Entry 385: Parking and Politics

On the first day of summer school, I used the roundabout like we were asked.  It was a bit slow, but to the school's credit they kept it flowing as best they could.  The main issue was that a traffic light on a neighboring street went out and caused a jam that backed up all the way to the school.  That's just an unfortunate one-off event.  It's not the school's fault, and it's not something that happens regularly.

On the next day, however, I decided to test out street parking.  I pulled up right in front of the guy monitoring the streets, parked, got Lil' S1 out, and started to walk toward the school.  He politely confronted me and told me I couldn't park there.  I said I'd just be a minute and took Lil' S1 inside.  On the way back I went up to him and hashed out the parking issue.  It was mostly a friendly conversation.  I was probably a bit overly contentious at first because I felt like he was bullshitting me, but once he realized I wasn't going to let it fly, the conversation took a turn for the better.  Here's a pharaphrased excerpt.

Me: The thing that bothers me is that that's not how parking works anywhere else.  I can't tell people not to park on my street Sunday afternoon for church.  It's a city street.  Anybody can park there within the laws of the city.
Him: It's part of our zoning agreement with the neighborhood.  I can show your the clause in the paperwork.  It's something we agreed to with the neighborhood association.
Me: But there are no signs anywhere stating this.  If this neighborhood is zoned different for parking at this time, why hasn't the city changed the signage?
Him: It's not an agreement with the city.  It's our agreement neighborhood association.
Me: OK, then what streets are specified in the agreement?
Him: We don't have specific streets laid out.  It's just that we have an agreement that you won't park on the street to drop your kid off.
Me: I don't see how you can possibly enforce that.  I don't see how that's legally binding.
Him: [This is where his tone changed]  Well, it's not legally binding.  I'll be honest, if you continue to park there, there's nothing I can really do about it.  I'm not going to, like, call the cops or anything.
Me: Then what's the point?  Why not just let me park here without bothering me?
Him: I wish I could, honestly.  I'm the director of finance.  I'm the third highest paid employee at the school, and I'm out here doing this every morning, because if I don't people in the neighborhood complain.  It's really only two or three families, but they have a lot of pull, and they can make it hard on us.  I agree with you, actually.  I wish we could push back on this.  But we have to play nice.
Me: And these people with a lot a pull, if they go out to eat in DuPont Circle, and they park on the street in front of a bunch row houses, do you think they even consider how it affects the residents of that neighborhood?
Him: Of course not.  I'm sure they don't.  You're right.

And I figured there wasn't going to be a better note to leave on than that.  He could have just been telling me what I wanted to hear, but I took him at his word, in part because I didn't want to get to work too late.

So now I have to decide what to do.  I don't think I'm going to park on the street in plain view again, especially if this guy is out on patrol.  Then I would be directly defying him, and that's not something I want to do.  I'm not going to get on the bad side of a school administrator over this.  But I might park on the side streets out of view.  Or I might just breakdown and use the roundabout.  It's actually faster than parking.  But it's also more annoying.  So I dunno.

In other news, the Senate is posed to vote on their "repeal and replace" Obamacare bill.  It actually neither repeals nor replaces Obamacare; it just takes away a lot of its funding to pay for tax cuts for rich people.  It's an awful, cruel bill, and one that will probably disproportionately hurt people who vote for Republicans.  But I still think it will pass in some form (Jonathan Chait explains why nicely in this article), and I think the political blow back from the right will be less severe than one would hope.  I suspect a disturbingly high percentage of rank-and-file Republican voters would trade away health insurance for white nationalism.  Then you toss in the people who don't actually know how legislation works (the "KEEP GOVMENT OUT OF MEDICADE DAMMIT" people), the tribalists who would rather die than help a "libertard" win an election, and the affluent people who actually like the new law because it cuts their taxes, and you've got almost the entirety of the Republican electorate.  Man, what a loathsome party.

But if you want to end on bit optimism it's this: The Republican margin of error in elections does appear to be waning (slowly waning, painfully slowly waning, but waning nonetheless).  It often seems things will never change, but they always do.  And if this disastrous healthcare bill shaves off a sliver of the GOP advantage, it will help things change -- for the better.  It's not much of a silver lining, but it's something.

Until next time...

Entry 384: My School Parking Dilemma

I have a minor dilemma on my hands at the moment.  It has to do with school parking, which is an underrated source of consternation in many parents' lives.  My oldest son starts summer camp on Monday at an expensive private school a few neighborhoods away from us.  They have curbside drop-off, so parents don't have to get out of their car, which is especially nice for parents who have other little kids with them, but I prefer not to use it.  I always drop Lil' S2 off at his daycare first, and the school's roundabout drop-off zone always turns into a massive clusterfuck, which I do my best to avoid, so I like to park on the street and walk the few dozen yards to the school.  Some other parents like to do this too.

But this year in the back-to-school packet it says explicitly that we are not supposed to park on the street anymore due to an "agreement" between the school and the homeowners in the area, who are undoubtedly annoyed by the added congestion in the neighborhood caused by street parking.  This request, to not park in the street, has been reiterated in several subsequent emails.

My dilemma: Do I continue to park on the street this summer?  At first blush, the answer is no, because it's now against the rules.  But here's the thing: The street doesn't belong to either the school nor the homeowners.  It belongs to they city.  Anybody is allowed to park there within the confines of DC law.  The school and the homeowners have no legal right to make an agreement among themselves governing city parking.  Of course the agreement could be that the school will ask parents not to park there as an act of goodwill (which I think is the case), but unless they made some sort of agreement with the city as well (which I don't think is the case) then it doesn't hold any water beyond an expression of courtesy.

And so there is a big part of me that says "fuck it," if it's legal to park on the street, I'm going to park on the street if I damn well please.  After all, that's how it works everywhere else in the city.  I live within a mile radius of at least 20 churches (not an exaggeration), on Sunday afternoon there is never street parking on my block.  We just have to deal with it.  A prominent Jewish school is three doors down from me, and when the bus drops off kids in the morning it blocks an entire lane of traffic; sometimes I have to drive a little bit out of the way to avoid the congestion.  But that's part of living in society, especially in a big city.  Everybody in every neighborhood has to deal with a business or a school or any other establishment that attracts crowds.  Having to put up with a little extra congestion for -- what? --  a hour half?  45 minutes? twice a day is hardly an exceptional burden.

The whole thing smacks of entitlement and privilege to me -- which I hate.  The school is in a very wealthy part of town, and I strongly suspect this would not be an issue if it wasn't.  It's really rich people who are annoyed because it takes them an extra three minutes to get out of their neighborhood during their morning commutes, and they pay a lot in property taxes, dammit!  Meanwhile, I assure you, when they go somewhere else in the city and have to park on the street, they don't give a second thought as to how it affects people in that community.  It's total, hypocritical BS.

With that said, sometimes it's better to just go along and get along, even if you're getting the short end of the stick.  It doesn't behoove me in any way to get on the bad side of the people who are responsible for the well-being of my son for eight hours a day for the next six weeks.  If they ask me not to park on the street, then isn't it best to just not park on the street?  Therein lies my dilemma.

Well, I have to go now, but I'm sure you are all on the edge of your seats waiting to see how this all resolves, so I will keep you posted.  But for now, I must bid you adieu.

Until next time...

Entry 383: More of the Same

The big news this week is that James Comey testified before Congress.  I don't have much to say about it, because it was more of the same.  We all already know that Russia interfered with the election; we all already know that James Comey was investigating this; we all already know that Donald Trump didn't want him to, because (a) the interference helped him (he publicly encouraged it), (b) he or his associates have been in cahoots with the Russians, (c) he has deep financial ties to Russia that he doesn't want detailed in public; we all already know Trump fired Comey specifically because of this investigation; we all already know that this is grounds for an obstruction of justice case; we all already know that congressional Republicans already know this and they don't care; and we all already know that Donald Trump lies constantly, so it's not even worth considering what he says in his own defense.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Comey testified.  I'm glad all this stuff is on record.  I just don't think it changes anything.  I didn't understand the hype.  Congressional Republicans have made it clear that there is no transgression too egregious and no embarrassment too great for them to turn against Trump in any meaningful way.  As long as they have a president willing to sign into law tax cuts for the rich, they will put up with literally anything.  If you told Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that Donald Trump signed over the country to Putin to pay off his debts, their first move would be to Google "What's the marginal tax rate in Russia?"

The unfortunate reality is that we are very likely stuck with Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.  We have to vote him out (and vote out his party in the midterms for being complicit).  It's our best hope.  And even that might not work.  Because Trump is shady as hell and will do everything he can to tilt any election in his favor, legal or otherwise, and even if things are on the up-and-up, he's still very popular with a sizable portion of the country.  He's certainly more popular than Congressional Republicans, which is another reason why they put up with everything he does.  They recognize that if Republican voters are forced to choose between them and Trump, it's not going to go well for them.  The only incentive they have to oppose Trump is one of dignity and patriotism, and if you think those are important qualities to Republican leaders, you haven't been pay attention for the past 25 years.

And Trump's base doesn't mind his lying and undermining of democratic norms.  They like it even.  Because they see it as pushing back against "the deep state" whatever the hell that means.  That's one thing that his election has made abundantly clear.  A lot of people aren't all that interested in things like honesty and constitutional democracy.  They have different values -- or value, rather  They're one issue voters: white supremacy.  That's it.  That's their issue.  It always comes back to this, doesn't it?

Yes, I know not everybody who voted for Trump is a white supremacist.  But I do think this is the strongest through line of his base.  A data scientist name Seth Stephens Davidowitz just put out a new book in which he analyzes behavior based on Google trends, and he argued pretty convincingly (in an interview, I just started his book, so I haven't gotten to the good part yet) that racism was the main driver of Trump's election.  Van Jones got it right when he called it "white lash."  A decent hunk of the population feels like demographic changes are being shoved down their throats (because things really are changing), and they don't like it.  So they respond to somebody like Donald Trump who says openly the things that other Republicans are only willing to convey via dog whistle.  It doesn't matter if these things are true or not.  The content isn't important; it's all about the context.  And the context is pretty clear: Let's keep America a white-dominated country for a little bit longer.

Now, the good news is that most people don't think this way.  The bad news is that "most" is only like 55%, not 95%, where it should be.  And of this 55%, a lot of them don't vote (when they do, we get Obama; when they don't, we get Trump), and of those who do vote, too many of them are congregated in the same ten or so cities, which makes winning majorities district-by-district and state-by-state an uphill battle.  So I genuinely don't know how this ends.  I think ten years from now, we'll be in a better place, thinking to ourselves, "God, I'm glad that shit is over."  But I don't think it's a sure thing by any means.

Alright, I think I have to wrap it up here.  S is out of the country for a while, so I'm on extra dad duty.  Her parents came up to help out, which I'm always extremely grateful for, but they can only do so much, because the boys will only let them do so much.  Most of it is on me, which is okay, but it means free time for blogging is even more limited than it usually is.

[S posted this on FaceBook.  An undisclosed location in Ghana, where she was stationed for the week.  Good for her.  She works hard at her job and at home.  Any amenities she gets are well-earned.] 

Until next time...