Yes, Virginia, trans rights are human rights

The Easter Resurrection: Not of Christ, but of Common Decency

Dear Editor: I am 42 years old, and some people say you should remain silent when family members casually dehumanize entire groups of people. These same people probably think chocolate bunnies are an appropriate substitute for standing up for basic human dignity.

I recently had a conversation with someone—let's call her "Virginia," because nothing says "protecting the identity of transphobes" like using the name of an entire commonwealth—who expressed views about transgender people that would make Tucker Carlson blush with professional jealousy.

After ending our call with the diplomacy of someone evacuating a building that smells like gas, I received a series of texts that could generously be described as "I'm doubling down!" First came the classic non-apology ("I'm sorry YOU don't believe I should FEEL this way"), followed by a YouTube video about a transgender swimmer. The video was deeply unserious, offering nothing more than subjective anecdotes, misrepresentation of institutional policies, slippery slopes, straw men, false equivalences, confirmation bias, intentional misgendering, and overgeneralizations.

In short, it was an interview with a bigot who wants to be seen as a victim and not a perpetrator. The crescendo was a cherry-picked news story about a rape case where—surprise!—pronouns were somehow framed as the real villain.

Today is Easter Sunday. It is a holiday celebrating a guy who was literally known for hanging out with society's outcasts and telling self-righteous people to stop being such massive jerks—a position deemed so extreme that the state politely replied by torturing him to death in public.

So, Virginia, this isn't a debate. I'm not "just asking questions" or "having a dialogue" about whether some humans deserve basic dignity and legal protection. I'm writing this to explain why you're wrong—not just factually wrong (though hoo boy, are you ever), but wrong in the deeper, "this-is-not-who-you-were-raised-to-be" sense of the word.

Consider this my Easter gift to you: an opportunity for resurrection. Not of the 2,000-year-old preacher kind, but of your basic human empathy. After all, if there's one thing Easter teaches us, it's that profound transformation is possible—even from those we've given up for dead.

The Drag Queen Paradox

There was a story on the news last night showing life imitating an old children's riddle. It seems that a truck got stuck at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Too high for the clearance. Well, for hours, the experts tried to find some way to unwedge the vehicle, but to no avail. Finally, a ten-year-old girl in a passing car suggested simply letting the air out of the truck's tires, thus lowering it to the clearance level, which they did. And it worked.

— Working Girl (1988)

Remember that time in elementary school when your teacher asked a riddle that stumped all the adults but seemed blindingly obvious to the kids?

That's exactly what we're dealing with when it comes to anti-trans arguments. The argument goes something like this: "I have no problem with a man wearing a dress, but I don't think that they should be doing it around kids! I heard that some schools are even letting these drag queens visit schools! They're reading stories to children and indoctrinating them with gender ideology!"

A deviant radical rabbit impersonator spreading their bunny ideology, allegedly.
source: https://bellevuecollection.com/easterbunny/

Here's the paradox at the heart of Virginia's position (and those of the countless talking heads who've monetized this particular flavor of outrage): If gender truly is fixed, biological, and immutable, then dressing up in drag is simply theater—a harmless performance, no different from wearing any other costume. It can't "change" or "influence" a child's gender identity any more than dressing as the Easter Bunny can turn a child into a rabbit.

This is not a light point. The biological essentialists love to clutch their pearls, and claim that their bigotry is rooted in concern—"Think of the children!"—and will gleefully refer to transwomen as "men wearing dresses." By this logic, we've already established that drag (and by extension, social transition) is just a presentation of fabric and makeup. The person underneath remains unchanged because, remember, gender is supposedly immutable!

But if drag is somehow "dangerous" or influential to children's gender identities, then gender must actually be fluid, socially constructed and influenced by culture, environment, or role models. This would mean gender isn't strictly binary or biologically fixed—and if gender is malleable, there's no basis for discriminating against people whose identities differ from traditional norms. To suggest that merely witnessing drag performances could somehow alter a child's gender identity is to admit that gender isn't fixed after all. Oops!

So which is it? Is gender an unchangeable biological reality, in which case drag is just harmless dress-up? Or is gender so fragile and impressionable that it can be altered by exposure to someone wearing sequins and reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"? Because it literally cannot be both.

The truth is that neither position justifies bigotry. If gender is fluid, then we should respect transgender identities as valid, part of the human continuum of gender and sexuality. If gender is fixed, then a trans person's existence is not a threat to anyone else's gender identity. Either way, the only logical conclusion is respect and acceptance.

This isn't advanced calculus. It's not even long division. It's the kind of basic reasoning any third-grader could follow. And that's what makes it so maddening—the failure isn't one of intellectual capacity, but of willful blindness. Because the point was never logical consistency. The point was always to find a socially acceptable veneer for plain old prejudice.

The Time-Wasting Machine: Why "Debating" Human Rights Is A Trap

A man walks into a pawn shop and asks, "How much for this gold chain?" The pawnbroker, seasoned and skeptical, takes the chain and performs his usual test—scratching it with a file. As expected, it's fake.

The next day, the same man walks in and presents another supposed gold chain. Still skeptical, the pawnbroker applies acid to this chain, and finds that it is also a fake. Day after day, the same person brings in gold chains. Each time, the pawnbroker tests them, and each time, they turn out to be counterfeit.

Eventually, THE PAWNBROKER stops testing altogether, dismissing every chain as fake without a second glance. It's a waste of time, and the pawnbroker has better things to do.

—The Parable of The Pawnbroker

Virginia, those garbage YouTube videos you sent me are counterfeit gold chains. And frankly, I've run out of acid. The fact is that you've had plenty of time to sincerely research this topic in earnest, to listen to queer and transgender voices, and learn with empathy and an open mind. You've chosen instead to pick low-hanging fruit from low-effort propagandists on the dregs of the internet. Dismissing expertise doesn't make you a rebel, it makes you a fool.

As YouTuber Thought Slime (aka Mildred) brilliantly explains in their video "Fascists Will Waste Your Time," debates with bigots aren't actually debates at all. They're time-theft operations. While you're out there living your life (working, caring for loved ones, enjoying hobbies, and (presumably) having sex) the professional bigot has nothing better to do than argue endlessly about whether certain humans deserve basic dignity.

Their strategy isn't to win these arguments. It's to have them in the first place. To keep the question perpetually open. To make it seem like human rights are up for reasonable discussion between well-meaning adults instead of what they actually are: non-negotiable table stakes for participating in civilization.

And, I'm paraphrasing Mildred here, ask yourself this: If I came to your house for Easter dinner and spent the entire meal loudly questioning whether your best friend Amanda deserves basic human rights—"I'm just saying, what if Amanda shouldn't be allowed to use public bathrooms? I'm just asking questions!"—how long would I remain at your table? Ten seconds? Maybe fifteen if you needed time to put down your fork?

Yet somehow when the target of this rhetorical harassment is an entire marginalized group of Amandas, we're all expected to entertain these arguments ad nauseam. We're labeled "extreme" if we don't patiently explain, for the eleventy millionth time, why transgender people deserve legal recognition, fair access to public spaces, housing, healthcare, and the basic courtesy of being addressed by their correct names. I call bullshit.

It's an exhaustion tactic. In today's saturated outrage media environment, nobody has time to research and formulate thoughtful responses to every half-baked theory pushed by rage-merchants on Facebook. We're drowning in information, and the anti-trans crowd knows it. They don't need to convince you with valid arguments—they just need to overwhelm you with so many bad ones that you throw up your hands and say, "I don't know what to believe anymore."

Description: a Nazi loser doing Nazi loser shit.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1oBfg0fwI

This strategy is particularly effective on people who feel economically or socially vulnerable. When you're worried about paying medical bills or keeping your job, it's oddly comforting to believe there's a simple enemy responsible for your struggles. The billionaire class certainly isn't going to volunteer for that role, so they make sure the spotlight stays firmly fixed on marginalized groups who make convenient scapegoats.

The fascist doesn't debate to discover truth. Truth is irrelevant. They debate to normalize the idea that some people's humanity is questionable in the first place. Every minute you spend arguing whether trans people are "real" is a minute where you've implicitly accepted that this is something reasonable people can disagree about.

It isn't.

So the next time someone tries to drag you into one of these "debates," remember the pawnbroker. Remember that you can simply say, "Shut up, you're being an asshole." It's not closed-minded—it's time management. It's recognizing that some positions aren't worthy of debate, some gold chains are obviously fake, and some YouTube videos are just thinly-veiled hate wrapped in a trench coat of pseudo-intellectualism.

Simply put: A fascist will always have endless bad faith arguments, but reasonable people are not obligated to entertain every shitty thing a Nazi has to say.

Pass the Easter ham, please.

History Doesn't Repeat, But It Sure Does Rhyme

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

―Jean-Paul Sartre

There's a reason the words "Never Again" still echo through Jewish communities worldwide. History has taught us that atrocities don't begin with violence—they begin with words. With dehumanization. With the quiet acceptance that some people's dignity is up for debate.

Before we dive into this section, let me acknowledge something: comparing anything to Nazi Germany risks hyperbole. The totalitarian machinery of the Third Reich was uniquely horrific. But understanding how that machinery was built—brick by rhetorical brick—isn't alarmist; it's essential pattern recognition.

Loser Nazi assholes destroying books taken from the library of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld
Source: https://daily.jstor.org/90-years-on-the-destruction-of-the-institute-of-sexual-science/

Many people don't realize that when Nazi forces came to power in 1933, one of their earliest targets wasn't Jewish people, it was the transgender and homosexual community in Berlin. At the time, Berlin was home to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld—a pioneering research center that conducted groundbreaking studies on human sexuality, including some of the earliest work supporting transgender individuals. On May 6, 1933, just months after Hitler became Chancellor, Nazis raided this institute. Days later, they burned its library of over 20,000 books and research materials in a public bonfire, destroying decades of irreplaceable knowledge about gender and sexuality. This wasn't a random act of violence—it was a methodical erasure of knowledge that contradicted their ideology.

As historian W. Jake Newsome documents, Nazi officials like Wilhelm Frick declared that "unnatural fornication between men must be prosecuted with all severity as this vice will lead to the downfall of the German people" [Pink Triangle Legacies Project]. Sound familiar? The rhetoric of "protecting children" and "saving civilization" has always been the cover for targeting marginalized groups.

The pattern is distressingly predictable:

1. First comes the dehumanizing language: labeling a group as "degenerate," "unnatural," or a "threat" to society.

2. Then come legal restrictions: laws that push the targeted group out of public life.

3. Finally comes violence—sometimes state-sanctioned, sometimes merely state-tolerated.

After the initial book burnings, the Nazi regime dramatically expanded persecution under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalized homosexuality. Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality, with roughly 50,000 officially sentenced. Of these, between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where they were forced to wear the infamous pink triangle. Many were subjected to torture, medical experimentation, and execution. Survivor testimonies, like that of Josef Kohout (who wrote under the name Heinz Heger), detail unimaginable cruelty—beatings, rape, and public humiliation specifically targeting gay prisoners.

This persecution wasn't just the work of fanatics at the top. It required the quiet complicity of ordinary citizens—people who might have personally known someone gay or transgender but who chose to look away, to accept the new normal, to believe that maybe there was something to what the authorities were saying about "those people."

I can hear you now, Virginia: "But that was Nazi Germany! That's not what's happening here!" And you're right—we aren't living in a totalitarian dictatorship... yet. But that's precisely why these early warning signs are so important to recognize.

In Florida alone, the past few years have witnessed a staggering acceleration of anti-transgender legislation. In May 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a package of bills that banned gender-affirming care for minors, restricted it for adults, prohibited transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in government buildings, and created new restrictions on drag performances. As DeSantis himself put it, "We are going to remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy" [BBC]—implying, of course, that transgender identities are neither sane nor normal.

In 2024, HB 1639 (dubbed the "Trans Erasure Bill") passed committee in the Florida House, aiming to ban transgender Floridians from accessing accurate driver's licenses and IDs. As Equality Florida noted, the bill exists "for the purpose of bullying transgender Floridians out of public life entirely" [Equality Florida]. These aren't isolated actions—they're part of a coordinated nationwide campaign. The year 2025 is already on track to break records for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, with over 120 bills filed across the country before the year even began [Truthout].

When a transgender Floridian named Amy Lundberg sought gender-affirming surgery, she discovered that the University of Miami had stopped providing these services altogether—not officially because of the legislation, but because "the state's holding back funding for any institution that does anything" supportive of transgender people [NBC Miami]. This isn't about protecting children; it's about erasing an entire community from public life.

Like in 1930s Germany, the persecution isn't being carried out by monsters. It's being enabled by ordinary people—people like you, Virginia—who may not harbor deep hatred in their hearts but who have been convinced that there's something dangerous about transgender existence. People who wouldn't personally harm anyone but who vote for politicians promising to "restore normalcy" by excluding those who don't fit narrow definitions of gender. People who might say, "I have no problem with them, but..." and then proceed to explain why basic human dignity should come with conditions attached.

"Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than "politics."

They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren't nice people? Resisters."

― Naomi Shulman

The lesson of history isn't that we're doomed to repeat it. The lesson is that we have a choice. We can recognize these patterns early, speak out against dehumanization in all its forms, and refuse to be complicit in the gradual erasure of our neighbors' humanity. Or we can look away until the machinery of hate has gained too much momentum to stop—when non-violent resistance is no longer a viable option and we must throw ourselves against the gears until they seize.

As federal judge Robert Hinkle wrote when permanently blocking Florida's anti-transgender healthcare law in June 2024: "Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs. But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender. In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished" [LA Times].

History may not repeat exactly, but it rhymes. And right now, Florida's laws are rhyming with some very dark chapters of our past. The question isn't whether you'll end up on the right side of history—it's whether you'll get there before more damage is done.

Let's be crystal clear about something that right-wing politicians and professional idiots love to obscure: there is no actual scientific debate about the validity or necessity of gender-affirming care. Every major medical organization in the United States supports gender-affirming care as medically necessary and often life-saving. This includes:

• The American Medical Association, which has explicitly stated that "gender-affirming care is medically necessary" and "has been linked to dramatically reduced rates of suicide attempts" AMA, 2023

• The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing over 67,000 pediatricians

• The American Psychological Association

• The American Psychiatric Association

• The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

• The Endocrine Society

• The World Professional Association for Transgender Health

• The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

• The American College of Physicians

Collectively, these organizations represent more than 1.3 million doctors across the United States [HRC, 2025]. The medical consensus is overwhelming. This isn't a "both sides" issue where reasonable people can disagree—it's a case where politicians are overriding the recommendations of literally every relevant medical expert simply because it's politically convenient.

What's At Stake: This Isn't Academic

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

― Lyndon B. Johnson

The culture wars over transgender rights aren't just Twitter arguments—they have devastating real-world consequences. People's lives, literally, hang in the balance.

A 2024 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour found that anti-transgender laws directly caused increases in suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72% —not just correlation, but causation, established by tracking over 61,000 trans and nonbinary youth across five years [Trevor Project, 2024].

The CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that approximately 26% of transgender students attempted suicide in the past year, compared to just 5% of cisgender male students [CDC, 2023]. These aren't just statistics—they're children, siblings, and friends driven to the brink by a society that treats them as political talking points instead of human beings.

And it's not just the heightened suicide risk. Anti-transgender laws create cascading social and economic harms that ripple throughout communities—often the same communities that right-wing politicians claim to champion. Here's where it gets deeply ironic: the very people who rail against transgender rights are often hurting themselves in the process.

Consider the case of Trevor, featured in Jonathan Metzl's award-winning book "Dying of Whiteness." Trevor was a conservative white man in rural Tennessee with severe liver failure who needed medical care. Because Tennessee repeatedly blocked Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, he couldn't access the lifesaving care he needed. When asked if he supported Obamacare, Trevor told researchers: "Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die." [Boston Review]. His reason? He didn't want his tax dollars "paying for Mexicans or welfare queens."

This is the tragic irony that Metzl documents extensively: conservative white Americans often support policies that literally shorten their own lives. In Tennessee, resistance to the Affordable Care Act meant that white Americans who would have really benefited from healthcare reform were "loath to support Medicaid expansion" because they didn't want minorities to benefit [Boston University]. Metzl's research found that this opposition to expanded healthcare "cost every single white resident of the state 14.1 days of life." [Metzl].

The same dynamic plays out in the fight over transgender rights. By supporting politicians who demonize trans people, many rural Americans are backing leaders who are simultaneously gutting their healthcare, defunding their schools, and dismantling economic protections that would benefit them directly.

Rural communities and hospitals in states that refused to expand Medicaid have suffered disproportionately. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, expansion was associated with "a large reduction in hospital closures" [KFF]. When rural hospitals close, entire communities lose access to healthcare—not just transgender people.

Meanwhile, transgender people face extraordinary economic challenges. According to the Williams Institute, transgender people are four times more likely than the general population to be living below the poverty line, with more than 25 percent reporting an annual household income of less than $20,000 [Center for American Progress]. In states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA, the uninsurance rate among low- and middle-income LGBT communities dropped by 10 percentage points, compared to only 6 points in non-expansion states. This translates to real lives saved.

When politicians block healthcare access to score political points against transgender people, they're not just hurting the transgender community—they're hurting everyone who needs affordable healthcare, especially in rural areas. When they cut education funding while raging about "gender ideology," they're not just making schools less welcoming for transgender students—they're depriving all children of quality education.

Consider current statistics: According to the Human Rights Campaign, as of August 2024, 39.4% of transgender youth (about 118,300 teenagers) live in the 26 states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care [HRC]. These bans don't just affect transgender teens—they often include provisions that restrict public funds for healthcare across the board, limit what doctors can discuss with any patient, and interfere with the doctor-patient relationship for everyone.

Virginia, you might think the culture war over transgender rights doesn't affect you personally. But the politicians using transgender people as scapegoats are the same ones implementing policies that hurt your community, your healthcare, your schools, and your family's future. This isn't a coincidence—it's a deliberate strategy to distract you from the real sources of economic insecurity.

The medical evidence is overwhelming: gender-affirming care saves lives. A 2022 study in the journal JAMA Network Open found that gender-affirming care was associated with 73% lower odds of suicidality among transgender youth [JAMA Network Open]. When politicians override medical consensus, they're playing politics with people's lives—including the lives of their own constituents.

The fact is, the states with the most aggressive anti-transgender laws also have some of the nation's worst health outcomes, highest poverty rates, and most underfunded social services. This isn't helping anyone—it's hurting everyone except the politicians who ride the wave of manufactured outrage to power.

So the next time someone tells you that transgender people are the reason your community is struggling, remember: the real threat isn't the transgender teenager trying to live authentically or the drag queen reading stories at the library. The real threat is the cynical politician using them as distractions while picking your pocket and dismantling your healthcare.

Transphobia isn't just morally wrong—it's a scam by the wealthy that none of us can afford.

Beyond "Tolerance": The Problem With Being A Christian Bigot

I've tried to appeal to your compassion by showing the devastating harm caused by these laws. I've tried to appeal to your self-interest by showing how politicians use transphobia to undermine policies that would benefit your community directly. Now, let me appeal to your sense of religious values.

As we mark Easter Sunday, it's worth remembering what Jesus actually taught. He didn't tell us to protect "traditional gender roles." He didn't tell us to enforce conformity in others. He told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He surrounded himself with society's outcasts—people who violated every social norm of his time. The Jesus of the Gospels would be sitting with transgender youth today, not calling for their erasure from society.

In fact, our modern concept of "tolerance" falls far short of what Jesus actually taught. "Tolerance" suggests putting up with something unpleasant—like tolerating a toothache or tolerating a boring dinner guest. Jesus called for love, not tolerance. And love doesn't say "I'll put up with your existence as long as you stay out of my sight." Love says "I see you fully as you are, and I cherish what I see."

Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? When Jesus was asked "Who is my neighbor?" he didn't respond with "Only the people who look and act like you." He told a story about a despised foreigner showing mercy to someone from a group that hated him. The point was radical: your "neighbor" isn't defined by similarity—it's defined by shared humanity.

Florida's policies don't reflect these values. They don't reflect compassion or mercy. They don't even reflect basic American principles of equal protection under the law. What they reflect is fear—the same fear that has driven persecution throughout history.

So Virginia, I'm asking you to ask yourself: What would Jesus do? Would he support laws that drive children to suicide? Would he support erasing people from public life? Or would he sit with the marginalized, heal the wounded, and rebuke those who use religion as a cover for cruelty?

The Easter story isn't just about resurrection. It's about transformation. It's about the possibility of radical change. It's about seeing the world anew.

We all have biases. We all inherit prejudices. But we don't have to be defined by them. We can choose to grow. We can choose to learn. We can choose to see people—all people—as fully human, deserving of dignity, respect, and love.

That's my Easter prayer for you, Virginia. Not just tolerance, but transformation. Not just reluctant acceptance, but genuine celebration of the beautiful diversity of human experience.

The resurrection we need isn't of some ancient religious figure. It's the resurrection of our collective humanity. It's time to roll away the stone of prejudice and step into the light of compassion.

Yes, Virginia, trans rights are human rights. And that's not up for debate.

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"Liberation Day" Where do we go from here?

Since August last year I’ve been working at a food pantry: William Temple House. 72 days into the new administration and already we are straining to meet the increasing needs of our community. Recently, USDA announced that it is cutting shipments starting in May and June.

Due to these cuts, millions of pounds of food won't even make it to our state's food banks. When these shipments don't arrive, our food pantry will go empty at the exact same moment when millions of Americans are going to slip into poverty due to cuts elsewhere in the federal government.

We simply CANNOT absorb the amount of economic hardship this administration is about to place on American families. Couple this with plans to cut nutritional assistance programs like SNAP, and we are about to see tens of millions of vulnerable Americans (mainly children and seniors), go hungry.

Let me be clear about what I am saying: Americans are going to die because of this administration. The victims will be our children, elderly grandparents, the friend or cousin who lives with a disability, and the unlucky neighbors who happen to fall on hard times through no fault of their own.

During Trump's first administration, the crisis came to a head in 2020—during his final year in office. COVID-19 destabilized a fragile and fragmented social fabric and precarious economic condition. The negligence became too consequential for everyday Americans to ignore. The politically disengaged were blindsided by closed businesses and social distancing requirements. Our hospitals were flooded with the sick and dying.

Do you remember it? I feel like the people in my life have blocked it out—this collective trauma that we never really processed and remain in denial about. In the final months of Trump's first term, the daily death toll was in the thousands from COVID-19. We had 9/11 levels of death in this country every day for months. Over 10 million people were out of work. We were spiraling.

We're not there yet, but I cannot help but feel that we are rushing ass-first into disaster. As of this writing, we are just 72 days into the crisis of this administration, and already the alarms are flashing red and I can see the cracks forming beneath my feet.

My most charitable position is that Trump is a careless and dangerous buffoon—a reality-TV guy who is flailing about at the ancient controls of an impossibly sophisticated machine, turning dials up and down blindly—unaware of the consequences of his actions. Maybe his actions are nothing more than a deeply flawed vibe, the product of an underdeveloped mind and stunted personality which cannot properly address the complexity of his own situation.

And I really want to believe that's the case... but then I remember January 6th, and his efforts to retain power after losing the election. I remember everything he did after Election Day and the events leading up to that, and I get a pit in my stomach.

My frosted side says he's a born fool and dangerous for that reason alone. My shredded wheat side says that this is intentional, that he is aiming for conditions that will all but guarantee civil unrest. It appears that he wants to stoke chaos as a pretext for declaration of emergency powers. And even as I type that, I feel crazy. I feel like I deserve to be called a crank. [adjusts the tinfoil hat for a snugger fit]

Suggesting that an autocratic coup is already in motion, that plans have been laid out and are being followed, sounds crazy because it is crazy. But I'm not being an alarmist, I'm just actually fucking alarmed. I'm alarmed because of the Executive Order Trump signed on the first day of his second term: DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES.

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.

I read that last line and something cold washes over me, through me. I feel it in my bones right now. We have just 18 days to go.

These tariffs are going to impact a lot of people who simply are not paying attention. They will come to our food pantry, and will find a line of other people who also were not paying attention. Every day that line gets a little bit longer, and we're doing the best we can. But by the end of the month, we'll have a President who is ready to make a power grab, and a public that is living in fear and increasing scarcity.

And as we head into May and June, food pantries like ours will be cut-off from our largest supplier just as that line starts to go around the block a few times. Once we're out of food, we have to close our doors. What will all of those people do then? Where will they go? What will they do?

Insurrection Act, 1807

[I]n all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.

Insurrection Act of 1807, ch. 39, 2 Stat. 443, 443

Will the President of the United States turn our own military against us? Will he massacre civilians when his own policies lead to civil unrest?

I don't know. What I do know is that the next Presidential election is 1,314 days away.

Jimmy Carter

One of the strangest things about adulthood is noticing how many prominent and influential people are fading away. I’m an “elder millennial,” so the first U.S. president I remember was Ronald Reagan.. When he passed, I felt conflicted. I generally thought poorly of his administration, but I also felt sad. It was like a little piece of my childhood died with him.

Jimmy Carter was before my time, and I always knew him as a “former president.” What stood out—so very, very admirably—was his unwavering dedication to serving others after leaving office. All my life, Jimmy Carter was out there: looking for ways to help vulnerable people, promoting peace, and building homes for those in need.

That he once held the title of President of the United States of America seemed almost secondary, an interesting line on a résumé. For months now, we knew Carter was in hospice care and that his life would soon be coming to an end.

Now that he’s gone, I find myself admiring him even more. He passed peacefully, having accomplished more than most could ever imagine. And in his passing, there seems to be broad consensus that he was the best former president of our lifetime.

I’m also sad because the world was better with him in it. People like Jimmy Carter are extraordinarily rare. I can’t imagine any former president following their political career with such generosity, humanity, or humility.

Learning Through Building: Adding Sort & Translation Features to a Food Pantry Web App

Today was a journey of wins and "learning opportunities" as I worked on improving William Temple House’s food pantry management system. The morning started great - implementing sortable table headers was surprisingly smooth — I’m continually impressed by the coding capabilities of Claude.ai. Working with both Claude and ChatGPT, we created a modular code structure, which made it easy to add sorting without breaking existing features.

But then came the interesting part. When I began tackling multi-language support, my API requests to OpenAI exploded into the tens of thousands. The goal seemed simple: translate food items into our client community's languages. William Temple House serves many non-English speaking clients: Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. I’ve integrated OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini API for translations, and everything worked beautifully... until it didn't.

Turns out a rate limit is easier to hit once the database of food items reaches critical mass. Who knew sending thousands of translation requests over a period of just a few hours would hit OpenAI's daily cap? Probably everyone who bothered to read the documentation first. :-)

It's actually kind of funny watching the error logs fill up with "please try again in 8.64 seconds" messages. Claude as an AI coding assistant was invaluable throughout this process. When I got stuck on implementing sort functionality, it helped refactor the code while maintaining the existing event-driven architecture. Later, when we hit the translation rate limits, it suggested implementing batch processing and queuing systems - solutions I wouldn't have considered immediately.

Key takeaways:

• Small wins matter: The sorting feature works great in my Test UI

• Read API docs before sending 10,000 requests

• Sometimes the best solution is to wait 24 hours for rate limits to reset; I should be taking a break on a holiday weekend anyway

• Having an AI pair programmer helps spot potential issues before they become problems

Next steps? Take a brief pause while OpenAI's rate limit resets, then return with a smarter approach to batch translations. As frustrating as the rate limit issue was, it's pushing us to build a more robust system.

I’m going to use some of this down time to reflect more on the process of building this system. I’ve learned a lot about how best to leverage AI for software development, and hope others will benefit from what I’ve found along the way.

Core77 Design Awards 2022

I’m very pleased to see Stuart Candy’s project “Imagination is a Commons” is the winner for Core77’s award for Speculative Design, 2022. Back in March of 2021, I received a somewhat unusual paid request — for studio photography services. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccines were still out of reach for many, and facilities and institutions remained shuttered, I was suffering from cabin fever isolation and grieving the death of my uncle.

I was finishing up my second Master’s degree, and Pittsburgh had only begun to thaw after a long and difficult winter. Without access to the campus photography studio, Stuart had reached out to his network at Carnegie Mellon, seeking alternatives. As luck would have it, during my undergraduate studies I invested in my own studio photography setup.

My barebones digital photography setup

Scrappy resilience was a constant theme throughout 2020. Students without studio space were constantly finding ways to make do. This was one of those rare moments where few compromises were necessary, and I had everything I needed on hand. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a bag full of artifacts from the future…

T-shirts from a coding festival in the year 2030

Social distancing and staying home (for the better part of a year) had distorted my sense of time. In the first year of the pandemic, there were days and weeks that seemed to vaporize, and weekends that lasted a month. To hold these artifacts, and to focus on them through a viewfinder, I felt as though I had stepped completely outside of time and space. This was a perfect diversion from my mundane existence, and a reminder that this too shall pass.

Thank you, Stuart and Ceda. And congratulations!

Week 14 update: The Late Edition

The final push is now upon us. This past week I’ve been working nearly around the clock with my team, pushing to bring about our future vision. One of the most labor intensive, yet rewarding parts of this project has been the production of a newscast from the future. We’ve made countless script revisions, scraped stock images, sound, footage, and crafted motion graphics elements to bring this story to life. It’s been challenging, but I’m excited to see the final results.

What’s working: our approach to generating a video is deeply grounded in research. We’re incorporating concepts generated with participants — public educators who so generously gave us their time and perspectives on the present and future state of teaching in American schools. We’re also building our story to represent several systems-level shifts, including national legislation, teachers union contracts, and individual school reforms. We used several different futuring frameworks to develop these narratives, including: cone of possibility, backcasting, STEEP+V, Multilevel Perspective mapping, affinity mapping, and worldview filters.

This process has been anything but precise. The future is something we build, not something we predict through careful measurements of trends. Understanding this truth has been very reassuring. Now that we are approaching a conclusion, I feel as though I have been on a long drive through undeveloped territory. The daylight of exploratory research gave way to the twilight of generative research and in the pitch of night we evaluated concepts. With only one headlight, we squinted off into the distance, to read the signs. Sometimes the precipitation of a pandemic obscured everything, but we relished the intermittent moments of clarity.

Those latter kinds of moment were by far the most exciting. “Oh, oh, what if…” was a common preamble to productive yet heady conversations with peers over zoom, as we scrambled together various visual representations in Miro and Figma. 

This workflow has been essential to synthesizing content and a visual language for our video, which we’ve been iterating on through various stages of prototyping. I’m concerned about the overall fidelity and recognize that this will be important to suspension of disbelief for our intended audience — policymakers and various stakeholders connected to PPS must find this artifact compelling enough to act and bring these concepts into a shared reality.

On the technical side, video editing and motion graphics are computationally intensive tasks. I built a beefy workstation prior to starting at CMU, and this machine has been essential to so many tasks and assignments. Nevertheless, I’ve found that this work has strained my system’s capacity. I’ve purged files to make room for temporary caching and rendering outputs. I’ve reset my router in a desperate effort to speed up the transfer of data to Google Drive, and ran my system in a barebones state to maximize resources available to Adobe CC’s memory-hungry apps.

The stress I place upon the tools I use to design are complemented by the stress I’ve applied to myself. My sleep has been intermittent. I take short naps on the couch and found myself on more than one occasion this week working through the sounds of birds before the break of dawn. These late night hours are quiet and free of distraction, but tend to make the day that follows less than appealing. I’m staying awake through this last week of lectures, but finding my mind trailing off into thoughts about the timeline and how I might optimize frame rates for nominal render times. I’m obsessed with getting this video done, but know that this pace is not sustainable.

Week 13: Artifact Generation

We’ve began to generate assets for our final artifacts. This should be an exciting time for us. For the last 13 weeks, we’ve been living and breathing the problem space. The future of Portland Public Schools is not a matter of fate, it is something that will be built — not only designed, but also transformed by external forces and deliberate interventions. This work and our team’s research are only one tiny piece of this larger unfolding process, and we cannot know what impact (if any) will come from what we have done.

On some level, I cannot help but feel a little bit sad as we conclude this work. I have a very real sense of the scope of this issue and understand that fifteen weeks cannot generate anything conclusive. Nevertheless, we must honor this process and the deliverable. There is an underlying contradiction in this work. What this project calls for is “bold humility.” We know that our research is not conclusive, we also know that without bold presentation, we cannot inspire meaningful change or the greater vision by Prospect Studio.

Our primary concept is a news story about PPS holding their first ARC summit, and what it means for the future of Portland schools and teachers. We can use this medium to communicate the most salient details while glossing over the more bureaucratic aspects of our system level thinking. For secondary artifacts, we’re thinking about “swag” that is typical for a professional conference, as well as a custom logo for the ARC council.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to resolve these artifacts to the highest fidelity possible. I know that the success of this project rests somewhat on our ability to persuade others, and we cannot know how this work will be interpreted if the artifacts are not convincing or feel too generic. I’m also worried that we have spent so much time working on the particulars that we haven’t given ourselves room for making these things.

I wish that we had a better sense of what is expected, and how craft will be factored into our grade. This is the first time that I’ve taken a studio class where nothing was made until the last two weeks. I expect that our team will be evaluated on the strength of our research and the clarity of our concepts, but as a studio class, I cannot shake this feeling that we should have been crafting prototypes along the way.

My hope for this week is that the momentum of making and the joy of purely creative pursuits will have a feedback effect to keep us motivated through this final push. I’m excited about the potential for the project even though we are still grappling with an incredibly high degree of uncertainty.

Week 12 Update: Evaluative Research Presentation and Reflection on Reaching The Project's Final Stage

This week our team presented our evaluative research to Prospect Studio (Fiona and other representatives were asynchronous for this session) and our guest, Arnold Wasserman. This presentation is the last before our final deliverable, and represents the conclusion of our research phase. While there are some loose ends for us to address (and further evaluation of our concept has not yet been attempted), we are now in the early stages of artifact synthesis.

The last few weeks have helped our team to understand the importance of user evaluation, what strategies do and do not work well in a remote/online context. In particular, we learned that building a survey is a miniature design project unto itself. The creation of an interactive system, and evaluating the results required significant labor up front and a lot of uncertainty throughout. Nevertheless, I feel that our team was successful in achieving specific goals.

I’m proud to say that we managed to get several different concepts in front of several educators from around the country as well as from within PPS specifically. We successfully navigated and sorted through feedback to gauge overall patterns of responses to several concepts as well as system-level evaluations. We managed to coordinate and divide our labor effectively, and communicated asynchronously as we brought key components together. This process was mirrored in the creation of our latest slide deck for Wednesday.
We received helpful feedback and challenges to our concept following our team’s presentation. As previously has been the case, our team had a good sense of who ought to respond to specific questions, since our divided labor has granted each team member some degree of specialization and familiarity with the topic we’ve been researching. Specifically, Arnold Wasserman was curious about how our artifacts could communicate these concepts in a compelling and persuasive manner. Arnold Wasserman pointed out that school boards and the people elected to them, have a tendency to be self-serving, to the detriment of the districts they represent. He questioned how our concepts would overcome the significant obstacle of implementation, especially given the fact that school boards and public officials hold the levers of power and the teachers are functionally an underclass in the United States.

This is something I’ve been thinking about since the beginning of this project, and I related back to these thoughts in response. My ideas are largely based on the work of Donella Meadows, and her famous essay on leverage points.

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

In particular, look at points three and four: the power to self organize and the goals of the system are key to understanding the forces necessary to reform PPS to more closely resemble the vision from Prospect Studio. I agree with Arnold Wasserman’s observation regard the school boards and policy makers, but I also see a real opportunity with this difficult and problematic group. They hold the levers, so we need only find a way to align their goals with the reforms we envisions for PPS.

If we accept the premise that politicians and school board members care about their own tenure and individual interests, and do so above all other considerations, then what we need to produce are artifacts that provokes the parents and registered voters of that school district. Once an activated and inspired public knows what they desire, they will vote for and ultimately elect representatives who promise to bring that vision to life. We have seen this on matters ranging from civil rights and infrastructure, to economics and war. Politicians will follow public pressure to keep their own seats warm.

Arnold seemed pleased with my answer, and suggested that our topic relates directly to the fate of our nation’s democracy — so, no pressure at all!

This weekend our team held three meetings to jumpstart this process of future artifact synthesis, and we have been more or less fruitful in this endeavor. It’s exciting to be in the final stretch, but our team has been struggling to maintain momentum lately. The demands of presentation weeks, and the rush to complete our research, often requires long hours, multiple zoom meetings outside of class, and many late nights. This has began to produce negative health consequences for our team.

We’ve been intensely looking at teacher burnout, but have also been confronted with the burnout of a pandemic, and the rigorous academics of a graduate program. Illness, headaches, and signs of exhaustion have crept into our team dynamic, and I’m concerned about what this will mean now that we are heading into the final push for this semester. What we really need at this stage is that spark of creativity and divergent thinking. It’s hard to do this level of work while also pushing up against the steady hum of stress and exhaustion.

Brainstorming session, mapping events and trends to eventual implementation of key ARC concepts

I think it was a gigantic error on the part of CMU to breakup our spring break. I understand the rationale, and the concerns around travel, but this alternative strategy of giving students a random Monday or Tuesday off has not provided the benefits of time off to rest. I simply cannot “sleep faster” when given a 24 hour window, and I cannot catch up when one day of classes is omitted from an otherwise packed calendar. I’m burned out. I’ve got this strange ringing in my ear that won’t let up, and I’m having more trouble concentrating than at any other time this year.

Languishing in the fog of constant deadlines, constant tasks, constant meetings, constant emails, Slack messages, updates, etc., etc., have left me depleted. It has also sucked the joy out of doing this work. I hope this terrible mental and physical state doesn’t last, because I don’t see how I can be productive while feeling this way.

Week 11: qualitative evaluation of concepts

Our online survey is now underway, and while this virtual format isn’t exactly like so-called “speed dating,” we are hoping that it will be able to serve a similar purpose for our research. Creating a meaningful online experience for our participants was a tall order, especially with such tight constrains. There are many risks when created a fully automated and hands-off system. Not being there to clarify or to address questions or concerns in realtime was something we needed to accept as a trade-off. In exchange, we have a dozen unique participants ranging from 2 years to 27 years of experience, and from various districts around the country.

So far, the majority of responses have been from an online community of English teachers, so our data is skewed toward this perspective. On the plus side, English teachers provide excellent written responses. To avoid the pitfalls of statistics and quantitative analysis, we designed an online survey with open text fields, and we framed our questions around hypothetical scenarios. This would provide us with reflection and insights into how teachers imagine these concepts for themselves, and what perceived deficiencies come up for them in thinking about these systems in action.

Screenshot of survey responses, exported into a CSV file

The last 24 hours in particular have been very exciting, as we finally gained access to online educator communities. This process has been slower than wanted, but we first needed to fully develop our survey before we could deploy it. This process in and of itself was a design challenge. 

Last weekend, we decided to use the Tripetto platform. This gave us the same logic capabilities as TypeForm, but without any additional costs. It became clear almost immediately that we would need to prototype and refine our survey before receiving teacher feedback, and this effort was highly collaborative.

With multiple teammates, it was possible to divide this task into several areas that could be worked on independently and in parallel. We first decided on a basic structure  and strategized the division of labor. Carol worked on the text/content based on a logic diagram we crafted together. While Carol crafted this outline, I created a mockup version in Tripetto. Without access to finalized concept sketches, I took some poetic license.

Screenshot of 2nd iteration prototype survey

As Carol and I worked together to refine the text copy, Cat and Chris worked together to create images and descriptive text for our participants. Once all of this content was ready for Tripetto, we began doing test runs, trying to break the experiences. This revealed some quirks with Tripetto’s logic functions and some of the less apparent features.

There are a few honorable mentions; Tripetto has a lot of subtle features that we often take for granted in other online experiences. Things like placeholder text, required fields, multiple choice radio buttons, checkboxes, multi and single-line text boxes. During the refinement phase, these features became essential and it was exciting to discover them—only after they were deemed essential enough to be worth the effort.

The minimalist UI of Tripetto made these features less evident, but not too hard to locate or execute. From start to finish, this experience felt a little shaky and uncertain but viable.

I often found myself this week grinding away on the platform, slipping into a state of mind that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as “flow.” In other words, creating a survey on Tripetto wasn’t easy to use, but just challenging enough to keep me interested in working through obstacles. I think that what helped support this effort the most was building models within platforms where everyone on the team is already fluent. For us, this was primarily Miro, Google Docs, and Sheets.

Screenshot of two representations of the survey, carried across platforms (Miro and Sheets)

First impressions matter, and we didn’t want to put out anything that wasn’t necessarily a work in progress. Even with this in mind, we did have a few last minute tweaks as we adapted our survey to maximize pulling power with other social media environments.

Arnold Wasserman’s desk critique was incredibly valuable for our team, as his feedback helped us to consider the importance of our survey as a communication tool. He recommended that we make the implicit, explicit, to directly communicate to our participants what we expected and why. We were encouraged to explain what questions we were asking, and to share this openly. This kind of transparency can be tedious, especially in text-based systems. I took this to task and simplified statements throughout the entire experience.

This gave the survey a personality all its own; like a casual and curious friend, we asked about specifics but with little pressure. We kept things open.

Open data cannot be calculated, it must be evaluated for patterns. Next week will be a scramble to synthesize patterns and new insights as we work to finalize system concepts into well defined parameters. We hope that through this process we will also identify opportunities to produce relevant and compelling artifacts (our final output/deliverable).

It still feels like a risk to be so far into a process and to still not have a clear idea of what it is we are making. We instead draw our assurances from what we have already made: an index of relevant articles, interview notes, countless diagrams and visual representations of high-level abstract concepts and maps at almost every level of visual fidelity imaginable, hundreds of presentation slides, dozens of pages of reflective text, and months worth of slack messages, shared links, and drafted emails. We created interactive digital workshop spaces and protocols for our participants, and archives with 256-bit encryption.

When looking at the collective volume of effort from this team, it’s difficult to imagine that we wouldn’t make something meaningful in the end. Is that too optimistic? Ask me in a month.

Week 9 Update: Presenting Generative Research Findings

Fiona Hovenden (of Prospect Studio) was back in class with us this week. Monday through Wednesday blurred together as our team worked around the clock to bring our findings into coherence. Through this process, we found that it was easier than past presentations for us to produce clear and concise summaries of our work. This outcome stems from two key advantages:

• Our team continues to get better at coordination and understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This has accelerated our communication and the delegation of tasks.

• As we continue living and breathing in this problem space, we have gained deep familiarity with core concepts and structures. This has allowed us to develop a kind of fluency in addressing Portland Public Schools as a topic.

There is still a lot that we do not know, but this is something which we must (as a matter of need) become comfortable accepting as a default state. There are limits to what we can and cannot know over a fifteen week period, with limited access to our stakeholders.

Nevertheless, we are slowly inching toward viable concepts.

These concepts are derived from last week’s workshops and diary studies. There was a lot of doubt and uncertainty going into our work last week, as we started with a zero participants. By Tuesday, all of this changed, and we found ourselves scrambling to coordinate with five different participants. Additionally, we coordinated with our counterparts (“Team Ahaa”) and I even took part in one of their workshops—after nearly 11 years of living in Portland, I had some qualified opinions to share.

This accelerated and compressed path from research to presentation ensured that we quickly moved from documentation to synthesis. Our team only had ten minutes to present all of this, and this constraint was helpful motivation to distill everything we learned over the last two weeks. So, what did we learn?

At a high level, generative research helped us to understand how educators see their relationship with various stakeholders. We gained more intimate, personal, and “day in the life of” perspectives from educators. We also got surprising feedback regarding their perception of possible futures. In general, there is not much hope for things improving substantially in the next ten years, but there is still a very real sense of urgency to make things better. This paradox has been with us since our first round of interviews but remains unresolved.

The most salient insights for our team were around issues of resilience and community: 

• Educators feel supported when colleagues show up and help proactively

• Informal but reliable networks among educators support their resilience

• Lack of resources and top-down surprises make teachers feel unsupported

• Quality of life and mental health resources are poorly leveraged

“Empathy” and “Community” are other target areas in the Educator Essentials ring.

In our team’s presentation debrief, we had a lengthy discussion about this overlap, and our concerns about spreading ourselves too thin or not staying on target. This is an ongoing conversation and part of our general concerns for this project. We considered whether or not ARC is a “keystone” goal— resting on requisite conditions, and also essential to achieving other areas. This enmeshment is not entirely incompatible with the brief and Prospect Studio’s understanding of the problem space, but we must carry the burden of interpretation.

As we continue developing and evaluating concepts and potential interventions, we hope to achieve more focus on ARC, and to draw clear distinctions between outcomes and means to outcomes—e.g., is empathy an outcome of ARC, or is it a means to achieve ARC? This isn’t yet well defined, but I have faith in our team’s ability to resolve it.

Coming away from our Wednesday presentation, I can say that this task was both a relief and a source of pride. It was a huge relief to affirm key findings from Prospect Studio’s work, and also a moment of pride to have found these insights through workshops and protocols developed in house. This validated our research methods and demonstrated our core competency. Our protocols and assets were effective and entirely reproducible.

In terms of project management, we also took time to reflect on what was and was not working with our process and team contract. We do this every week as part of our “Rose, Bud, Thorn, and Shoutout” check-in exercise. We still felt more rushed than we’d preferred, and thought about ways to better support each other. We decided to designate “backup roles” to augment the facilitator and note-taker tasks. We hope that this will keep everyone equally engaged, while still offering flexibility and variety throughout the process. There are diminishing returns to these types of reforms, as we are already more than half way through the project. Nevertheless, every improvement counts. 

Week 8 Update: Generative Research and Future Visions of Portland Public Schools

We began this week with a guest lecture from Adam Cowart, a PhD candidate in the transition design program. He introduced us to the concept of CLA (Causal Layered Analysis). We used this framework to better understand the landscape of our problem space at Portland Public Schools. Adam described different facets of the problem space through the lens of “litany filters.” To recognize what futures are feasible, we need to understand the triad of history, present, and future, and what elements in our landscape pull, push, or weigh down progress.

We took some time in class to reframe our insights through this framework, and began synthesis of potential elements to build a bridge toward the future vision created by Prospect Studio. This process began slowly, but after some heavy lifting we began filling out the diagram with great enthusiasm! It was refreshing to revisit our secondary research (which was already categorized under a STEEP-V framework). It was revealing to see visually how much further we have advanced our understanding of this problem space since literature review and background reading.

Outside of class, our team was busier than ever — working to adapt and overcome the obstacles we’ve encountered in our generative research phase has not been easy. I’ve struggled to support these efforts. The external factors of my personal and professional life have been an ongoing source of strain. I feel so much gratitude to the support and encouragement I’ve received from this team, and this week I felt a great deal of pressure to reciprocate.

Sample of generative research protocols

This effort to pay back the generosity I received (when I needed it most) began with a complete/comprehensive draft of our protocols for generative research, and the specifications for our workshop. Working with Carol, we delivered this to the team ahead of schedule. It was necessary for us to draft new protocols and workshop exercises to include a broader audience, outside of Portland Public Schools. We found that last week was somewhat of a dead end for seeking participation from our intended stakeholders (administrators and educators at PPS).

For our workshop, we wanted to know how different stakeholders perceive their relationships with counterparts, learn what different stakeholders prioritize and why, gain deeper understanding of how educators think about the future of public education, and to explore and define preferred futures.

We conducted three separate workshop sessions with educators outside of PPS. This included neighboring districts of PPS (Gresham-Barlow), as well as out-of-state educators. This approach allowed us to glean insights regarding that which is common in the US public school system, and that which is more specific to Portland. While this adaptation is not without its risks to skewed data, it is far more preferable that to remain without any additional insights beyond our primary research activities.

Screenshots of workshop activity

This was my first experience with executing participatory design with stakeholders and it has been such a rollercoaster of emotions. Since Carol and I worked on the protocol together, it was only logical that we also create the visual and interactive components for the workshop. We iterated on our initial concept by practicing with our own team, with each member taking a turn roleplaying as a participant. This helped us to work out the kinks and refine details before putting anything in the hands of our participants.

The first workshop with a real participant was very revealing. Having access to their thought process in real time, their visual associations, priorities, and ideas about the future were peeled back in layers, digging deeper into their lived experiences than we ever got through primary research and conversational interviews. Even the generation of simple sketches gave us glimpses into their inner worlds. I now question how important it was to conduct traditional interviews in the first place. Workshops are just so much more dynamic and active than interviews, and I consistently came away feeling more connected to the participants and their experiences.

This weekend was highly reflective. With new insights in hand, we spent over five hours evaluating what we discovered. There was so much for us to consider and it was only once we had the chance to pick it all apart together as a team that we could begin to make sense of it all. Many of our initial assumptions were blown out of the water. Our newfound perspective gave us a real sense of how important relationships are in the field of teaching. We also learned that technology is probably the least important factor for educators — with the exception of a desire for students to have high-speed internet at home, there was little to no interest in improving access to technology generally.

I’m still getting used to applying so many different approaches and methods so quickly.  I feel like I’m only occasionally operating with a sense of clarity. There has been prolonged fuzziness that’s difficult to describe or ignore. It seems as though new insights provoke deeper questioning, while offering little in the way of certainty. I think this is just the experience of progressively revealing collective and individual ignorance. Before learning enough to act decisively, we must first gaze into the vast abyss of what we still do not know.

Week 7: Expanding scope of generative research

This week, our in-class sessions were dominated by guest lecturers who provided insights into our current work in progress. On Monday, Stacey Williams and Richard The asked us for our team’s “elevator pitch” and then asked us a few questions about the work we were doing:

• Is the artifact(s) part of the intervention, or just a representation?

• Is there a conceptual map that anybody should be working on to provide a system?

• Can we design a process that will unify the decision making process at PPS?

• Creating space where they can reflect on their own lives and experiences, and present a different model for education?

Carol was quick to respond regarding the relational mapping from our last presentation, and how our understanding of the relationships between administrators and other stakeholders has revealed a potential leverage point for meaningful interventions, but that the artifact should be something that inspires change.

Peter added that we’re separating the artifact from the process, but will develop an artifact that is representative of the depth of our research and understanding of the problem space. We then spent some time brainstorming out loud about some form of “ARC Institution” in the future could help to achieve the goals outlined in the Prospect Studio brief. A couple interventions we may want to prioritize:

• Leadership development curriculum, teaching design and reflexivity.

• Summer courses that are paid separately from the 9-month salary.

Peter reminded us that “future is fiction” and that it is our job as designers to bring that fiction into high enough fidelity that we make a persuasive argument through form. This ultimately means that we must situate the proposal within a fiction, and build from there.

Richard The wanted to know what other communication materials might inspire this. While not suggesting that we need to answer such questions with any degree of immediacy, we should put onto our horizon a few questions around how the ARC Institute might talk about these goals. For example, this could be a poster that says what life-long learning looks like.

Stacey’s other comments tied in well with the reading that Peter provided (Rutger Bregman). Specifically, this strange mismatch between education and the typical way we encounter work: i.e., in school, each subject is divided and compartmentalized, whereas in our work, often we must apply mastery of multiple subjects and do not have the luxury of flattening our problems into a single subject matter. Stacey pointed out that we (meaning educators, but also society) are boxed into binary thinking whereas other cultures have non-duality, non-binary ways of thinking.

Knowing that this entanglement is an obstacle to change, we must also consider what other sudden changes (from external factors, such as a pandemic or climate change) might present opportunities.

On Wednesday, Liz Sanders ran us through a series of role-playing exercises, where we considered the differences in priorities for stakeholders. This was confusing at first, but eventually we sync’d up and began negotiating as if we were in fact those different people in a school system. I was representing the thought process at a district level, while Carol played a student. I recognized that there were basic needs that were not at all address in our hypothetical scenario (a hackathon to create new and sustainable transportation for the future).

This was eyeopening and made our team think differently about our own approach to generative research…

Oh, our research. It has been challenging these last two weeks, and we’re worried about getting stuck. Despite so much cold calling/emailing acquaintances, we’ve found that right now in particular is a bad time to solicit any participation. PPS is migrating to a hybrid model, with teachers having stated a great deal of concern about safety. Additionally, this next week is their spring break, so any activities that require reflection on their daily lives will not capture work activity. This is also the only week of respite they will be afforded before summer break.

Nevertheless, there is some scintilla of joy to be extracted from this obstacle. I’ve had more motivation to reach out to people I haven’t been in touch with since graduation. Some of them are doing really great, others not. Some are starting families, others are starting careers. Much to my surprise, two acquaintances are actually in the process of becoming K-12 educators. This was not expected, but it was heartening to know that such alignments exist.

Our team is also struggling with external pressures: wrapping up mini courses, midterm expectations, job hunting and interviews, design challenges, personal struggles, and more. One of the things we specified in our team contract was transparency for such events. My team has been supporting me the best they can while I navigate these struggles and diversions. I too have been supporting them the best I can.

This weekend was very productive, as we generated new protocols and refined our workshop to included a broader range of participants. I’m especially excited to try out some of the techniques we’ve been considering, including: “Thing From The Future” based on the work of Stuart Candy, prioritization card sorts, and relational mapping. That last exercise was directly inspired by our conversation with Liz Sanders.

Thanks to a 20 oz. can of Red Bull, I was able to power through my very packed Wednesday, and I’m glad I made it that session, since we ended up monopolizing Liz in our breakout room — she seemed to be genuinely interested in our project, which was very, very humbling.

On the personal side of things, I’m glad to have my job interview and design challenge behind me. It’s been difficult to juggle so much, especially while still grieving the loss of a family member. I’ve been more emotionally raw, and feel less focused than I’d like. Some of this is due to a loss of sleep and not the workload. I seem to be “fine” during the day time, but when the sun sets, and the world gets quiet, I still think of him. I miss you, Uncle Ron. I’m sorry I won’t be there to send you to your final resting place. Like so many we’ve lost this year, you deserved better than this, and sending flowers to those left behind feels insufficient in the face of so much loss.

We’re about to cross the vital half-way mark in the semester. Normally this would include a spring break of our own, but due to concerns about increased student travel, we instead have pre-scheduled “off days” to (at least in theory) provide some periods of rest. It is something like having a nap instead of a full night’s sleep. We can make do, but that doesn’t mean we need to like it.

Week 3: Portland Public Schools — Reflection on Researching Educator Essentials For a Vision of Teachers Who Are Resilient, Adaptive, Open to Change

“In sum, if you can set yourself up with a definite question for every day in the field, find a solid, reliable way to get the data you need to answer it, and feel confident in the insight that emerges- you will get where you need to be in the long run.”

—Christena Nippert-Eng

This week, our team took a deep dive into secondary research. Using the STEEP analysis framework, we assembled a large collection of articles, relevant URLs, case studies, and much, much more within a relatively short period of time—the power of scale is in play for reasons I’ll illuminate soon. Close reading of this text was then distilled into short summary statements. Hat tip to Dr. Elaine Gregersen, for this wonderful article on how to make use of spreadsheets for research. This approach had several advantages:

1. a clear division of labor.

Specifically, our team was able to divide our secondary research along discrete domains/categories while also sharing any incidental discoveries. This “yes, and” approach to research lowered the stakes and allowed for maximum contribution by every member of our team.

2. expanded exploration and discovery.

We were given a specific focus of our own choosing, and this was based entirely on our affinities, curiosities, and professional backgrounds. A clear advantage of having such a diverse group was our ability to apply personalized knowledge toward an information gathering process.

3. Rapid synthesis.

After gathering our sources and insights, and taking time to discuss our findings as a group, it was easy to recognize patterns and apply our newfound information to the task of formulating dozens of relevant interview questions. This process set us on a clear path from secondary research and lit review to primary and ethnographic research.

4. Clarity and transferability.

This information has been collected in a manner that will potentially benefit other teams; the indexical structure of the information we’ve collected, when paired with short summary statements, will enable others to quickly browse a significant amount of research in a relatively short period of time. It’s a buffet of relevant information!

We’re on the precipice of a convergent process, and we can now begin to glean some visions of the future of PPS beyond what was offered in the brief. The most dramatic insight revolves around “The Great Reset” brought upon us by COVID-19 is revealing unseen potential futures. We often cannot see what is possible until it happens, and the sudden shift to work/study from home is no exception. American schools are strained by unique technological and social needs. People are isolated, but also finding new and compelling ways to communicate and collaborate. We are working from within the context a novel problem and circumstance, and in doing so revealing new methods of organization and interaction.

There is a window of opportunity that I fear might be closing as vaccine rollout accelerates and we embrace a return to “normalcy” (a pre-pandemic world that we want to believe, desperately, still exists). If we return to this sleepy shadow of what once was, we risk a deep and terrible slumber that our children will never forgive us for—a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If we return to old habits and old ways of thinking, we will do so at the expense of those most negatively impacted by COVID-19. The underlying power structures and inequality that we cannot ignore under current conditions will be something we’ll be very tempted to sweep back under the rug once people are able to return to work without a deadly virus burning through our communities unchecked.

We need clear visions of the future; we need that clarity so much more now than before the pandemic.

Next week, our plan is to setup times for interviews. Now that we have a general landscape of what is known and documented, we have lots of questions to ask and new insights to gain. I’m very pleased with the work our team has been doing and have absolute confidence in our ability to make these interviews a success. The curiosity is palpable at the moment and we’re eager to begin connecting general and specific knowledge. These first-hand insights will fill so many gaps if we can just ask the right kinds of questions.

The current pace seems to be sustainable and the progress that we are making has been very satisfying, but I’ll admit to having symptoms of “Confluenza.” The opportunities afforded by a job fair are not something I can ignore, and while I have done my best to take advantage, I do find the experience a needless distraction. Last year’s “open studio” was downright nauseating. The contradiction of values and actions was disturbing and felt like an intrusion into an important space: the studio was a haven for critical thinking and offered a high degree of psychological safety. The presence of so many “talent seekers” and alumni felt like an intrusion in 2020. This year, those same people were viewing me from a camera inside my home.

Simply put: from a personal perspective, the online/remote format of 2021’s Confluence wasn’t an improvement. The people I spoke with were professional and generous with their time and engagement, but I could feel their fatigue through the screen. There’s just a cloud of general burnout and I admire the way so many people manage to push back against it.

Our team selected Educator Essentials because we recognized the value of educators as vital tissue, making the rest of the body of education whole and capable of movement, growth, and change. Knowing that our ultimate goal is to produce an artifact that inspires an image of educators that are resilient, adaptive, and open to change, I am both grateful and terrified of the flood of countless examples I see every day, through every interaction I share across cameras and screens. I see people who work diligently, compassionately, through these screens.

If you want to get some sense of what I really mean by this (because it is always better to show than to tell), then just watch how these children self organize when an educator is temporarily absent from zoom.  The teacher, Emily Pickering of El Paso, Texas, exhibits these traits, and it is evident in how her students responded in her absence. The future is now and we should marvel at the efforts we are seeing in our daily lives. This moment is so much bigger than all of us. The future isn’t something we can wait in line for. It is something thrust upon us with all of its dazzles and horror. What we are seeing from educators and students is just one piece of a larger picture.

We are not “making the best of this” we ARE the best of this. All of us. For better or worse, everyone is doing the best they can. This was true before the pandemic, but it’s easier to see it now.

Prototyping Cutlery

For one of my final projects this semester, I’m interested in creating a set of eating tools that help account for involuntary muscle movements (e.g., Parkinson's disease or tremors) and other mobility difficulties that limit the enjoyment and consumption of foods; I'm interested in exploring simple solid shapes, living hinges, and assembly forms derived from explicit advantages of additive manufacturing techniques.

[I want to make a really nifty spoon.]

Fabricating physical prototypes will be a challenge (…)

Seriously: fuck you, COVID-19.

This is not the only challenge, however. Finding access to food-safe materials, conducting a series of user tests, iterating forms, and self-directed research will also require creative workarounds to overcome the limitations of working while under “shelter-in-place” orders due to global pandemic.

I have decided to go 100% digital. instead of building various forms and testing their ability to hold fluids under rapid motion, I will instead conduct a series of simulated physics tests to evaluate forms. For the first part of this project, I am required to conduct an A/B test or evaluation. I have decided to conduct dual testing using different 3D programs.

Method 1:

Maxon Cinema 4D includes a variety of physical simulation abilities—including particles and fluid dynamics. I intend to leverage this software’s capacity to test various designs and forms. Tests will be designed to evaluate fluid retention under repeated multi-axial movements. Cutlery designs will be tested against traditional forms (e.g., standard soup spoons).

Method 2:

Blender is a free, open source platform for creating 3D models, rendering, animation, and more. Among the built-in features is a fluid simulator. Combined with rigid body and gravity physics, it should be possible to evaluate a variety of spoon shapes and (potentially) even different forms of cutlery.

Considerations:

By using two different simulations, it should be possible to more thoroughly evaluate a design’s fluid retention abilities.

Timeline:

Week 1 — Cinema 4D Workflow: Since I am already familiar with Cinema 4D, I have decided to begin this project by constructing my first simulation with this software. I will use Fusion 360 to generate original spoon designs, as well as a “traditional” spoon shape to compare performance.

Week 2 — Blender Workflow: Using the assets from week 1, I will spend week 2 developing and executing a comparable test running under Blender’s fluid simulation engine.

Resources:

Blender Tutorial - Realistic Fluid Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmw-BTCbWMw

Cinema 4D Tutorial - Water simulation Animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JehbYBAZw7c

What does Day 1 look like?

Let’s just say I have a lot to learn.

Interactive Design Prototyping

THE TIME HAS COME TO…PUSH THE BUTTON

Wireless communication between Arduino #1 and #2

My current project in IxD Prototyping involves physical computing (i.e., “interactive systems that can sense and respond to the world around them.”) I have worked with Arduino before (Restricted Area, 2017) but this newest project is expected to have a daily use. In my head, I keep a long list of annoying technology interactions—this gets updated frequently. We are saturated with unsatisfying technology and devices that cause more problems than they solve. We have inconveniences stacked upon inconveniences, and if we were to step outside of this environment, you would inevitably conclude that most electronics are made to punish the buyers. I am looking to improve just one such interaction.

Back in 2012 I bought an HD video projector. If you love to watch movies, there is something magical about having “the big screen” at home. I love it. Do you know what I don’t love? Using an infrared remote control on a devices that is mounted above and behind me. Seriously, Epson: what where you guys (and yes, I’m assuming it was a team of men, with their dumb penises getting in the way of common sense) thinking?! The primary function of the remote control is to simply turn the projector on and off. I would gladly give up the remote control entirely if I could simply move the power button to the armrest of my couch. Instead, I must contort my arm in Kama Sutra fashion just to find the right angle to get the sensor to recognize the POWER-ON command from the remote.

Getty Images: the various methods for turning on an Epson HD Projector.

My girlfriend’s method to bypass the projector is more elegant: she retrieves a step-stool from our utility closet and presses the ON/OFF button on the projector chassis. This works well, but … well, let’s just say, it ruins the mood. I began to explore other options, and realized that the primary issue is that IR remotes are directional. The IR sensor is part of the assembly, and cannot be relocated. Arduino is capable of IR communication, it is also capable of RF communication. Radio frequency is far less dependent on line-of-sight, especially within the context of indoor and residential use. Imagine what WiFi would be like if it worked over infrared. Consider also that Apple abandoned their IR remote interface for the Mac.

Enter the Arduino

I found a few open source projects that utilize IR and RF communication:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ir-communication/all

https://www.electroschematics.com/ir-decoder-encoder-part-2-diy-38-khz-irtr-module/

https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/electropeak/use-an-ir-remote-transmitter-and-receiver-with-arduino-1e6bc8

https://learn.adafruit.com/using-an-infrared-library/hardware-needed

https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/nRF24L01_prelim_prod_spec_1_2.pdf (PDF Warning)

https://www.deviceplus.com/arduino/nrf24l01-rf-module-tutorial/

https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=421081.0

https://howtomechatronics.com/tutorials/arduino/arduino-wireless-communication-nrf24l01-tutorial/

All of these resources are excellent. I want to call attention to one more link: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/muhammad-aqib/nrf24l01-interfacing-with-arduino-wireless-communication-0c13d4

I have a bone to pick with this one. Take a look at the wiring diagram:

Diagram created by /u/Muhammadaqibdutt

Note the LED pin-out for the receiver. This diagram shows the positive leg of the LED connecting to Pin 3

Now, lets take a look at the code:

The devil is in the details: “digitalWrite(6, HIGH)” condition turns the LED on. Pin 3 does nothing.

This made for some very “fun” troubleshooting. I’ve since ironed out all the kinks, and have successfully pirated the IR remote signal from an Epson brand projector (on loan from the Design Office at CMU), and have moved on to making an enclosure. Will I 3D print or laser cut? I have not yet decided.

Here is some sample code for my RF triggered IR emitter:

(NOTE: this code is just one half of the project, and by itself cannot do anything. You’ll also need IR and RF libraries to make this code work on your Arduino)

#include <SPI.h>
#include <nRF24L01.h>
#include <RF24.h>
#include <IRLibAll.h>
RF24 radio(9, 10); // CE, CSN
const byte address[6] = "00001";
boolean button_state = 0;
int led_pin = 3;
IRsend mySender;
void setup() {
  pinMode(6, OUTPUT);
  Serial.begin(9600);
  radio.begin();
  radio.openReadingPipe(0, address);   
  radio.setPALevel(RF24_PA_MIN);
  radio.startListening();
}
void loop()
{
  if (radio.available())
  {
    char text[32] = ""; 
    radio.read(&text, sizeof(text)); 
    radio.read(&button_state, sizeof(button_state));
    if (button_state == HIGH)
    {
      digitalWrite(6, HIGH);
      Serial.println(text);
      //Arduino Remote On/Off button code
      mySender.send(NEC, 0xffa25d);
    }
    else
    {
      digitalWrite(6, LOW);
      Serial.println(text);
    }
  }
  delay(5);
}

Playing Catch-up

Thinking fast vs. looking back

Season 2, episode 1 is easily the most famous episode of the 1950s TV series, I Love Lucy. Ethel and Lucy go to work at a chocolate factory, while Fred and Ricky take on their respective housework. Whether or not you’re familiar with this comedy, chances are you probably know (or are about to know) where this is headed.

I Love Lucy, “Job Switching” (Season 2, Episode 1), 1952

Lucy and Ethel are assigned with the task of wrapping chocolates on an assembly line. Having already disappointed the foreman with their poor performance from earlier in the episode, this is their last chance to avoid being fired. Their task is simple, and repetitive: wrap the chocolates as they come down the belt, and don’t let any chocolates through unwrapped. At first the speed is manageable, but it quickly speeds up, and the quantity of chocolates increases dramatically — and that’s what makes this episode so damn funny. Lucy and Ethel panic. They begin setting chocolates aside, but eventually resort to stuffing the chocolates into their blouses and mouths. At the end of the episode, Fred and Ricky realize that they are terrible housekeepers, and decide that they want Lucy and Ethel to return to their traditional roles. As a token of appreciation, Ricky gives Lucy a gift: a box of chocolates.

What does any of this have to do with LxD, civic engagement, elections, or the unaddressed hazards of 21st century technology? Not much. It is however, a great analogy for my schedule last week. I managed to stay on top of things through the first few weeks of the semester, but then the belt sped up, and I had too many “chocolates” without the capacity to wrap them. I’m now looking back, instead of writing and reflecting in the moment. This shift in perspective has been fruitful, I along with the rest of my team have made significant strides toward our goal of developing a learning experience.

What is still missing are my posts on Medium and this personal blog. I want to document this process, but am doing so one week later. The next two posts (06-11 February) are dated to correspond with the class schedule and for their prompts. This is done for clarity, and not a deception. The advantage of writing from this vantage point is that I now have the benefit of knowing how these ideas unfolded. I can write about what was done, and how it changed things.

Who are my learners?

What can we teach about civic engagement?

Last week our teams mapped out the stakeholders for our chosen topic (citizenship and grassroots).

Our stakeholder map was stolen from the studio. This was the last picture taken before it went missing. If have any information, call: 1-800-STOLEN-MAP No questions asked if you return it. Really, at this point we all just want closure.

By looking at the tension between groups, we can easily get overwhelmed. What was most helpful was to recognize where common interests exist between stakeholders. These should provide opportunities for engagement, or perhaps even leverage points between groups in conflict (or perceived conflict). Additionally, we identified a disturbing aspect: asymmetry. While there were mutual and shared interests between our three groups, there were also some goals that actually provided benefits at the expenses of others.

The easiest way to understand this dynamic is to think about big tobacco. Smokers want and desire cigarettes. They are willing to pay for them, even when discouraged through taxation. They smoke throughout the day, despite knowing that it has a negative impact on health. Who benefits the most in this relationship? In the short term, the smoker benefits. In the long term, the tobacco companies benefit. These relationships are exploitative, but also difficult to break.

Reactionary politics benefit a minority of the powerful at the expense of everyone else, but it also provides validation to a cynical and disengaged citizenry. For those who insist that politics is self-serving, and incapable of providing value to the public, it is very easy to be proven correct, even if the outcomes that produce that validation are not beneficial.

Considering stakeholders

Civic engagement: how grassroots movements make lasting impact.

As I continue to think about what citizenship truly means, I am disturbed to think about the lack of participation in western democracy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the 2016 general election saw a 20-year low in voter turnout. It is tempting to shake my finger and to blame systems and policy (I still do this, in private), but when you pan back and look at the tension between discrete categories, it becomes much clearer what the stakes really are. I have heard from many of my closest friends and peers, that the election of Donald Trump has sparked an ad-hoc civics class. The Washington Post even launched a podcast whose title illustrates this phenomenon: Can He Do That?

One of the factors that prevents people from engaging with politics in a meaningful way, is the pervasive feeling of uncertainty. When you do not understand the mechanics of government and politics it is easy to be discouraged. The first amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right to petition government for redress of grievances. This principle makes sense, but government is not a monolith. Government is not a person or a place, so who or what do you call upon when you have a valid complaint? When there is an emergency, you can call 9–1–1, but what about the slow-moving emergency of climate change, wage stagnation, the rising costs of education, childcare, or medical services? We the people might be pissed off. Many of the people who voted for Trump were voting with their middle finger — people often make poor choices when acting in anger.

Grassroots movements have historically been the most successful when groups form durable solidarity toward specific and appropriate goals. If we can find a way to synthesize a learning experience to form coherence with groups who share common grievances, we can make real impact. The 2020 election presents a unique opportunity to pressure elected officials. This is an ideal setting for researching this wicked problem.