Social Infrastructure

This week, I went to the Mid-Winter Meeting of the American Library Association in Seattle. I went to a talk about “social infrastructure” by Eric Klinenberg. He is a sociologist from the University of Chicago, where I went to college and graduate school. He teaches at New York University.

Klinenberg believes that a strong social infrastructure makes people happier, lengthens life spans, and increases the chances that people will live through a natural disaster.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t hear of neighbors dying in hurricanes, wild fires, or tornadoes. The last big earthquake only caused one death in the entire Puget Sound area. The Big One is predicted to be much more severe, but it’s hard to get worked up about it in comparison to the deadly heat and cold waves that kill the elderly in the big cities of the Midwest and Northeast like Chicago and New York every few years. We have our forest fires, but the threat of fire on the rain soaked west side of the Cascade is not the terror of dry eastern Washington, Oregon, and California.

But I was still interested by Klinenberg’s talk. His social infrastructure is the set of institutions that bring neighbors together and foster a sense of caring for the other members of the community.

In my own community of Ferndale, an example of social infrastructure of the past was three-hand pinochle in the back room of the old Cedars Tavern on the corner of Main and Second (Now Outlaws Saloon). Farmers, construction workers, and other folks played cards and gossiped on rainy afternoons. I don’t know if back-room card games are still around, but while they went on, they brought together the community, cutting across social and cultural boundaries in ways that some closer-knit organizations, like churches, or civic organizations like Rotary or Kiwanis, do not. Of course, churches and civic organizations have an important place in social infrastructure, but they are not the same as broader based institutions.

The Ferndale Public Library is also an example. Folks of all ages and economic position mix together in a new and airy building. Kids attend story-times. There’s a LEGO club. Teens have Whatcomics and a readers theater. Adults have their book clubs, computer sessions, English practice sessions, and stress management classes. All ages read and check out books and magazines, borrow music and videos, and use free wi-fi and internet terminals. A librarian will help you find instructions for rebuilding the smoke lift on a 1954 Farmall B. Most importantly, folks see and interact with each other. Go into the library. Getting a smile and nod from a complete stranger there is the easiest thing in the world.

Another example is the Ferndale public school system. Kids are educated in schools, but schools do more than educate. When I entered the first grade, the first refinery, then Mobil, was completed at Cherry Point. I went to school with kids who had just arrived from Olean, an oil refining center in western New York State. Their parents were transferred to Ferndale to run the new plant. I remember going to PTA potlucks and other school events during which my parents met these new and different neighbors. Later, with the opening of another refinery and an aluminum plant, the population of Ferndale expanded and diversified. The schools, especially the high school, where the entire district turns out regularly for football and basket ball games, was an important force in welding the community together.

Social infrastructure brings people together who would not ordinarily mix in their work and home life. The school brings together parents and children, causes them to get to know one another at ball games, school concerts, plays and other events. Ferndale has always needed this, we still need it now. The Whatcom County Health Department reported this month that two Whatcom County communities with healthy social infrastructures (Bellingham and Lynden) stand out with lower rates of death from heart issues and cancer.

The social fabric of Ferndale has changed in the last 60 years. Back room card rooms have been replaced by a gleaming casino. The high school of a few hundred students that I graduated from is now the largest in the county. The high school building, which was dated in 1967, is still in use. In a few days, Ferndale will vote on a school bond to rebuild the high school and performing arts center. If the bond succeeds, Ferndale will carry on a tradition of a healthy social infrastructure that has kept the community going for over a century.

Disclaimer: I’m chairman of the board of trustees of the Whatcom County Library System and I use the Ferndale Public Library at least once a week. I haven’t been enrolled in high school for over fifty years.

Libraries and Optimism

Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.

I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.

In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.

But we are not.

In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.

Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.

The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.

Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.

But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.

The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.

Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.

Christmas 2017

2017 has been a year of ugly politics, grotesque politicians, collapsing heroes, sobering international affairs, and natural disasters. I, and a lot of others, don’t expect to be nostalgic for 2017 in years ahead. I started to write this as a catalog of woes, but I’ll leave that job to someone else, someone plagued with enough schadenfreude to enjoy the task.

Instead, I declare my love for Christmas. During the month of December, I listen to classical Christmas music constantly. I hum Christmas hymns while my Border Collie, Albert, takes me out walking. I get teary over old Christmas movies and nostalgically remember school Christmas programs from 60 years ago. When I was six, I held a vine maple crook made for me by my grandfather and wore a red flannel bathrobe with cowboys on it, playing a shepherd in a nativity tableau.

Today, I reread my favorite Nero Wolfe mystery, “The Christmas Party,” to warm up for the holiday. Wolfe poses as Santa tending bar to spy on Archie and is forced to solve a murder in order to prevent being found out. I don’t fully understand Rex Stout’s attitude toward women, sexuality, and race expressed in the story because I am not sure what is humor and what is over-earnest opinion, but I smiled as I read it. The story suggests to me Wodehouse with a sharp edge.

This is a remarkable Christmas for the Whatcom County Public Library System, of which I am an enthusiastic trustee. I must bore people by now when I tell them I got my first library card over sixty years ago from the county library bookmobile parked in front of North Bellingham Elementary School. I don’t recall the name of the first book I checked out. It had a gray cover and yellow ducks inside. I didn’t like it much, but it started something.

Two years ago, the library adopted a simple five-year strategy and goal: get people to read more. We chose increasing circulation by 10% as a metric. The December numbers are not complete, but it looks like we may meet our five-year goal in just two years. The staff has been working hard. They trained everyone from pages to trustees in better ways to encourage readers to find books they enjoy. We undertook a marketing campaign that has won national awards.

We have a new library under construction that is financed largely from public donations rather than taxes and another new branch in early planning. Most importantly, when I wander through our nine branch libraries I see children, teens, and adults with their heads buried in books absorbing the wonders of culture and knowledge that libraries have housed for centuries.

An impressive Christmas for a rural county library system stuck in the farthest northwest corner of the continental US and over half taken up by  mountainous state and federal forests, a national park, and wilderness.

There are other reasons for joy in this season. Since last December, the women’s advocacy organization, Emily’s List, has heard from 16,000 women interested in running for office. That is over ten times the number that inquired in 2015 and 2016 combined. And it’s not just women. And not only Democrats. All over the country, business people, veterans, professionals of all genders are planning to run for office for the first time, for high-profile federal offices as well as city and county councils, state legislatures, every kind of office. I foresee an overwhelming change in the country’s governance that will be felt for decades. The day of the professional politician is ending, disempowered by the digital disruption of politics and replaced by digitally informed citizens. What will that be like? I hope to see it soon.

Peace and Joy to everyone.