The many silos

On Saturday afternoon I was out riding on my bike in the country in the summer heat. I was somewhere north of Mt Sinai Rd, probably on Murphy School Rd, when I was coming up on an African-American guy who had stopped his car in the road to check his mailbox.

"How's it going?" I asked him as I came up close.
"Alright. You been out riding on trails?"

I was a little surprised at the question, as I was on a road bike, so I stopped to talk and explained that this bike was too delicate to take out on trails, how you needed one that was sturdier and with fatter tires.

He asked a few more questions, was it good exercise, did I feel safe riding on the roads, etc. I explained that as long as you stayed single file you were always OK, but that sometimes there was a jackass in a pickup truck with a Trump bumper sticker who might say something as he flew by. And of course, it is probably a measure of my white privilege that that mythical truck-driving guy might harass me differently than he would a black guy, for fear that I might lawyer up effectively if he didn't.

But what I wanted to get back to was how much this guy didn't know about bikes. He had no idea about the distinction between a mountain bike and a road bike, just because it wasn't part of this world. I have written elsewhere on the theme of siloing in society, I think, or at least I've thought about it, mostly in terms of the red-blue divide. There are so many other divides: black-white, white-Hispanic, Asian-Hispanic, etc. And so few places they are bridged. In the best of situations, political parties help with this. The fact that we have a two-party system forces the bridging of divides, balancing priorities in setting platforms, getting people together in various contexts to talk just a little. Also public schools, especially sports teams in the traditional mainstream sports, basketball and football. Jane Jacobs' neighborhood worked similarly.

But ultimately we always are forced back into our silos because we have to earn livings and tend to our own families. The exigencies of a fine-grained societal value chain but also the Dunbar number always reassert themselves. Even now, I am watching the clock and thinking that I need to get on the clock, follow up with my clients who reached out to me over the weekend (there were five of them, and somebody else asked me to look into something on her behalf), touch base with a family member who had a mild health concern, etc. Hell, I need to shave my itchy face, when you get right to it.

It is hard to make time to talk to the Other and still produce value. But maybe there's really nothing we need to do more.