted. I could go on a Friday night and have a drink with a friend and not worry about lifting the next morning. I was primed at that moment to become an activist. When that evening, I walked into a talk by Dr. Daniel Nocera. I got lucky. Chloe Maxmin was there handing out the flyers for the second meeting. I joined Divest Harvard that semester. I would spend the next three years involved with the campus divestment movement.
I would go to Indiana University to complete two master's degrees in public policy and environmental science. My goal was to become a sort of climate change action swiss army knife. I wanted to make sure that when I got out of school, I could go wherever in the movement I could be the most valuable. The public policy degree is where I began to understand how society fit together. Something crystallized in my mind, an explanation for a feeling I had held for years about how power worked in our society. It can be difficult to argue against data, and when I studied the data, I understood why. I understood why we were still fighting just to get climate change on the policymaking agenda despite knowing about it for decades. More than climate change, I came to understand why certain inequities in our society exist. I ultimately came to understand why I had access to opportunities that others who were more deserving than I did not.
I grew up stewed in politics. While no one in my family was particularly politically active, it was a source of conversation. Most of my family are political hobbyists. These are the types of people who vote in every election and consume political news like some consume baseball statistics. They usually aren’t political organizers, but they will make the occasional phone call to a politician or make donations. Discussions around the importance of philosophical consistency and how to construct valid philosophical arguments (and how to deconstruct them) were taught as life lessons. The politics of my family leaned conservative. The conservatism of my family was, for the most part, closer to what we would call Rockefeller Republicans until recently. Basically pro-civil rights anti-tax folks. Trump was and still is a uniquely polarizing person within the family who has managed to reveal the exact political standings of almost all of my family. I don’t need to further discuss him yet, nor do I wish too.
Some of this interest in politics was driven by a deep interest in history shared by most of my family. I grew up reading about the American Revolution and World War 2. I developed a particular interest in the holocaust after having the opportunity to interview a survivor for my school newspaper. This sparked a longstanding interest in issues around human rights. The two topics felt intimately connected, and a serious student of either politics or history will understand they are intellectually inseparable. Thus my upbringing included constant reinforcement to learn more about history and politics.
One of my earliest memories is driving through the woods in the backseat of the car listening to the voice of Howie Carr. I have literally no idea what he was talking about and frankly couldn’t really coherently understand him until I was older. That said, I grew up hearing his voice, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, and Dr. Laura. I also grew up listening to NPR. The honest truth was this was the era before podcasts before you could easily create your own media bubbles. I was born in 1988, and Fox News didn’t even exist until almost a decade later. Talk radio though was usually something I heard when I was in the car with an older male family member. While I discovered later that the personal politics of most of my family is actually quite diverse, I gravitated towards the loudest voices. It is not surprising to me that I first registered as a Republican at 18.
I wasn’t comfortable with the ideologies on the right. I am an autistic atheist who grew up with the knowledge about what it was like to be an outsider. I remember religious friends coming to me and telling me in tones that ranged from concerned to mocking that I was going to go to hell. I remember watching an angry parent calling special education a cancer upon my town's school system and then watching an elected member of the school board agree with him. I remember having a gay friend and not understanding why people cared that he was gay. My first experiences with open racism occurred when participating in sports, and frankly, they confused the hell out of me. My conservative father had told me that the only color that mattered was the color of the money someone handed you. My conservative-leaning grandfather, who dodged u-boats during his service on supply convoys in World War 2, would tell me about what happened to Alan Turing. Open prejudice, even though I recognize now there are times when I expressed more subtle versions, is something that was not a part of my upbringing.
That said, my conservative lean was combined with my love of debate. I loved debates in high school and thrived in clubs like Model UN. I joyfully played the role of contrarian in these settings. I was elected to student government in high school and looked forward to trying to grill local politicians who would come to our school. Once after asking a series of questions about education funding and why our teachers weren’t paid more considering the number of hours they were expected to work off the clock, a local politician turned to the principal and asked if I had been prepped by the local union. This love of politically oriented debate extended to my online presence. At 31, I have spent more time arguing with other people online for twenty years, then I wish to admit.
When some people turn 18, they are excited that they are legally an adult. For me, I was excited that I could finally vote. When it came time to finally vote though, there was some hesitation. I had always felt discomfort with conservatism. I felt a particular discomfort with the talk radio conservatism I had listened to for much of my life. The socially liberal, economic conservatism, for all its blind spots on issues of social justice, was something I could understand. Whatever Rush Limbaugh has sold for thirty years was a different story. I was not ok with the whistleblower rhetoric; I had learned how to decode by virtue of growing up around it. I was not ok with exclusionism. I was particularly not ok with Sarah Palin. In 2008 I voted for John McCain in the primary and then Barack Obama in the general.
I will never forget the moment I realized I could no longer consider myself a conservative. I was sitting in the car on my way to school, listening to a news update on the 2008 financial crisis. As I walked through the plausible answers to the problems this crisis posed, as I walked through what it might mean for the less fortunate, I realized I was no longer a conservative. While for a little while, I struggled with that. A little more than a year later, I changed my registration to independent. By the time I graduated from college, I was volunteering on the Elizabeth Warren campaign for the senate.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The election of Donald Trump was a uniquely traumatizing thing for me. That sentence will make at least one person feel the instinct to write “look at this triggered libtard”. Go ahead. I have been fighting on the internet for so long that such lines just bounce off of me.
As mentioned earlier, I am on the autism spectrum. I’m relatively high functioning, but I fall under the neuro-atypical umbrella. Most people don’t recognize it unless they know what they’re looking for.
I had always been sort of aware of climate change, but I first came to care deeply about it after a lecture in college. I became utterly obsessed with the issue. You see, I care about animals. Like not just a little, I mean to an absurd degree. You see, one of the aspects of being autistic is you develop these things you hyper-focus on. Like everyone gets sort of obsessed with something, but I mean completely and overwhelmingly down the rabbit hole obsessed. Like to the point where its the only thing you can think about, and the only way to get anything done is to find a way to relate it to something else familiar. For example, I straight up passed organic chemistry only because I was able to draw comparisons for how molecules moved in relation to each other to wrestling throws.
In the context of judo, I have discussed how my autism impacted my actions, but this is the first time I’ve really tried to put into writing how this works with my chosen field. I began to hyperfocus on climate change. I read everything I could get my hands on. I studied the field of climate ecology and how it may impact efforts in conservation biology. You can’t study climate change without inevitably starting to feel the tug of wanting to do something about it. I decided I wanted to dedicate my life to this issue.
Then November 2016 happened. I hadn’t bothered to get that involved in the campaign. I voted, but I figured there was no way in hell we were going to lose that election. So I didn’t feel the need to do things like help to get out the vote efforts. I even went to bed early that night because I thought the result was a foregone conclusion. I woke up at 3 AM and found a torrent of text messages. Friends asking me if this was real. The cruel realization that family members and close friends had voted for him, ignoring my pleas. I couldn’t look at people the same way. I thought that I would rather die than watch what was about to unfold. I knew what was coming, but I held out hope that maybe I might be wrong.
Once the administration got rolling, it becomes clear that all of the work I had done to become this climate change action swiss army knife was for not. There’s no work for me, and instead, I get weird contracting roles that often have nothing to do with what I can do or what I wanted to work on. I, of course, due to this unrelenting hyper-focus, cannot stop reading the news. However, this thing, this autistic hyper-focus that made me incredibly good at gathering information to write papers, be an informed activist, and pursue jobs to address climate change; is now the thing that is hurting me. All of this starts to feel like watching a drowning child, having a boat and a rope to go get them, and being told the child isn’t there. Being told by a giant orange dufus that that only is there no child there, but I’m an asshole for merely suggesting there’s even water for the child to drown in. This child, of course, is everything from species threatened with extinction, to my family's old stomping grounds in Massachusetts and New Jersey, to the question of whether or not I should have kids myself.
Eventually, this driven information gathering, even simply reading the news, starts to feel like pinpricks.
Leaving the Paris Climate agreement
Prick…
Scrapping the Clean Power Plan
Prick…
Over a 100 environmental protections being rolled back
Prick….
Eventually, enough of these pricks start to turn in an open wound and I am left with this emotional puncture into my brain is just programmed to deepen. I can’t break out of it, and nothing seems to be able to relieve the pressure. I just sit there, trying to force my brain to focus on anything else but climate change. I compete in sports, I go to video game conventions, and I start learning Japanese in hopes of one day being able to understand Goku in his native tongue.
The breaking moment came though when I volunteered to review a report for the IPCC. That report made international headlines about its dire predictions for ecosystems, people, and animals across the planet. I had spent all these years learning about climate change, and the only good it was doing me was ensuring I knew exactly how fucked up the decisions being made by the administration are.
This is the part where I reveal my hand if it wasn’t already obvious. I am voting for Joe Biden in November. In fact, I am co-director of the Biden Digital Coalition and an advisor to the DNC Council on the Environment & Climate Crisis. I have been a climate activist for almost ten years. My journey in that world began when Chloe Maxmin handed me a flyer when I walking around Harvard. I am driven to address the climate emergency. When you look at the pictures and videos of fires out west, that’s what motivates me right now.
To work on climate change is to see an oncoming train and try to warn everybody that it's coming. It is to try to get everyone around you to help you flip the switch to move the train to a different track. It can be maddening. You feel like a crazy person sometimes screaming that the end is nigh. Then hurricane season hits and you feel like the kid saying “I Told You So”. Seven years ago I wrote about the wildfires in California that were destroying the federal and state firefighting budgets. I wrote that if climate change wasn’t addressed we would be staring down massive flames threatening large chunks of the west coast.
To work on climate change during the Trump administration is to watch a child drowning and have some jerk blocking your way to the rope you could throw that child. When you tell the jerk that a child is drowning, they tell you there is no water for the child to drown in. That is what the last four years have been for me. Sprinkle in watching nazis marching in a town in your state chanting a conspiracy theory about Jewish people and things get real bad.
If you want a breakdown of all the things I’ve been having to track for the last four years, this expletive-laden twitter thread is a good place to start:
It wasn’t all bad though. This era saw the rise of the Sunrise Movement. It saw this amazing movement of people under the age of 35 that I’ve gotten to be a part of. Sunrise grew out of the fossil fuel divestment world that I joined when I was at Harvard. In fact one of the founders, Varshini Prakash, I knew from a climate march we both attended in 2013. She randomly knew my cousin. Sunrise was inspiring to me because the argument stopped being: “We have to do this or face annihilation”. It changed to: “We have to do this but we should fight to do it in a way that will make the world better than it is now.” It is a vision that requires a lot of imagination but offers hope. Hope is powerful. Hope will make you rethink a lot of things.
I am sometimes overwhelmed by everything I’ve been talking about. I get overwhelmed watching the COVID-19 deaths tick further upwards. I get overwhelmed by the news the president knew how bad it was and admitted on tape to Bob Woodward that he was intentionally playing it down despite knowing it was airborne and how that decision has cost America lives. I get overwhelmed by listening to the damn audio of those exchanges. I get overwhelmed by this fucking awful last few years. In those moments I flashback though to this scene from Lord of the Rings. I choose to use the time I have been given to make things better for other people.
The single hardest thing for me in doing communications on campaign work this year has been trying to explain to people what my own individual perspective is. This is because this perspective, to be kind of frank, is pretty complicated. It does ultimately boil down to:
I want to make the world a better place for people less fortunate than me. Inherently the work I do comes from a perspective of emphasizing fairness and protection.
My educational experiences consistently demonstrated to me that I, a person with only above average intelligence aided by a weird psychological mechanism, could get into doors that were not afforded to more talented individuals. I also saw people with the same gifts I had unable to use them for reasons beyond their control. I had struggles yes, but so did others and the key reason I was able to overcome mine was access. Access to resources and individuals others did not. Yes, I put out a tremendous amount of effort, but so did other people like me. I have seen the limits of hard work.
Part of the problem in explaining this perspective beyond this emotional messaging is that I work in a world many people feel as though they know but do not have a full functioning grasp of. A couple of master's degrees and half a doctoral thesis into it, I only feel as though know enough to know what I don’t know. It is hard for me to boil down discussions of economic history or risks from climate change to the size of a tweet without losing a lot of nuances or the ability to tailor my message to my audience.
I am trained to look at systems. I look at the American political system like how an engineer would look at a train. I understand the roles that each actor roughly plays and how they interact with each other. I am able to take my understanding of environmental science and understand how to use that system to address different problems. I can combine this with a background that includes a thorough education in US History and enough economics coursework & experience to have worked as a federal economist on multiple contracts. I was trained to formulate the broad strokes of public policy.
Public policy is this thing that can feel technocratic and distant. It’s this topical area that you may have some opinions on, but unless there is a hot button topic, you leave to the underpaid nerds who chose Independence Avenue over Wall Street or the activists you might hear about on the news. Public policy though is more than that. There is a quote from Pete Buttigieg that inspired this portion of the essay:
“Politics at its worst is ugly, but politics at its best is magnificent. Because it’s not just about policy. It is soulcraft and it is moral.”
It is soulcraft and it is moral. It is this sentence that rings between my ears. You see public policy is something that can be measured. It is something that we can run the numbers on and write endless quantitative and qualitative assessments. We can take those assessments and then argue about what is the right path forward. We can debate whether it is correct to even attempt to intervene in a problem. These technocratic discussions are important but we lose something. In technocratic discussions around public policy, we lose the context. We lose the moral significance of what we are trying to accomplish when arguing about how to index marginal tax rates on energy production based on an estimated carbon footprint. We are trying to change the world. We are trying to change it for the better. It truly is soulcraft and when done properly it is moral.
I truly believe another four years of Trump would lock in the greatest existential threat to the United States and much of the world: climate change. I know because I have had to study this ongoing disaster for my entire adult life. I know because I had to bust my ass to understand this problem. I had to train in order to find solutions to this great problem. When I came out of school I was ready to do that. Now I am sitting here four years later and watching the last chance to do so potentially slip away. I have sat with a burden of knowledge about how bad things are starting to become and bad they will get for so long. If after several thousand words you still don’t understand where I am coming from, I just have this question for you:
If you truly thought you had a chance to save everything you love from disaster and extinction, would you throw away your shot?
I don’t expect someone reading this whose politics differ enough from mine to make them vote for Donald Trump this November to change their minds. My hope in writing this was two-fold:
- To explain myself.
- To hopefully impart that I am working in good faith. That if someone understands where I am coming from they will not disregard my points.
We think when we discuss politics, that we are having an intellectual exchange of ideas. Sometimes we really are. Sometimes we are experiencing something different. There are times when a political discussion is a fistfight by other means. There are moments when it is merely asserting our identities; asserting who we are. In these moments we are communicating to those around us. We may be communicating solidarity with others, or we may be contrasting ourselves against those who surround us. Often we are asking those around us: are you still my friend? Are we still family?
So I will turn these questions around to you dear reader. If after reading all of this, if you are still perplexed by my choices, then I leave you with the power to determine the answers. That is your decision.
