Non-binary or bust

An argument for thinking more expansively in these retracting times

Too many of us are bad at non-binary thinking, yet it is so badly needed right now. 

Case in point: The public conversation about pods and educational equity. 

One person argues that pods are going to further educational inequity and so working parents shouldn’t create them. Another person counters that it is our educational system that must be blamed for inequity, not individual working parents. Stop shaming people for a structural failure! 

These two people, and the factions that line up behind them, stare one another down across an abyss. They feel guilt and shame, anger and blame. They feel desperate, misunderstood, and stuck. The media stories follow--ah, a tender controversy we can leverage for clicks.  

But here’s the thing: The abyss is self-created. It isn’t real. Our disagreements are real. Our struggles are real. But the abyss is a product of anemic imagination, not structural truth. It looks wide because we’ve painted it that way. 

In fact, there is no need to choose between fighting for equity on the individual level or the systemic level. We can and must do both. Just because the system is broken (broken by design, many wise people remind us), doesn’t mean that your individual action is a moot point. Your individual action matters to you, your own integrity, your own craving to live an examined life, to walk through the world knowing you are wrestling hard with your privilege, your power at a moment when we are all called to do so. 

Beyond that, individual choices do add up. They accumulate. As political scientist Erica Chenoweth argues, political change takes only about 3.5% of the population to be actively engaged. It’s true, there are huge systems and structures in place that dwarf our individual choices. The smallness doesn’t make them unimportant. The micro is representative of the macro, as nature tells us. We are fractal.  

Spotted in Oakland.

It is not good vs. evil, to pod or not to pod. That’s a mythic frame. In fact, there are a million nuances that are worth honoring. What is a “pod” anyway? (I think we’ve overused the word into meaninglessness already.) There are more and less equitable ways of grouping children right now. Your time would be far better spent exploring those dimensions than either shaming someone else or defending yourself against what you perceive as other people’s judgment. 

For that matter, what is a “working parent?” Some of us are hourly workers, with little or no  control of our schedules. Some of us are salaried and have some flexibility. Instead of oversubscribing on your sample size of one (your own family), ask more questions. Listen to more answers. What is this moment like for other people? What are they scared of? What is stressing them out? 

I promise you will feel not only feel better, but have way more proportionality about your own stress after doing this. And if you don’t know anyone outside of your race and/or class demographic to ask these kinds of questions of, start there. You’re depriving yourself of the richness of humanity. 

Let me be crystal clear: Rejecting binary thinking doesn’t mean floating away in a river of nuances, never putting an anchor down in moral territory and saying, “This. This is what I believe and what I am willing to do to act on that belief.” 

To the contrary, I find that when I am doing my best non-binary thinking, I am more convicted because I know I’ve explored the ethical terrain enough to stand somewhere firmly. I’m humble in that standing. I’m always prepared to be moved by what others believe and share. But I’m not interested in spending my one wild and precious life debating within a frame that I know is made for TV, not real, complex systems and the people that created them and re-create them every single day with their words and actions. (Systems = people, y’all. Don’t get it twisted.) 

We need to train our minds and our hearts to hold more, to be more expansive and explicit about the variety of ways that we can and should exercise our power to make things different. Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and feel free to critique and push the heck out of them. Abolish policing practice and get curious about what other models of justice and accountability exist that we can start practicing in their place. Try to compose a life in the midst of a mismanaged pandemic that you can still love, or at least survive, and keep pushing yourself to acknowledge and experiment with all the ways you are connected to and impacting other people.

If nothing else, let this motivate you: we have been experiencing a master class in binary thinking from the White House these past four years. If you are repelled by his leadership, and all it has wrought, then do different. Be different. 

Reject the simple and self-focused frame at every turn. Shift from binaries to spectrums. Ask questions before making arguments. Be willing to change your mind, or at least refine your thinking. Even in collective pain, stress, and transition, we can do this.