A story of a fallen tree
The most memorable conversation that I had in the past two weeks, by far, was with two men in West Medford. For the purposes of this post, I'll call them L. and J. Most voters aren't aware just how much candidates know about their voting history when we knock on the door — we have canvassing apps full of this information. I knocked on L.'s door knowing that he had voted in municipal elections before, but not in the past few years. J. was his neighbor, visiting his friend, and he wasn't on my list at all. I was trying to inspire a voter to return to the polls and maybe get a new one.
L. lived in front of a fence by the train tracks. "What are you gonna do about this?" he asked, gesturing to the fence. It was covered in unkempt shrubs, trees, dead leaves. "I cut it myself for years, but nobody was paying me." Finally he stopped doing that. He kept calling the city. They had sent prisoners out to clean it up one time, several years ago, but that was only one time. "And when will they put up a soundproof wall for these tracks?"
I wasn't promising L. that I could do much about his shrubbery, or buy his street a soundproof wall. The city needed money to get DPW staff that could do these things consistently, not one-off favors, and that takes time. Lately, at doors, I've been using analogies to make my points — comparing Medford to a dried-up lawn and saying that, if we “water” and tend to Medford now, we'll have beautiful grass in the future, but these changes won't be immediate. The unkempt shrubbery were a symptom of deeper problems with finance and capacity, and we need to invest now. Most elder residents appreciated my attempts to be honest, but, in a depressingly pragmatic sort of way, many also seemed to believe that they wouldn't be around long enough to see the results of these investments.
L. and J. used the opportunity to vent. It wasn't the first time in my canvassing that I'd been on the receiving end of a frustrated monologue; they knew I had nothing to do with it, but they’d had issues with the city for years and just wanted to vent. J. complained about the government sending money overseas instead of spending it here. "I mean, I know that's federal," he said, "and you're talking about property taxes, but still!" L. gave his neighbor a mild side eye, then pointed down the road. He told me there used to be a tree down there, and that he used to have a neighbor who was an elderly woman. She'd passed some years ago, of what sounded like natural causes. But, for a long time when living there, she had complained about a big, leaning tree in front of her house.
As L. described this, he began to tear up, with J. consoling him. She kept calling the city, L. said, asking them to cut it down. "The mayor even came out." Some past mayor had looked at the tree and decided to not cut it down. "He said it was a 'good tree'." The tree ended up falling down on her house, and it would have killed her if she'd been in a different room. After that, L. went on for a while about how nobody in the city cared and nothing ever changed.
This is an anecdote from one source, not journalism, so take it all with a grain of salt. I tried Googling the story to find out if it had ever been covered by some past local newspaper but found nothing. This didn't mean it didn't happen, but I couldn't independently verify it. Still, the story fit right into my understanding of the city's current issues and illustrated, very succinctly, so many things wrong with its political past. Hands-on leadership is great until a politician pretends to be a botanist. I personally can't tell a good tree from a bad tree, but one should have the good judgment not to cut staff from the forestry department to save money and try to do their jobs personally. It was also dismissive, supposing that a quick examination from — again — a non-expert was better than repeated warnings from an individual that spent a lot of her time looking at the tree. It reflected the long-term consequences of lack of maintenance, and the lack of resources that Medford has to perform this maintenance. And it reflects lack of empathy; this wasn't a rich neighborhood, and these people weren't politically connected, so why spend the resources to cut down a tree, or even think about the problem?
The ensuing conversation between L. and I touched on most of these points, and he agreed with them. The conversation was important for me in the immediate term, as a political candidate trying to get elected, but also in the long term: the clearest way to get money into the city would be a future vote to increase property taxes above what is normally allowed — one immediate source of revenue for our uniquely underfunded city — and that would need people like L. to vote. Having done some exploration of previous failed override elections in the state government's database, this has been on my mind lately.
But, when I tried to get him to commit to vote on November 7th, he wouldn't. "Yeah, I just, I don't know," he said. He hadn't decided. The question wasn't whether to vote for me — L. would do that, he said, if he decided to vote at all. It wasn't a case of potentially forgetting. He was just so disillusioned and sick of it that he didn't want to. I never liked to see how jaded some of the elderly can get, even if I understand why. But I kept walking, onto the next door. Maybe he'd vote, maybe not.
