Noted American humorist Will Rogers once wrote: “When I die, my epitaph… is going to read: ‘I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.’ I am so proud of that, I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved.”
When the time finally came for carving his epitaph, the message was simplified. “I never met a man I didn’t like.”
I believe that epigram encapsulates a human reality. No matter what our differences of opinion, if we sit down face to face and truly listen to one another, we can’t help but appreciate the other person’s humanity.
On the other hand, it’s oh-so-easy to despise people from a distance. Across the distance between Pagosa Springs and — say — Washington DC, we can easily characterize a person, or group of people, as dangerous monsters.
For that reason, democracy seems to work best when power is exercised locally — and when political power is shared, rather than centralized in only a few hands. No system is perfect; we will always struggle with ignorance, stupidity, greed and arrogance, whether here in Pagosa or in the nation’s capital. But as Will Rogers reminds us, we have a better chance of appreciating the other guy’s humanity if we sit together in the same room… even, at the same table.
The Pagosa Springs Town Council and staff spent about seven hours sitting in the same room talking about the future on Friday… a very specific and limited part of the future… namely, how the Town staff will spend their time over the next 12 months, and how the Town staff will spend maybe $12 million over that same period.
The $12 million didn’t actually enter into the conversation, in any substantive sense. No specific ‘dollar figures’ were tossed around. But listening from my corner of the room, I could hear the cash registers ringing in the background… at least in my imagination.
The Council’s annual retreat — the 2020 Strategic Planning retreat — took place at the Ross Aragon Community Center with plenty of ‘social distancing’ and with everyone, including facilitator Yvonne Wilcox, wearing a face mask. Ms. Wilcox has facilitated these annual retreats for the past three or four years, and has been refining her technique with each passing year, to help the Council better define its priorities in a manner that will have some actual influence on the municipal bureaucracy.
I won’t attempt to analyze all seven hours of discussion in this editorial series, but a few of the Council exchanges stuck me as worthy of discussion.
But before we get into the details, a quick reference to current political conditions — regarding people with whom we never sit at the same table. In Part Two, on Friday, I shared a quote from political economist Francis Fukuyama, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine this past June. Dr. Fukuyama had begun his article this way:
Major crises have major consequences, usually unforeseen. The Great Depression spurred isolationism, nationalism, fascism, and World War II — but also led to the New Deal, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and eventually decolonization…
The noted economist here seems to be comparing negative effects of the Great Depression — isolationism, nationalism, fascism, a world war — with a few of the ‘positive’ effects that resulted from that decade-long event. The rise of the US as a global superpower, for example.
Although people living in other countries might feel differently, many Americans view “the rise of the US as a global superpower” as a positive development… and perhaps even as evidence that the American people are especially intelligent and industrious.
Additionally, many Americans believe that we’re blessed to be living under an economic system focused on so-called ‘free market’ capitalism, largely controlled by a ruling class that regularly benefits from government subsidies and tax loopholes. Many conceive this to be the best of all possible economic systems.
Dr. Fukuyama sees things through a somewhat wider lens… through the lens of institutional checks and balances that help control government overreach, including an independent judiciary and a free press, and a non-authoritarian executive branch… through the lens of democratic decision-making, and the necessary spirit of compromise that allows democracies to function effectively.
Here’s an 8-minute video from his recent presentation at Stanford University.
Dr. Fukuyama mentions a couple of prominent ‘authoritarian’ political systems that have grown in power in recent years: Russia and China. He describes them as “big, consolidated and seeking to project their influence around the world.” But his larger concern in this lecture is the rise of “populist nationalism” — movements that tend to identify existing governmental and social institutions as corrupt and even oppressive, and which also tend to define “We the People” as a limited cultural group that doesn’t include other races and ethnic groups. The professor paints a picture of a dangerous state of polarization created by these movements, and suggests that we need to “address some of the grievances that are brought about by globalization — the great inequalities of wealth and social status that globalization has created…”
Living here in rural America… dependent upon our local retirement community and summer tourists, dependent also upon tax-supported local government… we might not feel oppressed by the “great inequalities of wealth and social status” created by our nation’s reliance on a global economy… an economy where our clothes, shoes, automobiles, computers, phones, TVs, furniture, housewares, medicines, toys, sports equipment and so many other items are produced in foreign countries. We might, in fact, imagine ourselves to be blessed to have access to these material goods at relatively low prices.
We might, in fact, be feeling lucky.
Or I should say, we would be feeling lucky, if we weren’t in the middle of a global pandemic, experiencing the serious collateral damage to what, last January, had seemed to be a healthy national and local economy.
Things don’t feel quite so lucky at the moment. Here, for example, is a chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, showing the unemployment in Archuleta County.
Our community’s unemployment rate spiked above 16% in April, and remained above 11% for May and June, suggesting that one-out-of-ten working families are currently reliant on government unemployment checks, if they have any income at all. Not a great situation.