To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.
I envision a community that is thankful.
I live in a thriving, wealthy, safe, and attractive community. Like any community, we have challenges, but we also have the means and the human capital to deal with them.
I won’t go through a long list of everything we have, but a few are worth mentioning because they are important to our health and wellbeing.
- For a California town, we have an amazingly robust water system drawing on both ground and river water. This is no small thing in the semi-arid valley in which we live.
- We are part of a small alliance of local cities and county that purchases our own electricity, enabling us to aquire green energy.
- We have an amazing system of bike paths and safe streets with ample bike lanes so that many children need not even ride on a street if they want to bike to school.
- We host a global university that brings vitality and bright, inquisitive minds to our town.
I could stretch this list to many pages. When I first moved here over a quarter century ago, I found myself smiling incessently as I pedaled my bike around town. The air was clear, the vistas broad, and I just felt healthy.
We are a privileged community—though who likes to admit that? But, arguably, by any metric, we are.
I have observed what this means for many years and have concluded that it is the root of what I experience as a profound lack of thankfulness and contentment for what we have.
Privilege means, among other things, never having to accept “no.” Privilege comes with a belief that there IS a better way—and I or we know what it is. Privilege means never having to compromise.
But, of course, the world is full of “no’s,” ideal solutions never come to pass, and living in a community requires compromise. These realities can cause anger, frustration, and even bitterness and cynicism among the privileged.
Perhaps you feel I am being too harsh. Perhaps I am.
But I know my own privileged heart and can observe my privileged neighbors’ actions.
Let me provide one example of what I have seen. We rarely, if ever, celebrate in our town. Oh, sure, non-profits hold donor appreciation events, schools do their rite-of-passage celebrations, and we gather at holidays with families and friends to raise a glass.
But we cannot seem to ever celebrate the successes that I mentioned above. Indeed, I can site examples when outsiders have praised us for one or more of these features and we refused to accept the praise, demanding only that things change and get better.
I sat in a full Community Chambers one evening not too many years ago with community activists seeking to improve our bicycling infrastructure. I felt (and still feel) that we have much to be thankful for in this regard. Many of the others in attendance did not. They were angry about the still too-car-centric nature of our town.
At the event, we invited a prominent city official from another town who had transformed the streets of his city into a bike-friendly place. We invited him so he could tell us what we needed to do to transform ours—because, certainly, it needed transforming.
Like any good speaker commenting on a community, he arrived a day early and toured our town’s bike infrastructure by bike. He began his talk by sharing examples of some of his successes and some of his failures. They seemed pretty similar to ours.
And then he turned to what he had seen as he toured our town. He spent nearly thirty minutes praising us for the many innovations, features, and overall outstanding nature of our city’s bike facilities. As he spoke, I first noted a murmur and then a shaking of heads by many in the audience. And then he asked us to give ourselves a hand for all we had accomplished.
And we refused.
We sat on our hands. Many people left that night bitterly disappointed at the uselessness of his talk. He had brought us nothing.
Except thankfulness.
Thankfulness for the hard work that had led us to where we were. Thankfuflness for an imperfect but still, by comparison to other cities, amazing infrastructure. Thankfulness that he could learn from us.
I was part of that crowd. In the years I have lived here, I now realize that I have come to identify deeply with this particular feature of privilege. I spend far too much time in angst about what has not been done. I spend too little time in thanks.
This is my privilege problem and it is time for me to engage in the counter-cultural act of giving thanks.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 