Last week I wrote about weddings — the joyful chaos, the choreography, the way a community briefly gathers around two people and says, “Yes, we’re still capable of beauty.”

Weddings are noisy in the best way. They remind us that meaning often hides inside the commotion.

This week, I’ve been thinking about a different kind of noise — the civic kind — and the quieter frequency beneath it.

And before anyone reaches for their partisan decoder ring, let me offer a simple clarification: This isn’t about left or right; it’s about the shared work of keeping a community healthy.

That shared work is what led me to this poem, which began with a question I can’t seem to shake: What keeps a person — and a community — true to itself in a noisy age?

The metaphor of signal and noise gave me a way to explore that question, especially here in Santa Barbara, where our civic conversations are often as beautiful and complicated as the coastline itself.

The Signal on State Street

Every life has a signal — that quiet,
stubborn frequency inside that says,
“This is who you are, don’t wander off.” 

And then there’s the noise:
the static of fear, habit, distraction
and the general American condition of being culturally over caffeinated. 

Some people arrive with a signal so clear it’s almost suspicious.

Marie Curie woke up thinking,
“Let’s go find something glowing and hope it doesn’t kill us.” 

Eileen Collins flew the space shuttle with the serenity of someone who has accepted the impermanence of all things, including gravity.

Abraham Lincoln carried a moral signal so steady it made the rest of us look like we were assembling democracy from an IKEA kit missing three screws.

Steve Jobs insisted beauty and usefulness belong together, which is why your phone now feels vaguely disappointed in you.

And Howard Thurman kept reminding us to listen for “the sound of the genuine,” which is difficult when the genuine is whispering and the noise is shouting through a megaphone.

Signal is not virtue.

Noise is not failure.

They’re simply the two conditions of being human — and American — the tug of war between the self we mean to be and the self that gets distracted by a coupon.

And if individuals have a signal to noise ratio, democracy certainly does. It’s an old radio with a loose dial, still playing the same simple tune: we govern ourselves.

The noise is everything that makes us forget that — misinformation, cynicism, outrage cycles and the national pastime of mistaking volume for truth.

And here in Santa Barbara,
the signal shows up in the places we keep returning to — none more emblematic than State Street.

Beneath the debates, the consultants, the renderings, there’s a quieter frequency humming: this street deserves a beautiful future. 

A future still unfinished,
still asking us to imagine it forward — a place for more gathering, more light, more small joys, more parades.

A future worthy of its history, its coastline brightness,
its teenagers on first dates and its elders who remember when the trolleys still clattered through.

The noise, of course, is everything that distracts us from that truth — the impatience, the competing visions, e-bike congestion, the civic static that rises whenever a community cares deeply.

But the signal is older and steadier:
State Street is ours to steward,
and it keeps calling us toward a version of itself that is welcoming, walkable, lively, commercially unique and enterprising, and unmistakably Santa Barbara,
the kind of place where you can buy a surfboard, a latte, and a wedding dress within 200 feet and somehow it all makes sense.

So how do we raise the signal?
Not by shouting.
Not by purifying ourselves like artisanal vinegar.
Not by pretending the noise will never vanish — it won’t.

Noise is part of the human package,
like the little packet of silica gel in a new pair of shoes.

The signal rises when we remember that tuning is communal work: when neighbors show up, when people stay at the table long enough to remember they actually like each other,
and when we listen for the quiet thing beneath the loud thing — the one that says,
“You’re responsible for the world you’re in. Act like it.”

As election season unfolds, the work before us isn’t to silence the noise — that’s impossible — but to lower it just enough that the signal can hum again.

Not perfection.
Not purity.
Just the steady, neighborly work of tuning ourselves — and our common life — to a clearer frequency that is always evolving.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, hearing it together. If we can manage that — even briefly — the rest begins to tune itself.