Closing Remarks—Building a Transportation Measure for the Bay Area in 2020, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, TransForm, Urban Habitat, August 2019

Thank you Mr. Perez for sharing Senator Beall’s priorities on the regional transportation measure. And thanks for all the thoughtful and provocative ideas from our panelists and the very intelligent set of questions from the audience. 

A round of applause for everyone.

I.               My excitement, delight, and passion

I am delightful to share closing remarks this afternoon and know that I equally share with you all the excitement about this important opportunity in the Bay Area. So many of you have been pursuing this for a while, passionately advancing many of these ideas on equity we heard today amidst Bay Area’s own unique challenges and opportunities. 

There were several ideas on the assembly of the bill and then the delivery:

DM Ranganathan’s “values based vision that is transformational“ and seemingly “impossible until its done”.

Director Mc Millan’s call of how “equity has to be on the front end.”

Liz’s reminder for “economic security for low-income people” and “accessibility for people with disabilities.” 

Thea’s eloquent remarks on “freedom of movement as a human right.”  

II.             What is my vision around it? What is my dream around it? 

What comes next? 

What does coalition building in Los Angeles and Seattle tell us? How can we begin to align ourselves in the Bay Area? 

I’d like to contradict what Director Mc Millan claims: “Where we are stronger together than where we are apart”. 

Borrowing from our revered Toni Morrison, I would say, we, foundations, institutions, advocates, business leaders, everyone, we have to stop playing hostage to our crises of climate change, of transportation, of housing and instead continue engaging in a conflict, a constructive conflict with each other on some of these issues. 

Morrison defines crisis as:

“A heightened, sometimes bloody, obviously dangerous, always tense confluence of events and views about those events. Volatility theatricality, and threat swirl about in crisis. Crisis, like war, demands “final answers”, quick and definitive action—to douse flames, draw blood, soothe consciences”.

Sometimes the demand for quick and definitive action is so keen, all energy is gathered to avoid the impending crisis rather than tackle the crisis itself. The effect of our actions, that are sometimes militarized, is at the most to maintain the status quo and on the least to keep us in a state of paralysis. Our quick actions also produce an increased appetite for ever more thrilling, intense presentation of crisis…one that can never be satisfied.

A conflict on the other hand, Morrison describes is: the clash of incompatible forces, a disharmony calling for adjustment, change or compromise. Conflict recognizes legitimate oppositions, honest and different interpretations of data, contesting theories.

Sometimes these oppositions may have to be militarized, but in the intellectual spaces such as those exist around the transportation challenges in the Bay Are today, Morrison claims they must not be. For the intellectual realm is unlike the arcades or the battlefield. Conflict in the intellectual realm is not a screen game to play for its own sake, not a social taboo to avoid at all costs. It has a bad reputation only because we have been taught to associate it with winning and losing, with the desperate need to be right. Conflict is not crisis nor is it war or competition. Conflict is not only a condition of intellectual life, it is also its pleasure. Firing up the mind to engage itself is precisely what the mind is for—it has no other purpose. “Mind craves knowledge—For when it is not trying to know, it is in disrepair.”

What Morrison calls language, “informed, shaped, reasoned”, and what I will say was the essence in the exchange our panelists just engaged in, will become that stays, that stops crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, “startling our lives and rippling our intellect.” 

Where does all this lead us to? 

Morrison has an answer: 

She says: “I know that democracy, (that we know will be crucial in this transportation measure), is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former, intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required.”

Let’s continue to make progress in our intelligent struggle.