Multiconstruct

Part of my Christian discipleship was to read the Bible every day and pray every day and to try to have some kind of self improvement every day.

 

 

 

The Nazarenes came out of the Methodists and the Methodists get their name because they have a method. It’s kind of an important thing. It’s the same principle they use in recovery. It’s having an organized, systematic, accountable way of having spiritual improvement. When you start doing that, your life starts looking different because instead of having the negative things and the things that are what I would have called then sinful and I would call now not helpful, you instead focus on being a better person and looking out for other people, and trying to make things better. That’s a really neat perspective to bring into life.

Some of the things we did was Bible quizzing where you start to learn to memorize scripture. I’d be reading it every day and there’s big stories that you learn, but you’re also doing the language and digging into what sentences mean and how do they apply to life. When I did Bible quizzing, it was great because it gave me a chance to shine even though I was socially awkward because I was really good at it and I got to know my Bible stuff.

After I read the Bible, I went back and read interesting parts and I probably read the New Testament a few times. By this time I’m maybe 16 and a junior in high school. I had really come to see that my favorite part of the whole Bible was the stuff that Jesus said and the Red Letter Edition of the Bible.

I had this Bible as literature class that was really great in public school and where I learned to look at the Bible as a literary device and see it from a different perspective. Then I had this idea that you work out your own salvation. What it meant was important to me. One of my favorite parts is the Beatitudes where Jesus is preaching and it gets kind of the core of his message. And he said you should love of your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

I read that and I knew it and I knew it by heart from Bible quizzed Matthew. It just hit me like a thunderclap: War was wrong. I thought about what it meant. I just went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and my parents were proud to be the only people in Sumeria township who voted for George Wallace. They had this kind of apolitical kind of independence, mostly not liking anybody, not being that into politics. They read the paper.

My church was like a center of right-wing activism, both like the Jack Kemp campaign was organized out of my church because the evangelicals had gotten really political with Reagan and pro-life. I had adopted these kind of politics without really thinking anything and I was a little Reaganite and and then I’m reading the Bible and I believe in an active spiritual process and it strikes me that war is wrong. And then what do you do with that?

You start thinking about everything.

If you’ve read a lot of history, and I had, I loved history after, you know, from the child that mythology is history and hearing stories. So I had read good history, most of the history of the world and so imperialism was right there. It was something that under American empire and the Great Commission and the Christianization of the planet, it seemed all very right and proper and good.

I brought this whole critique and in like three days I abandoned all of my political beliefs and I started to question, and then I looked at the Book of Acts where it talked about the early church where they they shared everything amongst themselves and lived as a community and and didn’t go to these churches but lived in each other’s houses and they pooled their money to take care of the widows and the orphans.

I looked at Jesus who said that the love of money is the root of all evil. When the rich young man came to him and asked what they do, h said sell all you have and give to the poor. And suddenly this Reagan politics of getting rid of welfare and government is the problem, it all became just terrible. I thought it looked like anarchy when I read about the early church and I thought that we ought to live like we were in the early church and that that was the goal of this whole thing that we were doing on Sunday morning and Sunday night and Wednesday night. I saw what they were doing. They were doing this weird thing that I couldn’t believe in anymore. But anarchy struck me as overly idealistic when I thought about politics, what does it mean about politics?

I really got into politics and found as I read that I found the social gospel movement where I found these wild left wing reformists socialist Christians who were trying to use government as the arm of religious zeal. In a way that helps struggling people and reorganizes the economy in a way that was more fair for more people. And that looked like what I had seen in the early church and Jubilee and in the message that I had got out of church and the in the Bible. So, I got into the social gospel movement. I got into utopian communities and reading about people who are really trying to do it and started to think about why it worked and what didn’t work and then I really became a democratic socialist. I believed in democracy.

But I also believe that the workers needed to organize the economy rather than capital dictating the decisions. I got into socialism and I also got into social movements of how did these things happen, what actions did a small group or an individual do that precipitated that?

I still did it through this kind of spiritual lens even though I had had this amazing political transformation where I went from a right-wing Republican to a democratic socialist and about two weeks. I know it was rapid. I think it was over Christmas break because I remember being pretty conservative in the first semester or if US history in the second semester being the most liberal kid by far in the class. And really being able to talk to the instructor in a new way where the instructor in the first semester, Mr. Rossi had called me a racist.

I believed in capitalism and freedom and felt that if I had built a company with no help from the government. He was Italian. I have no ill feelings towards Italians. I’m of German immigrant stock. Both have interesting histories and cultures. I said to Mr. Rossi “Just for sake of argument, if I didn’t want to hire Italians for whatever reason the government didn’t have any right to be able to tell me that I had to any.” Rather than attack that kind of philosophical point, he was like “You’re a racist.”

It was like this Zen koan. I was shamed. I was baffled that he didn’t engage in the discussion. And I had read a lot of arguments on the topic, so was confident in my ability to defend my position. Was I?

I didn’t really do anything with it at the time, but later I started to really question all kinds of things about myself and apply myself to this kind of lens of privilege as I was able to identify it. As a younger man, I had all of this shame from trying to fit in in middle-class environments without the social skills and the background and the training to be able to do it.

I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I made one that turned out to be really important after we lost our house. We lived in that town called Ida. And I had been in this farm school. I had been at this more kind of suburban elementary school because that country had become in the excerpts. Even though we were pretty originally or rural stock most of the kids at that school were like bedroom community of Toledo, Ohio, white flight middle-class kids. When we built the dream house and moved to the country, I moved to a smaller farm school where I was kind of the new kid at fourth grade, and I was a new kid at ninth grade when we lost her house. And because I was oriented towards church and I went to church in Monroe, I really pushed my mom to move into town.

Monroe’s about a city of 30,000. Ida didn’t have a flashing light until 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a pretty small town. My mom liked the country. We were pretty close and spent a lot of time together and, and we picked the house together and she got a place in Monroe.

There was this older kid at church when I first started going, but then he kind of quit going. I met him before he stopped coming to church. His name was Scott Woodward. He had a big, powerful impact on me in this phase. We would talk politics. He was Christian. He was weird. Before we were hanging out, he was known for like skulking around town in a cape. This is 1983 and people didn’t skulk around in capes then. He got over that, but he was into high weirdness.

He had a car and we’d go around and we’d go to bookstores and we would make fun of the New Age movement. I had read some Christian books about conspiracies and cults. To me the New age movement seemed like a threat to Christianity. He got me to become a vegetarian. I felt like you couldn’t really follow the Hebrew diet without getting all the blood out and a lot of Jews were becoming vegetarians and Jesus never really ate meat. 

I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons and not having to to kill. It was funny because he was a vegetarian for about three months and then ended up staying a vegetarian for about seven years. He came and went with the church and got in to other ideas. He had a more open spirituality. I would frequently argue with him. I ended up reading a lot of background stuff to be able to talk to him. And so I read a lot about God and magic. we would go UFO hunting. We’d get a pizza and we’d drive around in the back rows and look for UFOs. We’d go to all the occult bookstores in Ann Arbor and Detroit, just kind of roam around. I was intrigued by that stuff. I’d been playing Dungeons and Dragons but I was still a hard left-winger at this point. I was a left-wing fundamentalist Christian. I still didn’t really question that whole kind of system.

So there were some other early childhood experiences that were really impactful. None of us really had a lot of social skills. As for my parents, my mom was kind of broken from losing Dennis. I can’t ever remember getting a hug as a kid.

 

 

She watched a lot of TV and was pretty isolated and one always wanted to work. My dad never wanted her to work because he took that as kind of an insult and his ability to be a provider. He was very much into that traditional gender role stuff that I was just never very good at. I never really mastered the manly arts.

When John was in first grade, he also had a lot of anxiety about school and because we were dirty and poor and weird kids who were pretty isolated.

We both had Mrs. Thompson for first grade. And we’d sit in with her at church. We’d sit in a circle and you’d have to read aloud, but once you learned that you could read, you didn’t have to sit in the reading circle and you could describe a book and go off and read by herself. The kids who were still learning to read would have to read-aloud in the reading circle until they all learned. When John learned to read he became my person who could read me comic books. I had been obsessed with comic books for as long as I could remember. Before John’s reading to me, I just looked at the pictures. My parents were never going to read me comic books.

My dad would read me the Sunday funnies sometimes. My older brothers and sisters were not that great about doing stuff they didn’t want to do. So I would badger John to read me comics when he got the keys to the kingdom of being able to tell these amazing stories. He taught me to read, so that I would stop badgering him.

I remember when I would try to get him to make me breakfast and then he taught me how to fry an egg. So, he would make me breakfast once, but then I had to learn and then I was kinda on my own. He taught me to read and I was probably three or four years old. I learned to read. I become a voracious reader as I grew up in this kind of truck stop culture with randomness and garage sale books and a couple-times-a-year trip to the library. I read a lot of random stuff.

In addition to comic books a thing that captivated me was mythology. John brought home this book on the Norse gods: They were just like the superheroes and there were these stories. I got big time into mythology and read a lot of difficult books like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which I think is a college textbook. I read all of that stuff in first and second grade plus read a lot of adult books, westerns, and romance magazines. I’ve read anything that I could get my hands on because I had a lot of time on my hands when I was home with Mom. She was really focused on waiting because her life revolved around these episodic entrances when Dad would come home.

What I got out of being on the road with him is that you could go places and do stuff. I don’t think a lot of people realize that the world is your oyster and you don’t need a lot of money to be able to travel and see things and meet amazing people and see the wonders that are in this country. It’s so big and there’s so many places to go. I got to see a lot of it when I was a kid and I’ve kept traveling and have seen even more as an adult. That travel had a powerful impact on me.

Both my grandmas also had a big impact on me in very different ways. My Grandma Trapp was super-religious and my dad felt like that was important even though it was something that he didn’t want to have anything to do with or ever hear about. But he made us, I’m available and I would have been interested in those things. I think because of my fascination with Dennis, my brother who passed away.

I would go to camp meetings and revivals. I didn’t like go to church with my Grandma on Sundays, but there these events where there would be altar calls and there would be people jumping up and down. It was this phenomenal experience that was also terrifying. Grandma Trapp was not anybody you would want to go to these events with.

She had a strong condemnation. I remember she’d say, “Mickey (my childhood name), if you’re a friend of the world, you’re an enemy of God.”

That was a fearsome thing thought to put into a kid’s head. There were these apocalyptic stories and talking about death and hell and fire and brimstone and all that stuff put into my mind, which was active and imagination-filled what with mythology and superheroes. So I had this very kind of cosmic view of the world and a lot of fear and a strong interest in spiritual things. In my nuclear family nobody else was really into it. We didn’t go to church and had had minimal contact with that kind of thing.

My Grandma Allen had schizophrenia and she lived with auntie and uncle. That was, until auntie had heart attack in her fifties. She died pretty young. That’s when Grandma Allen came to live with us. What allowed us to be able to bring Graham Allen in is that my dad had built his dream house. My Grandma gave him nine acres of the family farm and he used that as a down payment to build a great ranch style house. And we really upgraded from a clapboard shack that we rented for many years and to this kinda suburban style ranch house back in 1978. I was about nine years old and it was not long after that that Graham Allen came to live with us. She was kind of scary. She scared me when I was a kid because periodically we would get walked back to her bedroom. She’d spent a lot of time in bed and or at least when company was over. She’d say crazy stuff.

“I’m afraid of the devil” was her thing. When she came to live with us I would have to take care of her. Around this time my mom and my dad started to struggle. He had owned his own truck and fuel prices with OPEC started to go up and his truck was getting old and he wasn’t able to replace it. He struggled with the ability to make enough money to pay the bills. Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking industry and so freight rates dropped and expenses went up and we really got squeezed. He built his house during stagflation back in the 70s when American had a stagnant economy and high interest rates.

We had an 89% interest rate on the house and missed a couple of house payments and ended up losing the house.

When you’re a kind of poor, unsocialized kid, you’ll happen across church people who will want to get you involved in their youth activities. My sister had fallen in with some folks at the Bedford Nazarene Church. I went to church with her and attended Sunday school class. I’m still socially awkward and still a weird kid at this point. They asked “Does God speak to you now?” and about half of us raised our hands. And I raised my hand because I’d thought a lot about God.

We were going to revival and I was reading mythology and all other kinds of adult things. I had felt what I felt was the well-springs of conscience or some kind of connection. I felt that God had spoken to me. When they went around and said “Tell me how God speaks to you”. None of the kids could really answer that question. They called on me and I kind of stammered that while he just kinda does, it’s in your mind. That was not the correct answer. The correct answer is God speaks to you through the Bible. And I wondered about what kind of spiritual life this fellow had if he had not ever felt the presence of God or heard the voice of God. It wasn’t in words.

I realized that I had a different spiritual life than a lot of other people. I also learned that it’s better not to tell people about it because they’re going to look at you like you’re weird and they’re not going to understand. The next group of random church people that I ran into were this group of Baptists who were really nice. They would take us on activities like a trip to Chicago to go Christmas shopping.  Of course, we would have church and Sunday school and those kinds of things. I remember one night at church, they broke out this loaf of bread and some grape juice and we had this thing called communion. I thought that was a little audacious for this group of near-strangers to put that onto a kid.

I had certainly read about it, but it felt powerful and meaningful. I wondered what it all meant. My organized spiritual path really began when I fell in with the Monroe First Church of the Nazarene. Again, this was courtesy of my sister Brenda. She was into spiritual things and was always pushing: “Oh, you shouldn’t be reading that pagan mythology. You should be just as interested in Bible stories”.

I was a little bit hungry for socialization because of traveling. I would spend summers with my dad on the road and met random people, but I didn’t have those ongoing relationships with kids in the neighborhoods like a lot of other people seem to. Church was a great opportunity to socialize. It was also this incredible experience where I kind of learned middle-class values.

A number of interesting things happened to me at that time. I started going to that church when I was thirteen and made it my church home for about seven years. One day I was in Sunday school and they prefaced a story by asking who knew the story of Gideon getting into the walls of Jericho and blowing the trumpet and the walls come falling down. I had never heard of the guy and all of the other kids had because they were raised in the church. Their hands went up because they had been singing about Gideon in the church songs and hearing about Gideon in the church stories. They were also all in intact families where their parents were together. They spent time together and weren’t drunk all the time or depressed from watching TV, but had these kind of more typical middle-class lives. I felt a deep sense of shame.

I started to do better in school around this time. I still didn’t always do my homework and missed a lot of classes. I was, however, the best reader and could do the work and do the material. Often, I would come home and ask my brother John how to do stuff. He taught me things like fractions. That helped since I had trouble in school due to my social awkwardness. I was much more comfortable learning on my own and learning by reading or having John explain it to me how things were done. John could speak my language.

So I had this deep sense of shame that I had never heard of this guy Gideon that everybody else knew about. I grabbed a King James Bible that night and started at Genesis 1:1. I started reading and I started in the beginning. And it was a long, hard slog, especially through Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. There were parts that I really liked especially when I got to the New Testament. I crushed the Bible in about four months. I went from being the kid who didn’t know who Gideon was to the kid who knew all this stuff. After I read the Bible, I started to read all kinds of books about theology. I read every book the library had that they had and it was more than just kind of learning what the Nazarenes had to teach, although I was into that, but it was learning on my own.

The other significant thing is that I had this born-again experience. I was 13 and there was at our church this thing called an altar call known as “winning souls for Christ.” The church was evangelical in that it tried to reach out. That’s why they would have the church bus come and get me. And then when they didn’t have a church bus devoted church people would drive out to my house in the country and pick me up and take me to church. My sister went, but we lived pretty separate lives. Ron Richmond was the minister and they would sing heartfelt songs and there were messages from God. I went up to the alter and asked for forgiveness for my sins and asked Jesus to come into my heart.

There was this powerful kind of emotional release and connection and it really was transformative. I’d struggled with shame and then suddenly I found this answer of how I could get over it and feel whole. I got baptized. After that I really started delve into: What does it mean to be born again? What does that mean as a young teenager I started to try to live a life like Jesus ? There was this idea of being almost like where people in recovery start celebrating their recovery date as their birthday. My new spiritual being, I grew quickly in that.

There was a lot of things about being a new creation.

I wanted to be like Jesus. That meant something to me. I really started to work on it. I had a typical kind of adolescent anger. I noticed that as a character flaw and started addressing it. I would go out and chop wood or I’d go for a walk and I wouldn’t allow myself to express the anger. I was very emotionally sophisticated. I might’ve turned some of that anger and depression into depression by directing it at myself, but I also began looking at myself and kind of having an organized spiritual process of trying to be a better person. The other part of the church life was not just going to church on Sundays morning and Wednesday night, but this idea of discipleship where you would go into small groups and you would be accountable.

You’d talk and set goals, like: Did you read the Bible every day? Did you pray every day? Did you have goodness in your heart? or whatever you were kind of working on and you would make yourself accountable. There would be accountability partners. We also studied the doctrines of the church. And I was a sponge. I was open to all of that stuff and took it all very seriously and it was a chance for me to kind of shine and show leadership as I learned to be able to pray and pray like the adults did. I would get asked to lead prayer and talk to the other kids. And it was something that for a kid who didn’t really feel that he fit in, it allowed me to kind of fit in.

Evangelicals are an interesting group. I had a friend who said, “Oh, you’re a fundamentalist.” I said, “I’m not a fundamentalist or an evangelical.” He said, “That’s right, because fundamentalists say you’re going to hell and evangelicals say, ‘Hey brother, you’re going to hell’.” There’s some truth to that, but really the difference is in that they believed in this second work of grace called sanctification, the idea that not only are you not sinning, but have lost even the desire to sin and you live in this state of holiness. That became kind of the magic grail, because I was an adolescent having lust in my heart as Jimmy Carter would say. I had all those normal and powerful sexual feelings with no way to channel or control them.

It led me to a lot of guilt and going back to the altar, asking to be forgiven, seeking forgiveness for my sins. Sanctification was this kind of quest. There was always this murkiness of whether it was a gradual act or whether it was a sudden act and what happened, and what did it really mean. There was a lot of this kind of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. I continued to read the Bible. There were some verses that really had emphasis with me. One of them was work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. One thing that makes Protestants different, if you’re not familiar with that, is that they believe that you can read and interpret the Bible on your own and that it doesn’t have to go through a priest. I took that as not even kind of having a pastor. I never joined the church because I didn’t know if I agreed with their theology.

The other thing that I got out of church were these youth retreats. It was great because it was a chance to be around girls and it was a ready made group of friends, which I sorely lacked and needed. We were, for the most part, a tight group, although I always felt like I was a little bit of an outsider.

Once in awhile there’d be some kid from a family of sinners that would get pulled into it, but it was mostly the church kids who had church parents and had been raised in the church and culturally much more middle class than the kind of barely functioning working class kid I was. We’d go on these youth retreats and there would be powerful spiritual things happening like revivals. We’d look at trying to be like the early church in the Book of Acts and be filled with the Holy Spirit. There was kind of a quest for that. What I got out of that was a real sense of community (even though I didn’t always feel a part of it and I felt a little bit separate, but I maybe because I was an outsider, it allowed me to see it more clearly in what it could be.)

I became entranced with the idea of this kind of sense of community and community-building activities. It also gave me a taste for eschatology, or the study of the end times. We were big on that. We had a youth leader pastor ,Dale, who was big on that. We showed these movies that were about these left-behind books, these powerful movies about the end times. When the anti-christ rolls over the world and Christians are persecuted and there’s the rapture and so there was a lie. I began to read a lot about that and thinking about the end times. I remember being in junior high and someone pulled the fire alarm, we went outside and there was a storm blowing in and the skies were dark and, and it was like nighttime during the day.

And I had this feeling like: Is this the end of the world? It was something that I expected. I read a lot of books. There was a lot of books in the 1970s written about the end of the world and you would find those in the used bookstores and Salvation Armies, which were my big supply of books. I never really had access to a great library or the ability to puruse. I read whatever came to hand. So I read The Late, Great Planet Earth and a lot of those kind of books. Then, I started to read books from the 1950s that I would find and realized they were saying that the world was going to be over. I got curious. I went on a search and found that in the 1930s people thought that was the end of the world.

With the rise of WWI there were people who thought that was the end of the world and the Great Revivals of the late 19th century. They thought that that was going to be the end of the world. And then I found that in the middle ages that they thought that was going to be the end of the world. And I read more history and I found out that the early Christians that thought they were at the end of the world. I realized that every generation thought they were the last generation. I started to have a little bit of doubt about this thing, but there was this interpretation of a verse that implied that that after the refounding of the country of Israel in 1940s, that a generation after that that, and so I thought there might be something special about our time.

Yes, I wasn’t really sure.

There was other one other moment where religion was really powerful to me. There had been this evangelist who had done a number of revivals. A lot of times pastors would age out of being a pastor of a church and then they would become evangelists where they would work the revival circuit and they would go from church to church and do these messages of salvation. Sometimes it would focus on sanctification. But usually it was to try to get new people in to the church or recruit people who hadn’t been involved or create this spiritual revival. The evangelist had passed away and we were talking about this guy who had done this revival. I was tone deaf and unable to sing yet I had gotten into doing some theater. I did a series of one act plays or skits that kind of helped illustrate the pastor’s message. I had gotten to know this evangelist well. When they were talking about how Eddie had died, I really felt like I heard the voice of Jesus telling me that I was to take his place. There had been this idea of kind of a call to ministry that I kind of took like that.

I felt like I had been called to to the ministry.

You can’t open a Crisis Shelter without getting tons of calls for help. He’s our first stab at a call log form.

So obviously this Corona Virus thing is crazy. As it developed my life changed. As a City Councilperson I go to a lot of events. As a consultant/trainer I meet with people, mostly groups. Suddenly work mostly dried up and everything started cancelling. I had a lot of free floating anxiety and surfed Facebook and Apple-news and read up on the virus and it’s implications.

Since I’ve lived in Columbia I’ve worked with individuals and families who were homeless and have had some success on the clinical and local public policy level. I follow the issue and do what I can. When I left my agency job my brother John and I started 4-A-Change, a social entrepreneur firm. Our largest contract is with our downtown Community Improvement District where we do outreach, coaching and referral for folks who are homeless or panhandling downtown.

So we follow the issues and know the folks. John joined the board of Room At The Inn our inclement weather shelter that moves from church to church. It wrapped up for the season just as Corona hit. John organized a big tent and sleeping bag initiative for the transition.

We started thinking about how Corona was going to effect our peeps. We don’t have clients, we partner with people and affectionately shorten it to peeps amongst ourselves. We know them, love them, and try to make life better for them whatever we’re doing.

There was chatter about a shelter opening but the requests to the emergency management system weren’t being addressed. So John looked up foreclosed houses after seeing some houseless folks had occupied some in California, so far successfully. John and I are more then brothers but organizing partners with a deep analysis and a long history of radical action.

I’ve also been on City Council for 8 years, I said before we do that let me ask the City Manager to make something happen. But we committed to do ensure folks had a place when their was community spread. We agreed no one was dying in the streets in Columbia if we were free and well. If that went no where I would ask the banks for a couple of foreclosed houses. If that went nowhere we would do what we needed to do that was just and right and necessary.

On Saturday morning I called the City Manager. Validated the struggle and asked funds I had championed for a homeless work program be allocated for this and a staff without current duties project manage. I offered to help. He agreed to email the Health Director. I clarified my request and offered technical assistance as I am a topic expert.

She said there was no one to project manage and thought I had the knowledge and skill to do so. I agreed to serve under the Social Services Director Steve, my long-standing collaborative partner, who I’d lost touch with because of our different roles of late as a citizen volunteer project manager. Not a bad start for a Saturday morning,

I got up to speed and we started working on a lead on a great space that needed rehab identified by the past Chair of the Chamber of Commerce, Susan. I pushed my contacts but that turned out to be a bust. Steve had been asking for university dorms every day for a week. I asked if I could ask the Vice Chancellor and was told wait until Monday. He’s still clearing the dorms of students.

More brain storming we got a lease offer on a shuttered motel and started trying to talk the price down to our budget. Susan suggested a call to our Conventions and Visitors Bureau. It’s funded by a guest tax and a board of hotel/motel operators help run it. It seemed like a long shot but we were hesitant to ask churches. They sheltered folks all winter and we were afraid of everyone in a big room on cots.

I also had a coffee date on Saturday. She was cool with me on my phone half the time trying to keep it moving forward. Sunday hotels started calling. I started making my case and trying to touch hearts. There were offers which surprised me but the history is in free fall and it’s an emergency. They were also well out of our modest budget.

Truth be told I’m a terrible negotiator. I’m a social services/counselor type and low income radical. I just laid my cards on the table and asked them to do right. Then a hotel manager called at a place I would have called a little troubled. I’ve gotten to know the low budget hotel scene well placing folks, staying out on a budget and looking at a couple with a community minded land investor who was shopping for one and interested in programming for homeless Veterans.

We immediately made a connection talking from the heart and I showed I knew and respected that part of the no real housing safety net who spent most of their money on electric bills for those crappy little room heaters. She said I need to talk to the owner but between us he was already doing the same thing on a small scale with a church group.

The guy called me as I was trying to find the house of my second date (coffee went well in spite of my distraction) that I was an hour late for taking a call on the way over and pulling in to a closed daycare. Ironically a dude with a wild beard talking to himself had been sheltering out of the rain when I pulled up. He started pacing in front of the car and yelling about following him. I was so focused I just rolled down the window and said “hey man it’s nothing about you but I’m on the phone”. He escalated and I started the car just in case but kept on task and I apparently out weirded him and he moved on.

It was productive conversation but I said I’m an hour late for my date can I find her house and tell her what’s going on. I did and found her house and said hi and got on the phone and finished my business. I texted my “boss” and we were doing a lot of math and thinking and texting and we decided to go for it. We had a site, if we can navigate legal for the contract and actually get to spend the money we’d identified. It was a great deal.

John and I and Steve some (Steve has a big portfolio of emergency response, this is like his third priority) had been thinking about logistics some but it really depended on space and resources. So with nary a “woo hoo” we got a site (probably) we were on to logistics planning. My date and her daughter were cool with my distraction. They got to watch it happen in real time.

So yadayada details, negotiations. Logistics. We have this grand scheme of City money, Room At The Inn (RATI) cots sand supplies, volunteer infrastructure and a small staff, chamber of commerce/United Way gap funding and inkind donations of construction if needed, the anarchist collective who work on homelessness and us and others who want to plug in.

We had queried RATI staff to see who was willing and able to come back to work. RATI had money left and they’d pay that. And we had some tentative plans in our tentative place by Sunday night. A nice weekend of effort.

Monday morning we had a conference call with homeless service providers. I pushed the urgency, the need to move quickly and what our plan was. Outreach workers will staff the shelter in the day. RATI on overnights and John and I and trusted volunteers would do evenings.

I’d been lead on site obtainment and bureaucrat wrangling. John is lead on logistics and planning. We can switch up like that effortlessly. We’re also housemates and we were home office before it was de rigeuer. I got off that call and called in to the right wing radio show to update conservative radio listeners on the current state of affairs. I also pitched the shelter and got rescheduled for the show tomorrow to tell people how they can help.

I’ll be on at 11:06 am CST with Gary Nolan, card carrying member of the Libertarian Party, your equal opportunity offender on 93.9 The Eagle: 939theeagle.com. Give a listen if you want to hear me live.

So we’d still like dorms for when/if our folks need to quarantine . We’ve just documented community spread. When one person who is homeless is positive likely they’ll all need to quarantine as they congregate at the Day Center. So kept on that. Kept on making the money flow (win) we have enough to operate until April 6th and the next Council Meeting so my peers can weigh in.

Still need contract and law is swamped like most everyone who responds to crisis. We have a Counselor/Manager form of government so our Health Director who reports to him writes the laws right now. We’ll get to weigh in as elected representatives in a couple of weeks. The law changes as the disease progresses and we step up our social distancing and close inessential risk points. I’ve stayed out of that in spite of of a public campaign to get our local elected leaders to order our professional staff to make stricter orders. It’s tough in Missouri. It’s tough to act in isolation when 28 other counties use as a jobs and retail center and we have no control over them. The conservatives say we’re too strict telling people what to do nanny state run amuck. The liberals say I’m killing our medical professionals by not ordering our paid professionals who are looped in and have been planning for this for their entire career and we should interfere because some people sent us an email.

I don’t know the answer. No one does really. I back my professional staff who we hired to manage these situations. On homelessness I’m an expert. Steve who is super knowledgeable and looped in yields to my superior knowledge, expertise, and experience. Always has. I’ve been doing this a longtime and lot of it defies reason if your not s topic expert. Public Health is the same but more so. So is City Management.

I wrote an angry reply to the last chain email I replied to. She rightly checked me. I apologized and we dialogued. I’m on my third day of 16 hour days and I’m writing this because I woke up at 12:30 and my mind is humming. It’s like campaigning, you’re in your own fast paced world, jamming most of the time. Everyone else is bored and watching Netflix.

We also wrote guest guidelines, infection control procedures, room grid assignments sheets, a call for volunteers and more logistical stuff. We got outreach workers out and invited our first 14 guests. Our first cohort are our easy ones. We want a positive start and a good foundation. We are going to ramp up the mutual aid approach in case everything goes to shit and everyone is sick and there’s no internet and we have to get through this.

Even in the best of times the homeless life is mostly brutal and short, they’re all trauma survivors and almost all are high risk with challenging behaviors. I am bringing them together and allying myself and pledging my time, treasure and health so that together we can survive as community of support. Right now only John and I know this. Now you do too.

Everyone can’t do what I am doing. I have a Masters degree in sociology with a deep analysis of society and inequality and social movements. I was an activist radical direct action and large statewide campaigns with significant victories around the country. I have a 30 year career in social service in a variety of jobs at all levels from line staff to Executive Director. I am a 3 term city Councilperson who is kind of establishment and I do it well. I’m looped in from the crack addicted bus boy to the bank president. I have spent my entire life planning for this and did not know it. The day before yesterday I made a phone call and tomorrow we open. You might not be able to do this but you can do something.

Mostly it’s empowerment. I do, because I believe I can, and having done so, I believe I can do more. When I was a case manager at a domestic violence shelter people would ask how I could work with all that horror. When I did batterer intervention and substance use disorder counseling people said “how can you do that kind of work?”

People in crisis are open to change. That is powerful and demands our best effort. Guess what Peeps, the whole world is in crisis. Why not join me in building that new world that is more just, fair and loving from the bottom up. If it works for those with the most barriers and the least resources it’s going to work for all of us. God bless you and keep you through these dark days. When it’s the darkest we all shine the brightest.

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Greetings faithful reader. I hope you are well keeping safe and practicing social distance. It is strange times and everything is changing. My thoughts go to history and the apocalypse easily anyway. I’ve been indulging in some free floating anxiety and too much time on Facebook. I’ve been distracted but the times allow for it and I have the space for it and I feel like I am due.

My friend Harry posted Rainbow Signs by mewithoutyou. I’ve listened to the album Pale Horses but had never made out the words. Great song and I’m listening to Pale Horses (appendix) and it’s nice to have some dreamy distance to all the weirdness.

I was asked to speak at a press conference put on by the United States Tiger Foundation (USTF). They have carved out a niche of raising money and donations for Veteran’s dogs, advocating for increasing ventilator capacity, honoring bravery in the struggle and offering their office for satellite services and the like. It was really sweet.

The USTF formed to remember a forgotten moment in history Operation Tiger. In preparation for D-Day a giant practice exercise was surprised by German subs with huge loss of life. The Navy used to ship out people by area and Missouri had a huge loss of life. So the USTF formed to build a memorial and stuck around to honor folks in Military Service, Veterans and First Responders. There big annual event is a snazzy awards banquets for the best from all of the Missouri military bases.

I have always tried to do a good turn for Vets, like most people but I am an unlikely champion for USTF. I am motivated and attached to communities, regions, and the planet as a whole. Nation states not so much. But when the last conservative got voted off of City Council I realized I was going to need to go to the banquet to read the Proclamation. The Mayor was unavailable (you could do nothing but go to events in your ceremonial capacity and still have to say “no” to some things) and I didn’t want the Assistant Manager of the Conventions and Visitors Bureau or something representing our community.

I might feel a little bad about my fundamental lack of patriotism if I hadn’t spent a good chunk of my professional life helping homeless Veterans. It’s easy to put a yellow ribbon on your car or post some bullshit on your Facebook page but it’s a bit different to roll up your sleeves and get side by side with someone to get them on a path up.

So I gave a good speech from the heart and it became a pretty much annual thing. Reading excerpts from the proclamation, welcoming the generals and honorees and dates to Columbia, slipping coins in a handshake ritual, all the stuff. I am oriented towards peace but I appreciate sacrifice, professionalism, service and bravery. I’m not to much of a critic to show gratitude. As a peace activist I honor Vietnam Veterans especially.

Today wasn’t about that, that’s just what got me in the room. I thanked the USTF and all of the spontaneous activity to render mutual aid. I talked about the ventilator bottleneck and the need to flatten the curve. I talked about the unmet needs of the unsheltered community. Support for boxed lunches for Harbor House and the need for hand sanitizer for Loaves and Fishes.

I also talked about the difference between County Government and City Government. The County has Commissioners who actually manage their government. They make the decisions and do the work.

In Columbia City Council hires the City Manager (and the Judge and the Clerk) and they run the government. We passed an emergency resolution listing sweeping powers like ignoring the law and using private property as needed. It was really symbolism though we don’t really have that power. He and the Health Department Director have all that power and more with a signature on a letter. We just provided political support because the bare reality is to incredible to comprehend.

A constituent wrote to ask me to close all the restaurants and bars, another asked me to ban door to door sales. We have scaled back to one meeting per month. I meet with the Manager a month. Normally that’s great for governance. This crisis is on a whole nother timeline. Our decisions are made by science by professionals according to best practices and local conditions I can’t pretend to understand. I’m not going to call him and tell him what one of my voters wants. I will share my wisdom, if I have any. I told him don’t just listen to the state and the feds, they’re timid and too focused on the economy over health and safety, be bold.

And that’s it. Boards have to let their executives execute. Otherwise every department director has 8 bosses which really means no boss. I trust our staff. I trust our community. We are all trusting each other to do the right thing. Wash your hands. Flatten the curve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone asked me what I do all day? I had coffee with someone wanting to run for City Council and wanted to what it was like lifestyle wise. How do still run a business. A friend who is in City Management suggested I do a post on all the little things local elected officials. So everyday is different but here’s what I did yesterday.

I woke up and started water for coffee. I checked my emails, Facebook and Messenger. I messaged with a constituent in another Ward who is sideways with her Councilperson and did a little troubleshooting to figure out why her boxes weren’t getting picked up. Apologized raised the difficulty of collection being short staffed and emailed my contact in the City Managers Office.

Drank my coffee showered and rode my bike to the Columbia Independent School. I met with a student and his advisors. He is a fellow and his project is to advocate for a safe pedestrian crossing across the state highway the school is on. There’s a big city Park they use as a practice field and the kids have to Frogger across.

I’ve been pushing for the same thing for 8 years but the kid was getting some traction. There was a MODOT project coming in 2021 and they’re considering adding it on. The City was onboard and I had made some connections and requests via email.

I told him about Interested Parties Meetings the likely RFP process and who else to talk to. The Governor is a tough guy to get face time with but the state legislator is responsive and powerful. We looked at the traffic speeding by and walked the perimeter. Sight lines are the main criteria I’ve learned. I’ve picked up quite a bit of engineering lore over the last 8 years. Engineering and finance and truth be told local geography were my steepest learning curves.

I rode home and got a message from the City Clerk’s office that Marge Comley had called. I had just talked to Marge for a half hour or so a few days ago so I didn’t feel a need to call her back. She has my number, that’s for sure. She likely called the Clerk’s Office to speak to the Mayor who probably isn’t talking to her. The Clerk’s Office probably told her they would call me when she complained he never calls her back.

Marge is a pistol. She once called the police 156 times in a 90 day span. That will get you a home visit by a mental health professional if you didn’t know it. Marge has had a series of problems with her neighbors for at least the last eight years.

I was talk to her and I’ve gone out and investigated and mediated a number of times over the years. She lives in a cute little bungalow neighborhood where she and her husband bought their first home 45 years ago. He was a city lineman. The neighborhood since has become all rentals mostly owned by the family who owns the trailer park and apartment complex next to Marge’s subdivision. They don’t take her calls anymore. I’ve mediated with them and they have good reasons.

Mostly I think Marge is lonely. She’s estranged from her kids except one son who takes her shopping and to medical appointments but “he don’t listen”. After her complaint about noise and the police response. She knows 3 beat officers by name and likes them all. She spoke highly of “the girls” at the police nonemergency number.

After we talked about that she told me about falling and being in the hospital and rehabilitation center. The police were worried because she hadn’t called they did a welfare check and tracked her down in rehab.

Since I knew all that I knew I didn’t need to call her. I relaxed for a bit and hung my laundry on the line. I knew I had a day so I was proactive about it. I made and ate breakfast and then rode to the south side for a radio show.

I do a regular bit as a City Council update on The Eagle 93.9 but that’s on Monday’s. This was Inside Columbia an hour long local politics show that’s fairly new. The host is a Republican activist turned County Commissioner and we went over some interesting ground.

From where I’m from to poverty, segregation, my views on the growth of the city and homelessness it was much more in depth then I usually get to go. It was also exhausting. I had a swallow of coffee and was back on the bike. I had squeezed in an appointment across town and had to push hard in a headwind to be 8 minutes late and sweaty.

It was a bit of an interview. A smallish nonprofit was considering me for a strategic planning gig. I normally like to get paid an hourly rate but I had pitched a set price and a good one because I want to do more of this type of work. It’s also a way to get more work because you get to look under the hood and see how else you can be helpful.

The ED had called me for advice on a deaf individual needing substance use disorder treatment and someone had recommended me as someone who knows stuff. When she introduced herself I reminded her we’d met 12 years ago when she turned me down for a job I desperately needed when I first moved to town because I was over qualified. When she asked me what I did now, after I gave her some sage advice on getting someone into treatment, I ended up pitching strategic planning.

In spite of being late and sweaty it went well. I got the contract and collected info and we made a plan. I biked back downtown and was only a little late for my next deal. I met with a Civil Engineer who has an idea to change the code so we can allow duplex lots to be replatted and sold as individual lots. We allow that type of new construction but they have a fire wall and the sewer and water lines are run separate.

If we could subdivide duplexes with smoke walls and tangled utilities then we could create a home ownership product well below $100,000. You can hardly find a new home for less the $200,000 and even shitty fixeruppers are north of $100,000. It would also get some more owner occupied in big rental duplex neighborhoods which my ward is challenged by.

I had requested a staff report so we went over concerns. Safety doesn’t seem to be an issue we allow it for renters. It’s really just property. Banks and title insurance don’t care. You need covenants for shared roofs anyway you could do the same for your water and sewer.

Tutorials with engineers are critical if you want to be able to challenge your experts. I’ll discuss it at the next meeting and we’ll see. At least one peer who gets the issues is open to the idea.

After that I stayed on the affordable housing theme which I am trying to make a big final push on in my last term. I had a Zoom meeting with another Council Member and an activist from Minneapolis who worked on their 2040 plan which created a lot of zoning reform to address lack of affordable housing and segregated living patterns.

I ducked out early and walked over to the Presbyterian Church for the Spaygetti Dinner. It’s the big fundraiser for No Kill Columbia. I’ve done a lot for animal rights and go every year. I ate my plate of zucchini marinara and one with meat sauce. I grabbed a bottle of red from the wine pull. I haven’t looked it up to see if I got lucky. I might just experience it.

Then it was off to The Affordable Housing Summit. It was a presentation on Missing Middle Housing by Tony Perez. MMH is the idea that prior to WW II there was lots of varied housing that was walkable and affordable. Zoning had eliminated it and all you see being developed is single family and large apartments, mostly luxury.

It was fascinating, informative and inspiring. It was all code and design and how to reduce the concerns of NIMBYs. A lot of the questions were angry because they couldn’t see the connection between this and affordable housing. I made the connection at my table and got an invitation to do a talk show on community radio.

Then it was heading for home. It was a lot for what I’ve been doing lately but not to untypical. As I think about wrapping up I feel blessed for the wealth of experiences and the depths I’ve plumbed into this city I love. I got some serious biking on a sunny winter day, we moved the ball forward on affordable housing and I made a few dollars. On top of a load of laundry not to shabby.

What a great weekend it’s been. I got to be a resource and witness some truly excellent strategic planning at Welcome Home. That’s a homeless veteran’s shelter where I’ve been consulting for several years. It really made me reflect on how much growth and development I’ve seen with this great organization. Since I’ve been working with them they moved from a ramshackle house to a beautiful new facility with three times the capacity. I’ve worked behind the scenes on policy and continuous quality improvement. They’ve gone from a mom and pop type operation to a fully formed professional organization. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. The need is great but the solutions are getting better and better.

My mind has been on the future as I spent the rest of the weekend at Rockbridge High School judging at a debate tournament. I did an evening of Lincoln Douglas contests Friday night. The topic was nuclear disarmament and I loved the moral reasoning. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, Kant’s second categorical imperative were all used to prove states ought to eliminate their nuclear stockpile and then to prove just the opposite.

Yesterday I judged the radio speaking finals. They were all so great and I caught a half an hour of news. It was fun to chat with the kids and kick it in the teacher’s lounge. I read the school paper which was excellent and the kid who invited me to judge had an article on Venezuela. It was on a whole page on US Imperialism which is technically accurate but bold for a high school paper.

Biking on a brisk day but with some blessed sunshine. The last event was running late so I skipped another experience and rode home while it was still light. Full but good day.

Today it’s been nice and unstructured. We’ve had a mouse infestation. I’ve been going through my cupboards and cleaning everything and replacing the shelf paper in addition to freshening up the traps. It’s a gross and difficult job for a big fella. I’m through the worst of it.

My ex-wife would scrub the floor as a spiritual exercise. A metaphor for her life and worrying away at the parts that need to go or get scrubbed clean. I’ve tried to bring some of that energy. Cleaning, examining, tossing the detritus, remembering my underused and forgotten assets.

So this happened. It was a fun interview. It’s been really fun and healing to not think about a next race and just live.

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/elections/mike-trapp-considers-end-to-city-council-career/article_269d53e6-42d3-11ea-b701-33b57f04938d.html

It’s generated a lot of well wishes which has been nice. Especially on a day I jammed. For not having any paying work I did a lot.

A friend came over for coffee and we had a great conversation about the nature of the self and when it breaks down into its constituent parts what that allows and how you can integrate new insights put it back in order.

I hung laundry and took the dogs to hike at Cosmo Park. We did a mile or so Loop on Rhett’s Run a mountain bike trail. It was hilly with more snow then mud for a warm winter day. Patches and Fido stayed pretty close. I was afraid Fido would lead her to roam but he’s wary of her since she got so much bigger and just as rambunctious.

Fido is in the background on his throne, where he is now, sleeping the sleep of the just. I’ve been neglecting him because Patches was exercising him but now he doesn’t play so I’m going to have to start walking him again.

Got back home and bikes across town to Dickies BBQ. My friends Jim and Lisa have a lunch fundraiser for the United Way. It was fun talking to the United Way folks about how my perspective had changed. As a young radical I questioned the United Way’s “control” over the nonprofit sector by brokering their fairly limited funding. Built a lot of admin and audits and other less directly useful things. My 50something self sees the value of outcomes, audits, and other structures to ensure quality. I also talked to a couple of folks interested in running for Council.

I went to Shnucks and grabbed a few things and biked home. My legs were trashed at this point. Walking in the snow and creeping on the ice uses weird muscles.

I forgot to mention the chuck roast I had barbecuing in the slow cooker. I pulled that apart and cooked down the sauce. I used Kelsey’s homemade salsa, grilled onions, jalapeños, and a green pepper; powdered mustard, cumin, black pepper & fenugreek; celery and the last of the bbq sauce rinsed out of the bottle. It was good. The salsa was vinegary so it had a South Carolina feel. I also browned the roast in rye flour.

After grabbing my clothes from the line I shot over to The Grind for office hours. No one came so I got to relax, read amendments for our upcoming short term rentals ordinance. I also wrote answers for a newspaper article on the same subject. I might throw it up here with a link to the article. Interesting topic. My thinking has evolved as I’ve read the literature and thought it through.

Came home and had friends over for dinner and D&D. It’s been awhile since we gamed and it was fun. It was a long full day but as January comes to a close I feel like I’m living my best life. It’s my mom’s birthday today. She’d be 82. She’s been gone 20 years now. She’d be proud of me though.

Look for some more stuff on what goes into local government. Make a comment, follow the blog. Thanks for caring enough to read this far.

It’s been a good month, productive and a lot of weather. I have been an every day bicycle commuter since early summer. I’m old enough where I’m not really in to riding in the snow. I did once because I hadn’t ridden in a couple of weeks and I didn’t want to lose capacity.

It was slushy and I confirmed why I wasn’t doing much of that though it wasn’t terrible. The piled snow eliminates some bike lane but not unacceptably. It was mostly the accumulated slush on the pedway on Providence Road.

On Mondays I’m a regular guest on a right wing radio station. I talk about local issues and mix it up with the host. It’s fun and a nice 5 mile ride. I kept to surface streets but on the way home I took the trail which was plowed and very pretty with the snowy woods.

Mostly I walk. Today I walked to my Consulting gig. About 45 minutes up arterials and state highway. Even so it’s beautiful in the falling snow. I wore my brimmed hat with ear muffs and picked a good outfit for the weather. That’s the secret, too warm and your sweaty. Not particularly business appropriate and makes for a cold walk home.

I took some cut through streets and checked out the power plant. It was steamy and a little surreal. A utilities supervisor offered me a ride but I didn’t think he was heading my way and I had the time and I was enjoying the walk. Third time I’ve been offered a rise this winter and the first time I’ve been able to waive it off. People don’t expect to see a City Councilperson walking in the weather.

It’s mostly made me feel blessed. When I visited Columbia in 1993 and decided to move here I could see my life. Walking and biking everywhere, good friends, being a bit of a random force for good, more cool things then I care to do. Blessed to be living the good life. I shared this thought with my brother John. He said Epicerus said “remember everything you have is something you once wanted”.

It’s been a productive month. Good consulting hours, I did a training on domestic violence with another agency, a bit of homeless outreach as well. Also wrote an article on homelessness for Missouri Municipal League magazine that I think is good. Did a de-escalation training for the inclement weather shelter, had a dinner party and my friend in prison. Lots of other stuff as well.