Category Archives: Political Discussion

The Politics of a Homeowners Association

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This has been a most interesting year so far. I had planned on it being a low key year, and in some ways, it has been as I have had to postpone my scheduled road trip for this year to next year. However, my responsibilities have increased. I realize that it has been over seven months since I posted on my website blog, but in the opening paragraph of that previous post, I noted that an interesting event had occurred in the previous year, having the position of president of the board of my homeowners association being dropped into my lap. The responsibility has been an interesting learning curve.

The concept of a homeowners association can be varied due to the type and number of homes in a neighborhood where an association can be formed. A homeowners association formed among a group of single family homes on individual lots is more of a collective oversight of the general neighborhood with more individual responsibility of private property. However, when the homes are townhomes or condominiums sharing one or more buildings in the community, more responsibility is placed on the legally controlled association to maintain the community, and individual homeowners are required to provide a monthly fee to cover the oversight and maintenance of the shared areas of the community. A covenant limited board of owners from the full group of homeowners are formed to handle the oversight. When I lived in Los Angeles, I owned a townhome in a building of six units, a small number that basically put every owner on the board. Under this situation, our association was more like a tight knit clique that handled the management of our building simply on our own. Yet, my current townhome is one of over one hundred units spread within a small neighborhood community which requires a professional property management company to handle the maintenance of building exteriors, landscape areas, and roadways, as well as the enforcement of the rules from board decisions and oversight of the association founding covenants. Due to the small size of the community, being on the board as an elected representative of the community is basically a volunteer duty, mainly consisting of attending a once-a-month meeting to handle community decisions. However, good board members realize that the responsibility of members are not limited to just the monthly meeting.

Community issues rise up quite often, which require the property management company to seek input from the board members. Some property management companies try to respond to individual owner complaints and requests on their own with very little reporting back to the board members, but other property management companies seek to maintain transparency with the board by keeping them informed of the communications as they come in. The property management company in my association falls into the latter category, which helps the board make more informed decisions when needed. In a way, it also helps the board members to get to know their fellow owners and neighbors, especially in regards to their concerns and needs. It is amazing how this fast-paced digital-oriented modern society has disconnected people from others living next door within communities. However, it is also amazing how this disconnect has created separate perspectives that have formed splits in the views within the community, a smaller version of what is visible in the political discord within and between countries on a global scale. In my position on the board, I have a front row perspective of this subtle division.

The main issue is basically in trying to find and understand the balance, dividing line, and responsibilities between the individual and society. In our situation, the individual is the person, family, or other legal entity that purchased the defined unit within the group community. Under the concept of ownership, the individual should be free to make decisions on how to enjoy and benefit from the property purchased, but is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property. However, on the social concept of an association, the interconnection of the units and the common property which they all share put a group responsibility on the general maintenance of the buildings and land. The constant question is where the line between social and individual responsibility and ownership lie. Unfortunately, that line is not absolute, but individual perspectives always seek to find that absolute line.

The basic argument is mainly conformity versus individuality. On one side, exterior design should be standard throughout the neighborhood, whereas on the other side, an individual should be free to express themselves within the borders of their property. With townhome associations, since units are interconnected, it is understandable to have the association determine the general color and maintenance of the exterior walls, but it is amazing to see the argument regarding window design conformity. Windows are a pathway from exterior to interior, so the responsibility of maintenance and upgrading is left to the individual owner. However, since windows have an exterior side, there is a sense of design conformity that many feel the association has a right to impose on the individual owner, not just with frame color, but also with design style. Should an owner be forced to have side sliding windows over up and down sliding windows? For some, association conformity rules over individual choice, although for many, the association conformity usually must conform to their own personal view.

Another area of conflict is with landscaping. For one side, the association is there to handle plant and grass maintenance, so they have no reason to get involved with it unless the plants begin to die, which is when they send complaints to the association board about landscape contractor incompetence. However, the other side has an innate avid gardener persona that wants to create and maintain their own exterior garden area. These owners seek a space where individual flower and shrub design is created and controlled by their own views. Over-avid owners seek to impose their design views on common areas beyond their unit in order to assign their own sense of conformity throughout the community, regardless of the cost.

In the end, I see the role in which I have been placed as president of the homeowners association board is to fiscally find the best balance between these sides by listening and guiding owners to find a good level of individual freedom and social acceptance, but I am aware that this level will always change and it will never find full acceptance by all. Still, it is better than accepting one side over the other and encouraging division, something I see on a larger scale in this country and globally.

 

How Should a National Park Be Defined?

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In one of my earliest posts written nearly five years ago, I discussed the various bucket lists I had created as a plan to explore the wonders of our world, gaining a perspective of where we fit within the environment and history of its being. One of those bucket lists was to visit all of the designated United States National Parks. At the time and up to the start of 2018, there were 59 designated national parks managed by the United States National Park System. With last year’s road trip, I am able to mark off 41 of those 59 national parks, and I am planning a northwestern road trip in late spring which will bring me to 4 more national parks. However, the United States Congress, at the urging of a Missouri senator, recently re-designated the Jefferson Expansion National Memorial to the Gateway Arch National Park. President Trump signed the law in February 2018. Now, I have no major quibble over officially renaming Jefferson Expansion to Gateway Arch, even though the metal arch was designed and constructed in the 1960s as a homage to President Thomas Jefferson’s action of the Louisiana Purchase which greatly expanded the US in the early 1800s and led to its eventual growth as the fourth largest country in the world. However, changing its designation from a national memorial to a national park totally upends the true concept of a national park and how it should be perceived. This is an action to which I cannot agree.

Now, the birth of the concept of the national park with Yellowstone did not arise out of any grand plan, as Yellowstone was created as the first national park only because it was not within the borders of a state at the time of its designation by Congress, but was just within US territory. Yosemite was the first park set aside by Congress, but because it was within the borders of the new state of California, it was designated as a California State Park. It was only after California decided to build the Hetch Hetchy dam and reservoir in a northern valley of the park that Yosemite was taken back and re-designated by the US Congress as a National Park, allowing future national parks to be set aside and designated within individual state boundaries. Under the activism of conservationists like Ansel Adams, the concept of a national park developed into the preservation of important natural ecosystems within the US, an idea which has spread globally to many other countries. The range of US national parks stretch from volcanic geysers, mountain ranges, arctic tundra, unique forest regions, major cave systems, deep canyons, low valleys, off-shore islands, and sub-tropical everglades. Visiting these protected environments have become a great means to gain a true perspective of the natural science of the planet on which we live.

Oversight of these national parks are handled by the National Park Service, a division of the Interior Department. This oversight balances the preservation and maintenance of these protected environments with handling the large number of visitors who come to experience and gain perspective from these environments. The National Park Service also oversees a great number of historical sites from battlefields, trails, and forts to memorials, statues, and historical buildings. There are also several national monument sites that were designated by Presidents under the power of the Art and Antiquities Act. Many of these monuments could be considered a valuable natural environment that could place it in the national park designation, but it would require Congress to pass a law re-designating these monuments to national park status. However, probably for the benefit of visitors and a positive campaign touting their oversight, the National Park Service is very prominent is calling all of their 400+ protected sites as national parks. This campaign may be why Congress did not have any issue in re-designating the Gateway Arch from a national memorial to a national park. Like many Americans, the senators and representatives had become blind to the designation concept of a national park.

Now looking through the other designated national parks, some may argue that social and historical constructs had already pervaded the natural identity of a national park. The smallest US national park, Hot Springs National Park, has its borders entering the northern city limits of Hot Springs, Arkansas, in order to take in historical bathhouses that formed a key part in the area’s use of the hot spring water for health reasons. However, the national park was designated mainly to oversee and preserve the naturally heated waters caused by the underground pressures within the surrounding Ozark Mountains. The park boundaries circle within the mountain ridge around the northern neighborhood of Hot Springs where campgrounds have been set aside. In another of the newer national parks, Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, the park boundaries surround several towns with a few schools and farms inside. When I visited the park eight years ago, I found it interesting to find a home up for sale in one of the towns within the park borders. As I understand, these town sections are not considered to be federal land nor technically part of the park. However, the reason for the designation of a national park was for the oversight and protection of the Cuyahoga River and the surrounding natural environment, since the Cuyahoga River was one of the first heavily polluted rivers that was successfully cleaned up, a major conservation act of nature. So, in comparison, the Gateway Arch is a major human-manufactured metallic structure designed solely as an artistic memorial based on a stretch of landscaped grassy areas along the shore of the Mississippi River next to an ornately domed historic courthouse in the downtown center of St. Louis. Nowhere in this description do I perceive a preservation of any sort of natural ecosystem associated with the concept of a truly designated national park. This was totally a socially grand memorial commemorating an historic era in the United States. It should have stayed a designated national memorial.

So how should this affect my bucket list of visiting all of the US National Parks? Even if I were to add the Gateway Arch to the national parks list, I will still be able to check it off as having been visited since it was a part of my Central Plains road trip last year, meaning I still have the same number of national parks left to visit. Of course, I still have my little slideshow of personal images from the national parks I have visited on another page of my website. Should I add a Gateway Arch image I took from my current visit last year to this slideshow? At this time, I will not, as I still do not consider this re-designation to truly fit within the natural concept of a national park.

Finding Balance Through Context and Perspective

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Nearly two years ago, I posted about how the current political polarized environment seemed to derive from the comfort many feel from a sense of absolutism, where a set framework of rules and beliefs gives a solid sense of direction, and how these absolute frameworks actually tend to upset the delicate balance of nature and society. I commented on how these expressions of absolutism failed to understand the balance by not seeing the context within the interactions of others or exploring the range of perspective in which one was creating the absolute framework. However, I do realize that understanding context and perspective is not a simple concept, especially when regarding each of our positions within this universe, knowing full context and total perspective is an absolute impossibility. Yet, the better one can understand the basic sense of how context and perception plays in understanding nature and social interaction, then accepting the variations of life in finding balance might come easier.

Context is a very important part of our ability to judge the actions of others around us, the conditions that many of us face on a daily basis, and the quality of our own actions within nature and society. Regardless of how selfishly or selflessly our own personal views characterizes right and wrong, worthiness, or responsibility, judgement is the way we relate our views to the actions surrounding us. However, our ability to judge any incident or decision is dependent upon the amount of information we can see about the factors surrounding the incident or judgement, including the aspects of intent and consequences. The better we are at seeing more of these factors of context surrounding an incident, the better we can become at judging the actions and consequences of the incident. For instance, imagine a person walking down a sidewalk along a busy street, when suddenly another person comes out of nowhere and tackles the first person onto the concrete, causing bruising and a couple broken bones. Just based on this information, one may judge the second person as being guilty of a vicious assault, perhaps even demonstrating a power-hungry sense of bullying. However, if mere seconds later, an out-of-control speeding vehicle suddenly jumps the curb and crashes into a wall at a point where the first person would have been if this person had not been pushed out of the way by the second person, then judgement of the second person’s actions may be seen as a selfless attempt of protection from danger and the injuries the first person incurred may be considered more acceptable to the real possibility of death if the first person had not been shoved out of the way of the wayward vehicle. Unfortunately, for many events, these factors of context tend to be much more complex and trying to understand actions or events often require sorting out opposing contextual factors, as well as trying to uncover the more hidden factors of intent. Yet, so much context is lost when we try to reduce our judgement down to a simple right or wrong single sentence meme.

Understanding the context of the information around us depends totally on the information we receive from our senses, our ability to integrate information over a period of time, and our acceptance in the reliability of this collected information, which forms our perspective of the universe around us. The evolution of humanity led us to develop a way to exchange parts of the information each of us gathers amongst other individuals through a common spoken language, then we developed a way to spread this information to a broader society of humanity through the organized symbols of a common written language. This sharing of information broadened our perspective and understanding to eventually create through scientific technology a way to share and gather information over distances beyond our immediate sensual views. However, no matter how much language and technology expands each one of our perspectives within our life and the universe, we are all limited in the amount and breadth of information each of us can gather and maintain in our memories in order to fully see the world and universe we are in and to accurately judge absolutely what our next actions should be within this world. Therefore, we base our decisions of future actions based on a core of information we feel we understand and use faith to fill in the blanks. However, due to variations in how information comes to us, we are often confronted with contradictions in what is happening around us. In some circumstances, these contradictions are caused by inaccurate or false information presented to us, from something as simple as a mirage or a damaged sense to something more complicated like incorrect or false information shared to us by others. How should we handle these flaws in our own perspective? For some, it becomes better to firmly accept one clear framework of information and begin to reject or judge negatively any information that begins to go against this framework. This may provide clarity or comfort, but very often this will begin to clash with other absolutely created frameworks. What I have realized within my own perspective is that there is no one perfect framework of perspective. To handle the flow of contradictory information, I need to constantly compare new information with old information and see where information seems contradictory. Sometimes, I notice that a changing environment only created the sense of contradiction when there really was no conflict in information. Many times, the comparison and balancing of information helps me to determine which information is illusionary or incorrect. However, oftentimes, I can only be open to gathering information, constantly compare and contrast what is provided to me, then use a little faith to fill in the gaps and move forward. My perspective is only one of an infinite number of perspectives in this universe, and seeking a balance among what I see, hear, read, and comprehend is the closest to being a calming part of this universe.

Absolutism: The Loss of Balance

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The political polarization that has arisen in America and around the world seems to run counter to the evolution of human society toward democratic ideals of equality, basic independent rights, and a broader global management of nature and life on earth; however, it seems to me that the technological advances of mass social communication has only revealed a base natural characteristic into which most individuals fall back to find comfort and power in an uncertain world – absolutism. In essence, in order to find order in one’s life, one seeks to find a framework of absolutes to live by, bonds with others who agree with this set of absolutes, and quickly dismisses and rejects those who refuse to fit within this strict set of rules and beliefs. The uncertainty of decision-making is resolved by the internal acceptance that, in all circumstances, there is only one absolute right way with all else being the absolute wrong way. This determination can be conceived through religious doctrine or social theory, but one’s acceptance of an absolute interpretation relieves one of the guilt and angst of making a wrong decision, laying the blame for an unacceptable result on the actions of others who follow a different interpretation. However, this sense of absolutism can only undercut the delicate balance within the context of life itself.

Many of Aesop’s fables have simple morals that have guided me in life and influenced society through the centuries. However, I remember reading one fable that did not truly fit the concept of the moral presented and caused me to reflect on the flaw behind the absolute in the moral. I have seen a couple of ways the story is told, but one simple version is a king providing comfort to a traveler on a cold night. Basically, the tale has the traveler blowing on his hands and, upon questioning, states he is warming them up from the cold. The traveler is then provided with a bowl of stew, fresh from the fire, and he begins to blow on it. When questioned, he states that he is cooling the hot stew so he can eat it. At this point, the traveler is sent back out into the cold with a statement from the king that “no man could be trusted who blows both hot and cold.” The moral on its own is a caution against trusting or dealing with hypocritical individuals, yet the traveler was not a source of hypocrisy. His life and the lives of all creatures depends upon a range of temperature far from the extremes of absolute zero and the solar furnace. When a person blows out of his mouth, the air that comes out is in this normal balanced range, which means that it can transfer warmth to items that are colder, like skin subjected to a freezing night, as well as absorb energy from hotter items, like a bowl of stew fresh from a fire. In essence, the traveler was balancing the levels of hot and cold around him. However, the traveler was accused of expounding both extremes, because the king could only see life in the absolutes of hot and cold. Aesop had fallen under the trap of absolutism.

As I see it, this has become the course of political and moral discussion in today’s broadcast and social media. Although I do see true incidents of hypocritical actions at times, often I witness the accusation of sin, incompetence, or hypocrisy directed toward others because it is outside the accuser’s absolute narrow set of ethics. An individual who attempts to resolve an issue by finding common ground between two sides or seeking a suitable balance of needs is accused by absolutists of “trying to have it both ways,” as well as “totally violating a sacred rule or law.” Any view, balanced or otherwise, that exists outside an absolutist’s view is labeled extremist, and any action, that goes against the absolutist’s narrow laws, regardless of context or intent, is grouped and branded under the same accusation of failure or sin. In other words, it is easy for an absolutist to compare “apples and oranges,” because it is all just “bad fruit.” By following and judging others from an absolutist set of ethics, an individual is able to avoid having to analyze the actual context under which actions and events occur, which is probably why so many seek to accept a straight set of rules.

The truth is, to accurately and constantly analyze and fully understand the evolution of context in trying to make the right decision requires the omniscience of God, yet we are constantly strapped by the limitations postulated in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which forces us to make some decisions on faith, setting some of these decisions on a course to failure. However, I feel that if we do not try to hide behind a blind set of absolutism when events do not follow as we have planned, but rather use a broader set of principles to guide us while continuing to monitor the changing context of events around us, we can find a better balance in successfully connecting with a broader range of humanity and making more successful decisions. Yet, I am sure that there will be many who will claim that I am only “trying to have it both ways,” that my thought and actions are “violating their rights and freedom to bring the truth to others,” or that I will “suffer in hell for turning my back on God’s word.”

Health Insurance and Religious Freedom

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A few days ago, I came across an article in the paper about the suit challenging the new healthcare law’s dictate that corporate health insurance benefits for employees must include coverage for standard contraceptives, including the “morning after” pill, was heading to the Supreme Court. The suit claims that this part of the law would constitutionally violate some company owners’ religious freedoms, since it would force them to support a practice that is against their tightly held religious beliefs. According to the article, the debate turns on whether a company can be considered “a person” that has religious beliefs protected under the First Amendment. However, I see this argument as being spurious because it does not matter whether one is making this case for a company, a person or even a religious organization. After all, how can any entity claim a First Amendment right to freedom of religion as a defense to deny that same right to another citizen?

In essence, all jobs are basically inherent contracts between parties requiring services and parties providing the services needed, whether the relationship is between an individual and an independent contractor or between an employer and employee. For services rendered, compensation is provided, and the payer has no further ownership or control over the funds provided, and therefore, no control over what the payee does with those funds going forth. For example, a vegan company owner cannot force his employees to use their salaries to purchase only vegetable dishes for their families.

Employee benefits are just as much a form of compensation as salary for an employee’s service. Considering that no individual or party can control or impose any sort of restriction upon how an individual uses that compensation within the freedoms guaranteed to that individual by the Constitution, it is up to the employee to decide how to use a health insurance benefit within his or her own religious beliefs. If an owner of a company is a Jehovah’s Witness, should he be able to restrict his employee’s health plan benefit so that it does not allow any form of emergency blood transfusion? I think not. A health insurance plan should cover most legally acceptable forms of medical services that an individual may find acceptable to his or her own religious beliefs, which is why the new healthcare law included contraceptive services. A business owner, like any other individual, has a right to preach his or her religious and moral beliefs to his or her employees, but the employees’ rights to their individual beliefs and morals must be respected and accepted in return. That is the price for living in a non-theocratic democracy.