Where were you Tuesday?

Each morning now, my walk to the office takes longer. It’s a small thing, really—just a few extra steps, a detour around the fenced-off police-friendly processing site. But the longer route reminds me, in that nagging, bureaucratic way, that something is different. The police haven’t cut a hole in the fence so I can walk straight from my car to my office back door. Instead, I have to pass by the site itself, where uniformed officers linger like hall monitors at a high school dance. It must be expensive, I think, watching them shift from foot to foot. I can almost see the dollar bills cha-chinging out the tops of their heads.

With its cafeteria-style benches, the site gives off the uneasy familiarity of a middle school lunchroom, a bizarro-world cafeteria where the only thing missing is a hairnetted lunch lady laying tater tots onto trays. I half-expect to see a line forming, plastic trays in hand, waiting for a scoop of something institutional. Instead, the site seems stuck in status quo, its purpose clear only to those who had the privilege of deciding it should exist in the first place. And, it makes me hungry for tater-tots. And, I really am curious, to know, if the people working here trying to help, at this site, actually feel like they are making progress, actually feel like they are helping people…if you see me walking by stop and let me know.?

But let me start with a little praise for the mayor. I mean it. I’m thrilled he’s calling people back to work in person. There’s something alchemical about people sharing space—something that doesn’t happen over a screen. Maybe, if we’re lucky, some of that old energy will return. Ideas will spark. People will remember why cities exist in the first place. And his push for businesses to reinvest in San Francisco? Good. They should.

Too many of them have gotten rich off this city’s spirit—the weirdness, the edge, the tacos in the Mission, the dive bars and barfy hipsters, the people who once made it a place worth dreaming in—only to retreat to their Russian Hill condos, forgetting that they, too, owe something back. A city isn’t just a backdrop for IPO parties.

Now for the journalism. I have so many questions. Is it just me or is there just a blankness to this all, to the people, both sides, like a world where everyone is walking around faceless.?

Where were you Tuesday? Because I saw something else, something heavier. I watched morality lift itself into the heavens like a wave pulling away from the shore. Morality has momentum, and on Tuesday, it picked up Max Carter-Oberstone, the police commissioner, and carried him over the heads of those who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see that removing him was a mistake.

The Board of Supervisors decided otherwise.

Maybe Lurie sees something the rest of us don’t. Maybe this is one of those "hard decisions" he talks about. The kind of move that makes sense only when you zoom out, far beyond the frame of what’s happening right now. Maybe. But I can’t see it. It isn't about whether he can do this (as the very few supporters that showed up stated) its about whether he should. I sat there, watching public comment, and I wondered: how many voices does it take to shift the outcome of a decision like this? How many people have to line up at the mic, shaking with anger or exhaustion or quiet resolve, for the people in power to listen? How clear does the wave of morality have to be, because it looked so crystal clear to me.

Would it have mattered if a billionaire had shown up? A celebrity? What if Jack Dorsey had walked into City Hall and put his name behind Max? Would it have been enough? I wish Lurie had showed up in the public comment line and made a passionate moving speech and stood by his decision. Explaining why this is right.

The thing about the momentum of morality is that it doesn’t care about votes.

Jared Diamond writes about idea diffusion not as a moral force, not as progress or regression, but as something much simpler: timing. Ideas don’t spread because they’re good or bad. They spread because they fit the moment they arrive in. They land in the right hands at the right time, and suddenly, they are what is.

Take the Phaistos Disk, an ancient artifact dug up in Crete, covered in strange symbols that no one has ever deciphered. It’s the earliest example we have of movable type, a technology that should have revolutionized written language 3,500 years before Gutenberg, but it didn’t. The moment wasn’t right. The idea died. Contrast that with something like gunpowder—discovered by accident, used for fireworks in China, then, once it spread to the right war-hungry Europeans, it reshaped the entire world.

Or look at something closer to now. The 1970s gas crisis sent car manufacturers scrambling to build smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. But as soon as gas prices fell again, Americans went straight back to buying big, inefficient cars. The idea of efficiency only mattered as long as it was needed.

That’s how bad ideas survive. Not because they’re smarter or stronger, but because they slip into the gaps where something is needed, and once they take root, they carry their own momentum.

That’s what’s happening here. The fenced-off lot behind my office isn’t good or bad. It’s just what is. It’s an idea that found its moment. A police-friendly processing site, pitched at the right time, in the right political climate, with the right people nodding along, so here it is. The money is already spent. The officers are already standing around. The press releases have already been written.

The momentum of what is keeps rolling forward, whether it works or not. More cars are parked on Jessie street now during the day. I see more lonely tired bodies and debris on the street. Less people congregating, their friends and community dissolved. That’s what’s obvious. At least today. More uniformed police hanging around. The site will process people, or it won’t. The supervisors will take a Goerge W. like “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier moment and move on - that’s this momentum (My guess is Matt Dorsey will be the one to land on the aircraft carrier in full jumpsuit). Someone will call it progress. Someone else will call it a mistake. It doesn’t matter. The idea has taken root. And until the moment shifts, it will stay.

It doesn’t matter whether the wave that lifted Max on Tuesday was morality or something else entirely. The momentum of what is—what always has been—will keep pushing forward. I’m still holding out hope that someone important reads this and spits out their steak dinner and throws it out the window.?