Shelter in Place, San Francisco, February 11, 2021
“I’m never an advocate of eliminating trees,” said the man who came to cut ours down. As his crew began their work, I thought about that irony and of the contradictions in my own life and heart. I donate to a local organization called Friends of the Urban Forest, an organization responsible for planting saplings in every available space along San Francisco’s streets. Yet here I am, removing at great trouble and expense an ample and mature tree in my own back yard because it is out of scale and blocks our sun. Consequences for the neighborhood and for the earth are afterthoughts as I watch them lower the branches to the ground.
In today’s New York Times, an editorial captures exactly the dilemma we all face in matching our beliefs to our actions, in choosing the greater good over our own interest and convenience. The article, in fact, is about California and I recognize my own neighborhood in its examples - how every window proudly bears a Black Lives Matters sign while the neighborhood ferociously fights any effort to build housing that might be affordable enough to equalize the playing field; how political pressure drove the school board’s recent vote to change the names of the city’s schools, pressure from whites who choose to send there kids to private schools.
While, branch by brach, our tree was cut and lowered to the ground yesterday, I sat transfixed by the impeachment trial on television as the litigators walked the nation step by step through the horrific lies actions by our former president and by his inspired and manipulated mob. ‘How could anyone not convict?’ I ask myself, ‘what has this country become?’ The answer seems to be that some senators have found a way to look the other way, to value their own futures over ours, to vote out of fear or self-interest, or both. Can I really be so outraged? Don’t we all make choices that we know in our hearts are detrimental to the greater good? Looking out my window this morning at a vista much improved, I cannot forgive the cowardice of the choice these senators are making, but maybe I can try in some small way to understand.