Diamond-Cut Life

Life often involves not getting what we want. Examples: the non-outcomes of the Copenhagen talks, the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate spending for elections, and the torrential downpours that dominated my visit to Disneyland last Monday.

Sometimes, though, we do get what we want. Examples: Portland General Electric has announced it will shut down Boardman, the only coal-fired energy plant in Oregon, by 2020 (coal emissions are a prime source of global warming). And on the personal level, my desire to have more community in my life got advanced last night, when the group of friends attending our dinner party enthusiastically agreed to my proposal that we get together every month for dinner, rotating as hosts. I am elated! We actually opened our party with a toast to the eventual demise of Boardman. I pointed out that Thor’s successful program helped build the voluntary market for renewable energy that may have helped to turn the tide.

The topic last night that most fired our conversational imagination was this: how do we constructively deal with things we don’t like? How can we wield positive influence? On the micro level, a bar with an unpleasant vampire theme has recently opened in my friend Linda’s neighborhood. Let’s just say this vampire bar is called . . . . Lure. Linda is having a serious case of NIMBY concerning Lure — but doesn’t want to pursue the usual exhausting process of petitions and city council meetings. She’s devised instead a plan that’s both subversive and nonviolent (note that last Monday, my sodden and bedraggled day at Disneyland, was Martin Luther King Day).

“We simply all go to this vampire bar called Lure. And hang out there,” Linda explained energetically.”All the young people they’re trying to attract see us and are, pardon the term, horrified. Word gets out that Lure is for square middle-aged people. By the next weekend their reputation is ruined. They’re as popular as if they have garlic on their breath.”

“With our presence, we put our stake in the ground,” I said passionately.

“This strikes at the heart of the matter,” Leigh added feelingly.

“Nobody would want to be caught dead there,” Ken nodded soberly.

Thor noted that this plan could also be deployed at the sex club in downtown Portland. “We bring a few decks of cards, spread out over several tables, and make ourselves comfortable.”

“We play Go Fish and order 7-Up all night.”

“The swingers who stream through the door take one look at us and are convinced they’re in the wrong place.”

“They’d want no part of us.”

“They’d turn tail,” Sam said. “I mean, they’d run in the opposite direction.”

Sorry. All that may be more information about my dinner party than you wanted, so I’ll stop. To close the loop, all the joking around about vampire bars and sex clubs ended up tying back in to the eventual closing of the Boardman coal plant. The common thread was the power of social norms, i.e. people are heavily influenced by those around them, and are uncomfortable with sharp differences. Both people and companies would sometimes rather change their behavior or location than feel out of place.

To my point: as Oregon’s energy mix replaces coal with cleaner fuels, it will put subtle pressure on other states to reduce their use of coal, the cheapness of which has invited both heavy dependence on it, and denial of its central role in causing global warming. Which ties back in to my earlier mentioned passion: community. It’s a powerful thing, and makes each of us more powerful as we become steeped in it.

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