A Contest About Hope

What can one person do?

One of the benches built by the Chattanooga Urbanist Society

So. A few weeks ago while browsing around Substack, I stumbled into an essay contest from

Suzanne Taylor

on her substack, Now What?

Naturally, I looked it over. Usually I’d have scrolled right on by. I’m tired. We’re all tired. But when I got to the last line of the prompt, I was hooked. “Start with what you did,” she said. The year is 2050. We saved the world. How? Start with what you did.

That’s the vexing part, right? The world is on fire and it feels like there’s nothing we can do. But what if there were? Start with what you did. 2050, not some vague distant future. I started thinking about it ecause I *wanted* to think about it, and once I was thinking I was at least a little excited about the possibilities of doing this with other people.

And there was a cash prize. For real? A cash prize for dreaming about saving the world? So I looked her up. Started following her substack. Read about how this was her way of moving the needle, even if just a tiny bit, with her own savings.

I liked the way she thinks. I liked what she was doing. So I threw my hat (and my essay) in the ring.

And I won! Well, I was one of five winners. I’ll put the link below so you can read them all, but here’s mine.

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Benches and Snacks

February 20, 2024 by Leela Sinha

How has it already been 25 years? Feels like we’ve been doing this forever, feels like we just started yesterday.

I don’t know how to tell you this, but it was ridiculously simple.

We just…started talking.

We took that paragraph from Ray Bradbury, you know the one about front porches?

Here, let me find it for you:

“No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”

–Farenheit 451

We took that and we thought, what if he was right? Octavia Butler was right, and Huxley was right, and so maybe he was right, too. Maybe they don’t want us talking, maybe stopping talking has been the problem the whole time.

So we deliberately. Started. Talking. We started by informing people. We put that quote up EVERYWHERE.

Everywhere.

Then we waited. Then we started.

We put pallets and milk crates in our front yards, took that picture of the janky stage from the meme, the one that’s milk crates and plywood, and we built it, over and over, 2x4s and milk crates and pallets just set up in front yards with sheets of plywood nailed on top, old theater platforms rehabbed and clamped in place, whatever we had for free, or for cheap, and we made front porches. People who had ’em, we gave ’em milk crates for stools, we fixed up old rocking chairs, nothing that we would cry over having stolen, we just kept replacing them. That project that started putting benches back where the town tore ’em out? The Chattanooga Urbanist Society? We borrowed their plans and put benches in, too, on the porches or out by the street, next to the sidewalk, with a little upturned five gallon bucket for a table. We called it The Porch Project. Landlords tried to complain and neighborhood associations got cranky, but we just kept going.

We went to the association meetings and put benches in the community centers. We offered benches to churches for their parking lots. We gave them to restaurants for outside their takeout windows. We walked the good neighborhoods and paths, figured out how far about-that-far was, and put in benches there, too, right by the side of the unimproved roads. Some of ’em got swiped but most of them got used. We swung back through with little 2×4 tables and pamphlet racks with plans, so more people could build benches and tables. One bench takes a handful of 8 foot 2x4s, or the equivalent in pallet wood and dumpster diving, and a few screws, and only a few cuts. You can even do it with a handsaw if you’ve a mind to.

Now what happened with those porches and those benches was something else. If there was a porch, now there was a place to sit and talk, out front, where people would see you and say hello. You could put a basket of fruit out from your apple tree, or some canned goods you weren’t using, or whatever you wanted. You could put up signs like “sit a spell” or ones like “don’t smoke here, please” or a butt can.

First thing it did is kept people’s dogs pooping somewhere else. No one wants you to watch their dog poop on your lawn. But then it also meant saying hi to all the people with dogs, and then people got talking, so then they’d pull up for a minute, let the dog sniff around, perch on the crate or the box or the bench and chat, then people’d ask us to help build another bench. Enough for two.

Next thing, people know their neighbors. Here, people would wave when they’re going for groceries. Mrs Johnson, she lives right up the block, eighty years old, still marches down here for her twice-weekly bread and milk. Sammy and the boys, they live down and around the corner, it’s got to be more work to come by with the kids than without, but they want their kids to know what it means to live somewhere with roots, so they come by, say hi.

Once I had kids coming by I had to have you know, cookies, carrot sticks, snacks. Kids always want snacks–any kind of feral animal, really, snacks are the way to their heart.

I never expected to stay here, but one thing and another and then here we were.

What with everyone talking to everyone, there were bound to be arguments, fights, that’s why people stopped in the first place–didn’t want fights and didn’t have time. So we put up fliers, offered classes at the community center, about how to talk. Sometimes it was just a poster: What If You Asked For What You Need?

or Tell Them You’re Nervous. Sometimes it was more. We brought benches to the parks and started conversations by the dog zones, conversations about conversations. Just, guerilla communication lessons.

And more snacks.

What started as a couple of people with some pallets and plywood became a movement. We gave free workshops at churches and mosques and synagogues and covens. We kept teaching people.

At first it had to be invitation only, or you had to stumble across it, like those apps that get big by being secret.

Once it was getting attention then we set up a website with information and a form. We connected with Skip the Small Talk and Meetup and local small businesses and restaurants. We gave it away, gave it all away, connected with the Human Awareness Institute and with YES World and kept teaching people.

And we kept building porches. Some folks got permits and made real porches. And then they’d give away their milk crates to the next family. Enclosed porches, some people even opened them up again, put on screens and big casements and shutters. People who didn’t want porches did front gardens, or hellstrip parks, or little free poetry boards.

And then what?

People developed relationships. And they ran for office. And they joined those neighborhood associations and saw the people they’d been chatting with. They grew more food and fewer lawns, which meant they had to trade tomatoes and zucchini come summer.

They started to take care of each other. And the governments changed. We didn’t know if it would work, but it did. The porch project spread, even into the places with twisty tall roads and no sidewalks. They noticed, after a while, how lonely they were. They couldn’t put sidewalks in, but they could have afternoon tea, and close the road for half of Sunday.

It seems like a small thing, doesn’t it, just talking? Even just becoming neighborly again after all those decades of closing things up.

But what happened next is it spread out of the city. It spread to the suburbs. It spread out, even into the strip malls. More benches. More bushes. Just appearing like they’d always been there, too many to stop, and people saw how nice it was. People putting down their phones. People forgetting to check for the bus until it was pulling up.

It was like Meetup, but in real life. Garden centers put in chairs and coffee stations, like bookstores do. Libraries had benches outside, too. Set up for talking, not just for solitude.

You know, Thoreau said in his little cabin at Walden Pond, he had, “One chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.” We figured enough room for three people, well that was enough to HAVE society so it was enough to CHANGE society and BUILD a better society.

Then, small town people said “we were doing this all along, why do you think you’re so fancy” and we said “show us how it’s done” and they stopped taking out the benches and started putting them back in, the one on the town hall porch and the one outside the post office and the one outside the general store and the one by the school.

And so we went back to the cities and put benches in by grocery stores and malls and when they filled up with people sleeping, people were so in the habit of talking that they just talked right to each other and found some better places for folks to sleep.

And we kept showing people about how to be real and still be kind, and how to notice you’re getting mad before you throw your beer at someone, and then we started getting town councils to meet with each other next door, like neighbors but make it a town. Whole councils, no agenda, just spend time together.

With communication skills.

And pictures of their gardens and their grandkids.

And snacks.

And it didn’t always work, but it worked a hell of a lot of the time. A lot of the time.

National news picked us up, but by the time that happened every major city had a..not even a chapter, just a bunch of porch projects off and running. People hiring each other. People trusting each other.

It changed a lot of things, little things. Who people sold their houses to. Where people bought stuff. How people got hired. Who people gave second chances to. What they asked for from their politicians. Who became politicians.

What came down, that really mattered, I think, was fear.

People were scared of what they didn’t know, and they were scared of not having enough if times got hard.

The more they knew each other, and trusted each other (in cases where their communities cared for them) the less scared they got, the more willing they became to rely on each other.

And, with the internet, people whose communities didn’t like them still had better skills and build better non-local communities. They had friends on the internet who were still a drive away, or who still sent doordash when family died.

The more people had that, the more it became a cultural default. The more it became a default, the easier it was for them to think of that as a right that everyone should have–that kind of care–and then to imagine a world where the government would provide it, not just for them but around the world.

And that’s what did it, I think.

Care and communication, that’s where it started. Porches. Benches. (Snacks).

That care meant we learned from each other, about plants and trees, about each other’s traditions and needs and grandchildren. That care meant we wanted everyone to have a nice neighborhood. It meant we wanted everyone who needed healthcare to get it, which meant more beds in rehab centers and more housing first and more people getting food so they could eat.

It meant when elections happened we wanted to take care of everyone. The communal will shifted.

But we still had to contend with the megacorporations, which had been granted an odd kind of personhood, and had no empathy to appeal to. There was no bench-building between companies held by investors, built for profit and profit alone.

But what we could change was politics. Towns and states became the proving grounds as we began to insist on conversations with the politicians who enacted the will of the corporations. We built our benches there–outside the offices and the statehouses. They refused to come to the conversations we were having, so we brought our conversations to them. We made conversations an expectation of election. We made the bench the symbol of true representation. The benches were already familiar, recognizable. They were already in towns everywhere, they were already outside general stores and schools, and in parks and down by the rivers where fishing was only half the plan.

We asked our politicians to come to the bench. Come to the Bench became our rallying cry. Come and talk. Come and answer. Come and be heard. Come and listen. Bench hours replaced office hours. Shelters sprang up over benches as the weather turned again. Come to the bench. We haven’t seen this representative at the bench. Where are they? Come to the bench.

Benches and ballots, the movement grew.

Meanwhile, benches and porches (remember porches) became a place for plants. Benches in apartment lobbies and across the street from steel and glass edifices that refused people a place to sit.

Benches on country lanes, nothing but corn and soy for miles.

Benches in strip malls.

Benches, finally, in the halls of Congress itself.

In other countries, the benches were often already there. Less work to get people talking; less work to get politics to align. The international councils were next, people gathering online from around the world, together pressing their governments and communities forward.

The thing is, when people know each other as people, the compassion comes.

And when people know everything as their siblings–even the plants, even the rivers, even the salmon and the stones–the compassion calls for a kind of depth that brings us forward.

The world came forward, slowly, together, the only way it can.

Porches.

Benches.

Snacks.

We started

with talking.

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So that’s my essay, my little dreaming into a big world. Is it a whole solution, no. But is it part of the solution? Maybe. I noticed when I lived in Berkeley that when my partner went outside to smoke every day they met a lot more of my neighbors than I did. They knew who lived in my building. They petted dogs and talked to the guy with the cool camera who did macro photography. It amde a difference. So maybe sitting outside and saying hello would be good for all of us.

Who wants a porch?

PS: you can read all the winning essays here:

The Big Announcement