I'll warn you right from the start: This may not make any sense, go anywhere, come to any conclusions, or even make a single point. And why? Because I'm choosing to share contemplations prior to their being synthesized into any useful form. I only do that out of a need to find an answer--or several--to my query. Maybe you can help...
Last night I attended a community meeting to discuss a town pool. We've never had one, wanted one for decades, and every attempt to make this item on the wish list come to fruition has either met with financial or political death. I've met on other occasions with this current "group of dreamers" and have found them to be extremely professional and entirely prepared to make our wet dream into reality. They've spend the better part of two years doing surveys, drawing up plans, getting estimates, doing studies--they even got the acreage donated for $10. Then they decided to unveil their work.
I'll hazard the guess that there were maybe 100 people on hand for their Power Point presentation, perhaps a little less, but in a town of less than 10,000, that pretty much constitutes a quorum. And we'd hardly gotten underway until the creeping bad feeling set in: the one that in "pool ideas past" had led to taking sides and rending of relationships. A guy interrupted and demanded the board introduce themselves--they had a slide coming with all that info on it but that wouldn't do for the man in the back row who "wanted to know he was talking to". I gave him a dirty look, I couldn't help it. I felt he was being rude.
Not too many slides later, some among us decided that the Q&A wouldn't wait until after the presentation but would take place in a piecemeal fashion, or what devolved into stream-of-thought-consciousness. Nice for an essay, shitty for a serious forum. Even the newly-elected Mayor--picture a Western Chris Christie--had to interrupt and throw his no-amplification-required voice around. And he was nice. He made sense. I decided to give the crowd a chance at redemption. (He turned on them later in the meeting, of course.)
I believe I counted to five or six the number of times the man across the aisle from me murmured "Bullshit!" in the following minutes. He was indirectly addressing an engineer (also a City Council Member) who was detailing the findings of untold hours of investigation he'd done on his own time. He gave lots of facts and figures and presented them in a way that I found quite meaningful and accessible. But the man seated a mere two feet from me had an obvious problem with the speaker. And it came out, as the engineer moved closer to the audience in order to take a question from the rear: "I was in the DOD longer than you and that's bullshit!" my seatmate announced, not in a shout, but loudly enough that most of those gathered could hear him. The engineer paused just a beat, and in that beat, without thinking or planning, I looked over at the man and said, "What is your PROBLEM?" We both realized at the same moment that I'd actually said that aloud, but nothing happened. He never looked at me, never recognized my presence. He was not as much of a problem after my intervention as he had been prior to it, however. (Just like every time I've bothered to correct a RWNJ on Twitter, kindly of course, they just disappear.)
Several other comments/complaints/sarcastic remarks were suffered by the folks at the front of the room over the course of the ninety minute meeting, and they remained gracious to a man/woman. I wish I could've said the same of the invited audience. If I had to estimate, I'd say that somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the city dwellers were with the board, but it was the squawky wheels running the show. By the time the meeting drew to a close, it seemed that everyone in the room was against the people and the project. I realize that was just perception and likely not the case, but those of us who were mostly silent were suffering from shock at our neighbors' reactions and treatment of these people and sat wishing for an air of civility to blow in off the peaks.
I was proud when a friend I'd invited stood before everyone could leave and asked for the audience to appreciate the work these people had put into a thing WE had long asked for by giving them a round of applause. She shamed 'em into it, and I will have to thank her when next we cross paths.
For my part, I went up to our former County Clerk, now retired and a member of many good works-type boards, and personally apologized for the behavior of some in attendance. "We aren't all like that, I just wanted you to know," I said as I took her hand and thanked her for all those hours of UNPAID work and lobbying on the behalf of the citizenry. I couldn't have left the building without putting a reasonable bit of punctuation on the unsavory evening, after all.
So what are these horns upon which I find myself, wrestling with a dilemma? They seem to be elk or deer horns, and I fear I'm looking at an eight- or ten-point buck:
*Where is it appropriate to engage in activism?
*Do I really want to know the inner-workings of small town politics?
*Should I try to educate or shape minds?
*Should I just practice my path in a way that draws others to me?
*Do I want to fight the local fights in the same way I fight the national ones?
*Do I let myself get disillusioned and walk away?
*Do I even go forward with another community group setting out to do WAY more controversial things in town? (Community gardens are RED, you know. Commies!)
It's the old "more flies with honey than vinegar" adage meets "why bother". I was so fired up with head-shaking anger last night that I didn't dare to write this in that moment. I knew too that I'd gone expecting a nice, hopeful vision of our future which would be met with rose petals and chocolates and instead I got the Iraq invasion. I had to let go of what I wanted to have happen and embrace what actually took place before I could begin to qualify the event in one way or the other. I had that much presence of mind at least.
But I'm not sure what to do with my 24 hours of lucidity, not sure it has brought me any closer to deciding how to proceed. What I do know is that I love this town and the vast majority of its residents. Outside a few bumperstickers and yard signs (and most of those are mine), political feelings tend to stay under the surface. We're more likely to discuss irrigation than immigration in these parts. Roundtables are a place to have dinner. Poles have more use to us than do polls.
I don't want to "come out of the water closet" with all of my Progressive views, but those in my circle and those I meet know where I stand. I do fly my freak flag daily, I just don't go in for one on the scale of the over-sized stars-and-stripes that cast shadows over car dealerships. It's not about me, it's about the message, the idea.
If there's one idea I'd like to get across to the rabble rousers of last evening, it would be that "public" is not bad and "private" is not good. It isn't that simple. I'd hoped when the board president started by asking for a show of hands of those who could swim, then followed that by asking how many of them had learned to swim in a public facility, the point might be made. It wasn't. The environment of this election year has so many misinformed, so many feeding on whatever the Fox trough sets out for slops. (More like Pig News, if you will.)
That's enough to ask you to read for now; I'll likely revisit this in posts to follow in the coming days. There are more stories to tell, but mostly there are decisions to make. I'm not sure this is about the pool for me anymore, as a matter of fact I know it isn't. It's about something much more important.
It's not the hole full of water I want to fight for, it's the hole in our national soul.
