Into a Field of Bureaucratic Weeds Only to Find Some Conscious Politics Flowers

Issue 80

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Today’s issue did and didn’t quite go the way I thought it would. About a month ago, in the general course of consuming news and information, I got wind of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy that was being touted by Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg. What got my attention were a few quick clips of him here and there focusing attention on jurisdictions within and beyond the U.S. that are enjoying roadway safety success today: “We know that roadway deaths are preventable because some places are doing a better job of preventing them than others.” The secretary name-checked Hoboken, NJ, for example, as having zero roadway fatalities in the last three years after adopting new policies.

Conscious politics practitioner me felt immediately excited. I mean, a huge government agency, flush with more than half a trillion dollars from the infrastructure legislation passed last November, doing something so simple and smart that aligns with conscious practice? Bookmarked! Then, faced this week with talking about war or war or anything else, I chose anything else. That meant a quasi-deep — and definitely deeper-than-you — dive into American roadway safety policy writ large, intending to make hay for you out of how easy it is to infuse American governance with higher consciousness. The things I do. Yet all I’m really talking about here is how it is excellent conscious practice to elucidate and magnify anything already in alignment with what’s wanted. What’s wanted here is zero roadway fatalities in America so where is that already happening and where have fatalities, at least, been reduced? Starting a project by elevating what is working — however big or small — is like putting fuel in the tank of the overall project. Vroom!

But, alas. It wasn’t exactly baked into the relatively modest 37 pages of roadway strategy. I didn’t see the references to Hoboken or South Los Angeles or Fremont, CA or New York City or even examples from other countries, but I did see some other excellent conscious practice as I trekked through the bureaucratic weeds. Right off the bat, I saw a lot of the connection between campaigning and governing. In the 2020 general election, Democrats writ large and certainly compared to Republicans, infused their campaigns with a lot of rhetoric about racial equity and guess what? Racial equity is being addressed in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new strategy as a direct result of President Biden’s EO 13985, also known as Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. Promise kept. Trust building. The other conscious practice gems I saw were interdependence, intention, compassion plus some talk about beliefs. Who’da thunk it?

So there’s interdependence and clear intention — both to address racial equity and to reduce roadway fatalities. There’s compassion, which is racial equity. And hold onto your hat because someone knows that beliefs matter.

Paraphrasing, there is built in to the strategy what the Department calls — in the engineering sense — redundancies and which I call interdependencies. It recognizes the need for multitudes of stakeholders to work in concert, mimicking the nature of Nature. We belong to the planet, not the planet to us. Then, there’s intention. Within the intention of the executive order for government on the whole is a shiny, clear intention for Transportation specifically: zero roadway fatalities. Nice. Then, there’s this: “An important area for U.S. DOT’s focus is the disproportionate, adverse safety impacts that affect certain groups on our roadways. For example, fatalities among Black people increased by 23 percent between 2019 and 2020 compared to an overall increase of 7.2 percent. People who are American Indian and Alaska Native have roadway fatality rates more than double the national rate on a per population basis.” And this: “The 40 percent of counties with the highest poverty rates in 2019 experienced a fatality rate 35 percent higher than the national average on a per population basis.” And also this: “To achieve zero roadway fatalities and a transportation system that is safe for all users, all actors in our transportation system must acknowledge and address historic and ongoing inequities.”

Republicans bloviate, taunt, and ridicule with their puerile assertion that “there are no racist roads.” Whatever. But we conscious politics practitioners know that equity in politics is compassion in action: listening to those who have been discriminated against and responding, guided by an intention to be equitable. That’s what’s going on here. I’d say it’s also compassion in action because the whole project is about valuing all human life — safety for everyone.

So there’s interdependence and clear intention — both to address racial equity and to reduce roadway fatalities. There’s compassion, which is racial equity. And hold onto your hat because someone knows that beliefs matter. In closing out his remarks, Buttigieg said: “…maybe more than any single piece of technology or policy is that we need a national change in mentality; it is time for a transformation in how people think about road safety…once we believe that and believe in our ability to collectively make progress, once we demand better, we will see more positive changes cascading across governments and industries.” #consciouspolitics

A reader asked in the comments last week whether I had someone in mind who, in the context of the piece, crosses the chasm more successfully between how progressives and how conscious politics practitioners approach politics and I named Buttigieg. Indeed, Secretary Buttigieg has been, for me, the only one whose rhetoric as a 2020 Democratic candidate for president I wasn’t always wanting to correct or augment or contextualize to make it “more conscious.” The directive to infuse equity into government came from the president, but Buttigieg campaigned on it, too, and agrees with it wholeheartedly. Obviously, all the departments of our government were issued the same order and perhaps we’ll look more closely sometime at how it’s being implemented elsewhere. Today, however, it is gratifying to point to this particular project as evidence that some higher consciousness is seeping into actual federal policy. In the U.S. Department of Transportation of all places.

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