Don't You Dare Duck, Either

Family dysfunction. You don't see me discussing it much because I'm a little bit raw from it. On the one hand, reliving pain is the best source of humor. On the other hand, reliving pain is the best source of relapse, which is the best source of a med-adjustment, which is on the road to Zombie Town and/or a new room at Harborview with built in straps, and new friends bearing needles for those all-important around-the-clock blood tests.

But I think I can avoid all that by not actually making family dysfunction the subject of my talk, but rather the day's primary source of analogies. Therefore I will not be talking directly about such situations as occur such as where Mommy "lovingly" corrects you too hard and breaks your brain permanently. Instead I'll talk about other stuff that happens and only refer to those situations by way of illustration.

So my goal today is to piss away the rest of my column space talking about things that resemble family dysfunctioning that I've known.

How 'bout that Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness?

We're all one big happy family at the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness! Why wouldn't we be? We're ending homelessness! In ten years! We've said so!

Turns out that's a bit like promising to honor and obey until death do us part. After about two or three years a promise like that has a way of morphing into, "You expect me to do what? You want to die?" Which if you think about it is the same thing.

Some of you might recall that back in January I had fun laughing about a thing, in the planning of the ten year's planning, called the Ten Year Plan dashboard. That was a document, or maybe it was a 'device', which was not finished, which WHEN finished would tell the big shots at the top of the planning process when the planning car was in need of oil or gas or a tune-up, so they could order their underlings to take care of that.

It turns out that it was totally dysfunctional of me to -- using the day's primary analogy source -- "snicker at Daddy that way." You're not supposed to snicker at Daddy when Daddy is busy telling you how things are going to happen around here in the future. You're supposed to hold your tongue until Daddy has made a new rule, and then, when you are spoken to, you may say what you think of the new rule, provided you speak respectfully.

It was especially dysfunctional of me because such things as governing dashboards are common in organizations. Even Real Change has been working on one. So I had snickered at Daddy for doing something all Daddies do. Next thing you know I'll be laughing at Daddy for breaking wind.

In a slightly different vein, last week our director Timothy "My Cage Is Too Dirty" Harris smelled something bad coming our way from the Seattle weekly named so. A writer at that weekly was asking questions of Real Change folks that made it seem like either a bogus 'expose' was being manufactured, or that someone had a bean and cheese burrito for breakfast.

We've seen these things elsewhere. A local 'investigation' reveals that some vendors at a street paper make so much money they can afford apartments, and they aren't fired for it! Some vendors meet the conditions of incentive programs to get guaranteed turf and other vendors don't! Vendors are caught drinking alcohol in their time off, as if they were ordinary people, and the director does nothing to stop them!

So Tim did a dysfunctional thing. He had the audacity to use his blog, Apesma's Lament, to object in advance of anything actually happening. The writer hasn't even written a story yet!*

What have we learned today? 1) Never giggle at your Betters. 2) You're not supposed to scream before your Betters hit you.

* That was when I wrote this. The article under discussion, by Huan Hsu, is out now.

Control Freaks

I like driving. I like smashing things, and driving is a fun easy way to smash things. My favorite things to have smashed, so far, include a Plymouth sedan, a Ford station wagon, a Chevy Impala station wagon, assorted bushes, a brand spanking-new Scirocco (totaled!), and I think a Honda, or Toyota, I’m not sure because it got away from me. The state doesn’t let me drive anymore, since the Honda, or Toyota.

But I don’t mean to reminisce about my fun cab driving days. I want to talk about driving public policy.

Driving provides a great metaphor for how power is exercised. It leads you to pay attention not only to who’s in the driver’s seat but also how the controls are set up, and how they’re used. Are there airbags? Are there cup-holders? Can the driver lock the kiddies in securely with a push of a button? Or can they open their doors and hurl themselves to the pavement, risking instant death, any time they want?

I was alerted to the value of driving as a metaphor for the control of public policy by the people at the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEHKC). They are working out what they call their 10-Year Plan Dashboard Project. The idea of this Dashboard Project of theirs is to maintain 9 or 10 measurements associated with eight desirable outcomes having to do with ending homelessness in 10 years. These measurements will be made available to the Governing Board of CEHCK, and updated on a regular schedule. The Governing Board will steer policy accordingly.

Then, when the measurements go “red,” or “tits up,” as we professional drivers call it, the Governing Board will call in the professional mechanics, otherwise known as the CEHCK InterAgency Council (IAC).

For example, people who want to end homelessness would like there to be lots of apartments that poor people can rent. So the Governing Board at CEHCK says, increasing “access to existing units (rental) stock for people who experience homelessness in King County” is a desirable outcome. But they don’t know how to measure access to rental stock. So the associated measurement is gotten by counting the number of fully subsidized rental units in the county. This they can do because they know all the folks handing out the subsidies on a first-name basis, and have them all on speed-dial.

The Governing Board will eye the “fully subsidized rental units” dial along with 8 or 9 other dials like it, while they drive the 10-Year Plan Cadillac, making this policy decision here, that policy decision there. Then, like I said, when the dial swings way down, they’ll pull over. They won’t look under the hood and pretend to know what to do. Instead they’ll immediately call the mechanics, the IAC, on their cell phones. These mechanics, by the way, happen to be mostly the same people who manage the subsidized properties. So they’re confident they can fix anything to do with subsidies. They guarantee it!

Notice there are no nasty politics involved. The metaphor doesn’t put legislators in the Cadillac. Instead it puts them on and around the road, as obstacles to avoid. Also, nobody is handing out tickets when the driver hits a lamppost.

There’s another way to do this kind of driving. In 2003, Scotland passed a law granting all citizens the right to housing, and created what amounts to a 9-year plan to end homelessness by making 2012 the deadline for turning the right into reality.

So in Scotland the legislators, or parliament, got in the car at the outset, inserted the key and turned it. They put their First Minister in the driver’s seat and told him to watch not 9 or 10 dials but a few more than 5 million, one for each citizen. The courts will keep the driver from swerving off the road.

No driving on the left side of the road in America.