. . . you make your decisions as honestly as you can and try to have faith that others are doing the same. In an imperfect world full of imperfect choices, I feel that that is about as ethical as one can get.

Speeches & Letters

Ethical Society

Good morning everyone.

I'd like to thank you all for taking time out of your busy lives to come listen to me. And I'd especially like to thank Stanley Wayne for both inviting me and also for putting more effort than he should have had to into contacting me. I wasn't the greatest at returning Stanley's calls and I appreciate his efforts in compensating for that.

It is both a pleasure and an honor to be here this morning. It is a pleasure because, not surprisingly as a politician, I enjoy public speaking and I especially enjoy having a focus around which to put my thoughts. It is an honor because in a city full of PHDs and doctors and famous people, you chose me, a freshman City Councilor, to speak and, with all the other important things going on in your lives, you are taking the time to pay attention to what I have to say.

Which brings up the underlying question I am going to talk about this morning, which is WHY ME?

I'm 44 years old, have been married to my wife Hope for 13 years, have one nine year old son named Robbie and a seven year old son named Cooper. I grew up in Wellesley, went to the University of Rochester on an NROTC scholarship, served 4.5 years in the Marine Corps, got out, knocked on doors for Greenpeace for six weeks, traveled around the Country for several months, wound up eventually going to Law School and then getting a job doing environmental compliance for the Army Reserves in New England. I was chair of my local neighborhood association for several years and I'm active in the Sierra Club.

And, believe it or not, despite all those credentials, no one ever asked me to speak anywhere.

And now, with 11 months of being a City Councilor under my belt, I have spoken at the Cambridge Patriot's Day celebration, a street corner dedication (by Pemberton Market) and, today, in front of the Ethical Society of Boston. This sudden twist of events begs the question of what changed? I'm still pretty much the father I was a year ago and the husband I was five years ago. I'm still the ex-Marine I was fifteen years ago and my views on the Iraq War are the same as they were three years ago (a disaster, with no right answers but a national apology and significant restructuring of how we live our daily lives as an indication of atonement. I doubt it will happen, but when you do something wrong and don't apologize, it's tougher for things to be put right). I'm still an advocate for safe cycling and my novel remains a small vanity published wonder.

The only thing that is different is that last November I got elected to City Council and suddenly, because I'd spent a bit over 40,000 dollars in the election, had a good campaign manager, put out some good election materials and convinced just over 1000 people to give me their number one votes (for those of you not from Cambridge, I'd explain the importance of number one votes but we don't have all day), more people care what I have to say. I've got radio stations calling, TV stations calling, the City Manager calling, random strangers calling (or stopping me on the street- I can hardly take out the recycling these days without someone telling me how bad the traffic has become since the Walden Street Bridge was shut) and so forth. None of these people tried to contact me before I was elected, so I've come to the inescapable conclusion that as wise as I am, as smart as I am, as charismatic as I am, as good-looking as I am and as humorous as I am, the real reason people want to listen to me is because I am now a City Councilor.

Which, if you think about it, is a weird position to be in. We all want to be loved and respected for who we are. We want people to soak up the pearls of wisdom that drip from our lips because they are exactly that, pearls of wisdom. We want to think that what we say or write matters because we've thought it out in great detail or phrased it with great wit, but the reality seems to be, for a freshman Cambridge City Councilor, at any rate, that having your voice truly heard is one of the trappings of public office. Take away the public office and I could publish my own blog, I could continue to send letters to the editor, I could stand on street corners and pass out homemade leaflets, but the truth is that while my mother, who loves me dearly, might read my leaflets, most of society would make the quick decision that my words aren't worth their time. In short, as someone who wants people to consider what I say or write, the vindication of being in public office is absolutely essential. Loose the public office, loose the platform that gives importance to my words. If that sounds unreasonable, think about what happened to Christopher Lydon. He was a household name in Boston, at least among liberals, but then he lost his radio show on WBUR and now he has, I think, a show on some AM station but I can't remember the last time someone mentioned his name to me. He lost his platform and with it went the vehicle that gave importance to his thoughts.

So, as you may have guessed, a great fear of mine is not being re-elected. I've spent years and tens of thousands of dollars to put myself in a position where people actually care what I say. Trust me, they don't always agree with me, but they do care. Sometimes passionately. That is in line with what my dad often tells me. My dad, by the way, is a great source of wisdom and, in the keeping of dads everywhere, is more than happy to pass it all on to his son, the only downside being that sometimes he passes on more wisdom than this particular son can soak up at the time.

Anyway, my dad's point is that a politician's first job is to get elected. His, or her, second job is to get re-elected. Dad worries that coming across as a free radical, a loner, the man on the one side of numerous 8 to 1 votes in a chamber that usually passes things nine to zero, will mark me as a person unwilling to compromise, unable to get along with my peers and unable to effect the change I talked about when campaigning.

But that, my friends, that series of eight to one votes, is exactly what brought me here today. Mr. Wayne thought that perhaps there was something beyond sheer obstinacy in my voting style, starting with my not changing my vote to Ken Reeves for Mayor because I objected to the manner in which the votes were gathered, continuing on to my voting against the City budget because our school system had done, I thought, a lousy job explaining how they were going to spend roughly a third of our tax dollars and going further with my voting against Council Research Assistants, and not taking one, because I feel that voting oneself post-election perks that weren't discussed during the campaign is a sleazy thing to do. I think that traffic management is an important enough issue for the Council to worry about that we should get data in digital form that we can sort through and analyze, rather than a 14-plus pound stack of paper. I think that, painful as it might be, we need a housing policy that is more than two paragraphs of single-spaced lines. I think the Councilors and City leaders should experience the same parking and traffic problems regular Citizens do, so they can better understand concerns about development and safe streets.

Those are some of my 8 to 1 votes, but Mr. Wayne might also have invited me because I don't leave the Council Chambers to eat deli food in the adjacent Green Room, or because I ride my bike all over town, or because my kids go to public school or simply just because I am still a new face on the Council and seem different from the rest.

These are all good reasons to invite me to speak here, I suppose. Standing up for one's principles against the entire peer group would, under most circumstances, be a truly virtuous thing to do.

But, and I don't want to imply that Mr. Wayne made the wrong decision, I don't place as much value on my dissension as others might. Dissent in any body should be commonplace. There is probably no one on earth with whom I more regularly dissent than my wife, and after her my two boys, and still there is no person on earth with whom I feel more comfortable building a future together. And my wife and I dissent over really important things, such as whether our sons ride their bikes on the street or on the sidewalk. The wrong decision there, at the wrong time, and we could have a disaster on our hands.

The City Council, on the other hand, does not have all that much power. We can encourage City officials to do things, but short of firing the City manager, holding back money, or passing Ordinances (which would still then have to be enforced by City staff), we don't really have muscles to flex on a daily basis. Arguing about parking spots, aids or traffic management may lead to a few moments of personal anxiety, but it wears off quickly. My family remains healthy, my roof still doesn't leak, there is still food in the fridge no matter how I vote. And, in Cambridge's quirky political system, there are likely to be 10%, plus one, of the voting public, that likes my 8-1 stances enough to vote for me in11 months and 2 days (not that I'm counting) so that I don't think I'm jeopardizing my political career, or more importantly the platform that makes people want to listen to me, by being an outlyer.

Instead, I look at my earlier days as a Marine lieutenant and at my peer group then, and I wonder what sort of ethical decisions I would make when it really counted. My peers, the ones who are still in, are pretty much all Colonels. They're in charge of infantry units, working as liaisons with ambassadors, involved in reconstruction efforts and so forth. They're making decisions on a daily basis that, agree with the war or not, have life and death consequences. And not just life and death consequences for their Marines, but life and death consequences for the people they're fighting, contractors with whom they're working and, most problematically, for innocent Iraqis who simply want to see their kids make it home from school in one piece.

And as I think about it, I realize that, at the moment that you are, as the President says, the "decider," you're generally not thinking about ethics. What road to take out of town, where to place a minefield, who to put on point, those are practical, down-in-the-dirt decisions just like you decided what you were going to wear today. That the wrong decision might get somebody killed if you decided wrong doesn't make it more or less ethical, it just makes it more agonizing.

The real ethical decisions seem to be made at a higher point in the process. Can I justify being in Iraq in the first place? Note that my question isn't "Is the war justifiable?" but rather "Is my presence here justifiable?" Or, on a more personal level, it is "Can I justify wearing these clothes?" Were they made by kids chained to a sewing machine in Bangladesh? Was the cotton grown on farms ripped from subsistence farmers, increasing the displacing impact of globalization and sending millions of people into poverty-ridden migratory lives?

Those higher level questions are the real ethical questions in life, I feel. How are my actions going to impact others? Especially others whom I can't see, don't know, will never meet and have no way of identifying with? When we make those initial decisions, or when someone or something, such as a global business or a government, makes them for us, the ethical die gets cast in such a way that future personal decisions become much murkier. Someone has to fight this war and I don't want to shirk my duty. I've got to wear clothes that were made somewhere, and this is all I felt I could afford.

And as it is with the rest of life, it is with City Council. The ethics of any decision have to be put in the broader context of the discussion. Should we spend as much money as we do on affordable housing unit? Do we want to fund certain types of community policing? These questions, and others like them, are immensely important for everyone in the City, but they are constrained by decisions far above us on HUD funding, estate taxes, drug policies and the like. We Councilors look at what we think we know about the facts on the ground, we listen to people who might be able to instruct us and we decide. Hopefully we've been honest and attentive in our deliberations, hopefully we'll be professional in our conduct and hopefully we'll be understanding that not everyone thinks like we do and that doesn't make them wrong, stupid or evil.

So, at the end of the day, and at the end of my talk, my point is that whether you are a Colonel looking at deploying troops in Iraq, a freshman City Councilor voting a school budget or simply a husband and father of two trying to teach the kids how to bike, you make your decisions as honestly as you can and try to have faith that others are doing the same. In an imperfect world full of imperfect choices, I feel that that is about as ethical as one can get.