We all want the individual social freedoms that come with private transportation and residential privacies, broadly diverse occupational choices, and the political liberty to choose our leaders – things promised by our national inheritance. Protecting any of our inheritances comes with a significant cost, however. This cost is measured more in terms of time than of money. To conserve our political liberty every one of us must renew for ourselves and with our neighbors our collective understandings of what is included in government protected political liberty and social freedoms. It may come as a surprise to some, but our neighbors may not be as ignorant as we imply when we say ordinary things like “that’s just not common sense” in response to a surprising mistake in our public business.
It might have seemed at the time like common sense to delay repairs on the Enterprise Water and Sewer systems over the last two decades. Now, however, almost anyone in Enterprise who looks at the water/sewer bill is gasping. What kind of common sense gave us these bills? At almost $90.00 monthly and still rising, the basic rate for a few gallons of water and sewage, one might suppose we have the cleanest water and the cleanest flush in the USA. Who’s willing to suppose that? Had we been hosting public deliberations over the last two decades about our water and sewer systems instead of handing the questions over to experts, we very well might have collectively discovered a much less expensive water/sewer system with much cleaner water.
As matters stand we are saddled with the best our experts could deliver; we are mostly paying for our own sustained avoidance of the difficult questions. Like it or not, our public leaders accurately reflect our effective, collective demands for and support of leadership. To the extent we are honest with ourselves, we take full responsibility for any leadership inadequacy we find. If we are annoyed, it is with our own failure to create and put into office the leadership we believe we need, and, further, our on-going failure to take full responsibility when our leadership malfunctions.
That water-sewer issue is all but a “done deal.” Yet it is only one of many others now facing our city. Our local economy has been in a tailspin for years. It is not easy to find economic revitalization that most everyone appreciates as long as most of us ignore conversations about what we want our city to include. How often has each of us appeared in public to listen to others speak their thoughts? How can we expect others to listen to us if we are not willing to listen to them? How can we call ourselves a democratic society if we are inactive citizens except when we vote? In other words, as long as we leave it to experts, we should expect no results on any issue better than what we are now experiencing with our water-sewer bills.
It is probably more sensible, unless we significantly improve our public deliberations, to anticipate other comparably enormous bills such as: electric (from increasing demands on the electric grid offsetting declining crude oil supplies with rising crude oil costs); garbage collection and/or recycle bills (who will pay for our continuing bulk waste habits, costs for disposal of which will surely rise along with rising energy costs?), general infrastructure maintenance (how do we think our streets will be maintained unless we pay for them?), and so on.
All these and many more considerations need our collective attention if we are to sustain a beloved community in Enterprise or in Wallowa County. We can altogether ignore, or leave the envisioning and creating of this community to the experts and to existing devoted organizations. Or, we can build our own ways of creating needed public deliberations for describing what the community’s future should look like and then further spelling out how we prefer getting there.
Yes, we did a visioning exercise three years ago. It was very heartening to see so many Enterprise folks at the High School that evening. But then what did we do to bring the vision we created into a reality? Who among us didn’t leave it to the experts, to elected political leaders, and, more generally to “them?” Note that it is “them” who usually gets it wrong, no matter what “it” is or who “them” was. In other words, we are talking ourselves in circles, telling ourselves unbelievable tales, yet too easily believing the tales.
We can ourselves to do, as John Winthrop so precisely said to his fellow and sister Colonial Massachusetts Puritans in 1645, what we all know is “good, just, and honest.” If you want to join periodic deliberations here in Enterprise which aim to build local civic organized transformation of our political, social, and economic weaknesses into a more beloved community life, give me a call at 426-4620, or send an email to walterj@eoni.com.