Going deep is intellectual, researching or analyzing a topic. Going deep is physical, pushing to the absolute limit of performance. Going deep is emotional, exploring complex, deep-seated feelings. There’s not enough depth in our current political environment. I want to bring more depth to our thoughts and actions.

Then there’s the depth of time. Balancing time frames is a challenge. Our businesses and our families differ in their emphases, and Mother Nature has her own time scales. Adaptation, success, and happiness require considering them all.

I want to win the Democratic primary on May 19 to be on the ballot against Darcey Edwards. I want to be elected on November 3 to represent you in Oregon House District #31, starting in January 2027. I want to be part of the team writing and passing legislation for the next two years that will give you a healthier and happier life for years to come. Better education. Better environment. Better transportation. That’s a straightforward schedule for actions, for creating changes.

What’s the schedule for the effects, though?  Over what period of time do you want the changes to build and persist? Lemme step back and talk about time more broadly. There are many relevant time scales for us. We need oxygen every three minutes or less. We need to keep warm. We can die of hypothermia in an hour or less if we’re in the cold Pacific Ocean water too long. We can do without water for two or three days but not much longer than that. Most people can go several weeks or even a few months without food, but it’s not pleasant. Our crops require varying amounts of time before we harvest them, ranging up to 30 years or more for tree farms. Our children and grandchildren, nieces and grandnephews will hopefully be here for decades after us. What time frame are we legislating for?

There are longer periods that we don’t legislate for directly but are relevant. The federal government changes in ways we have to respond to. Weather is variable, sometimes warmer or colder, wetter or dryer, than we expect. There are larger hurricane-strength storms and wildfires that happen at unpredictable intervals. Major earthquakes happen every few hundred years. Global heating is happening, changing our climate in ways that are hard to time and that would be well for us to anticipate.

A genius part of our system with three branches of government is that each branch operates on a different time scale. The executive branch manages the day-to-day conditions and changes. The legislative branch sets a direction for a year or two, sometimes longer. The judicial branch considers all actions by the government since statehood. For you engineers out there, this roughly corresponds to differential, proportional, and integrative control. Although it can be noisy at times, it’s wonderfully stable over the long run in a wide variety of conditions, including the greater disturbances that happen at longer intervals, like earthquakes.

Corporations, by contrast, discount the future. Literally. A dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar today. The discount rate varies with the broader economy, but a 10%/year discount is a common rate, borne out by the 50-year average of inflation + S&P return. At that rate, a dollar five years from now is only worth 59¢, ten years from now 35¢, and 25 years – a generation – is only worth 7.18¢. Therefore, if we want something we have now to be here for the next generation – say, clean water, for instance – we can’t rely on corporations to do it on their own. We must make them. We grant their owners unlimited opportunity but limited liability for corporate actions through the fiction of legal personhood. It’s important for us to manage those liability boundaries, especially for long-term concerns that corporations don’t care about on their own.

Let me close this discussion by writing about evolution. As articulated by Charles Darwin, survival of the fittest did not refer to physical strength. He was referring to the best fit to the existing environment – the best adapted. He wasn’t talking about destiny. He was talking about making best use of what’s available, with the knowledge that what’s available changes over time. We all have to adapt, individually and collectively, to how our world changes. The Oregon Legislature has a role to play in helping you and all Oregonians adapt successfully to our changing times.