Regional Cooperation
Volume 12, Number 46,
Issue 593
Last Monday, the Third Annual Cynthia and David Robinson International Studies Debates were held at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. This year the debates were very exciting because it was Election Eve and the students of R-MC turned out in such a great number that it was necessary to move them outside and hold them in the open air. It was a great feeling for Cynthia, myself and my great friend, Joe Walton of Kappa Networks (www.kappanetworks.com) to be surrounded by politics, a 70 degree evening, world class debaters from Great Britain and Ashland and about 250 people standing around listening to international political points being debated on the steps of an 1870s historic building.
I continue to be worried about the fact that political leadership continues to be centered in the hands of the few and, especially, the rich and special interest groups. Last week’s election results not withstanding, the months of emotion and uncertainty took, I feel, a great toll on the emotion and the sensibility of the regular working class. I’ve got to believe that there should be something better. When only well-funded aristocratic leaders (and only the rich can really run for any high-level state or national office) get elected, the consequences on the true working class are devastatingly divisive. Rather than leading and unifying, political leaders seem to divide citizens, erode civil society, and undermine trust in the democratic ideal and, regretfully, ultimately become beholding to special interest groups sooner or later.
Politics at all levels has become a contest among special interests that is inherently—by nature—self-destructive. A political writer named Peter Drucker described our political system as "battlefields between groups, each of them fighting for absolute victory and not content with anything but total surrender of the enemy.”
How can the lack of respect for divergent and important local views produce a willingness to provoke positive change at local, state and national levels? When the electorate becomes polarized on national issues that don’t—essentially—matter on a local basis, people view politics as black and white and not as an evolving study of gray. It’s not as simple as being a Republican or Democrat. There are Republican issues that many of my Democratic friends believe and vice-versa. Being closed-minded simply cannot produce sustainable change. My own views are constantly changing as I talk with Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and, yes, even Green Party members. Isn’t this the way that it should be? I always have an open mind because life is, after all, an adventuresome journey.
When people align themselves “all one way or all another” because of fickle alliances and shifting majorities, it divides people from another and alienates many from public life. It sets up future conflict on issues yet to come. No one can argue with the need to make progress in addressing complex public issues, but the means used to do this have become unproductive and divisive. The way we decide what is important--namely by listening to television news analysis--is destroying civility and the fragile bonds of community that bind us together.
I’ve learned that the news media has its own agenda based on corporate interests and the way each particular entity gathers its news. Two hundred years ago, it was easier to know whether your news was biased or not—the newspapers actually added “Republican” or “Democrat” to their name. A few to this day still do, like the Mountain Democrat—California’s oldest newspaper. The Waterbury Republican is still alive and well in Connecticut.
Rigid adherence to parochial or ideological positions has deeply polarized many communities. The City of Richmond has a level of cynicism and apathy that offers little hope for working through these divisions. The City’s electorate did have the courage to elect a new group of administrators recently—one that appears on the surface to be from new and diverse sources that will bring in a new style.
Chesterfield County, Virginia and Richmond could look to Charlotte to find a way through its thicket of problems concerning the increasingly obvious negative impacts of growth and sprawl. In Charlotte, traffic clogged freeways, a shortage of trained workers and serious environmental damage long outpaced the economic benefits of a 1980s and early 1990s “boom.” A region made up of several counties with competing needs and interests challenged the capacity of civilian and elected leaders to address their specific REGIONAL needs.
Charlotte founded several influential regional “think tank” organizations to help the region escape the stigma of not thinking regionally and to develop a true vision of the area’s future. Around Central Virginia we all seem to love to form boards and quazi-governmental commissions, but we still bury our heads in the sand when it comes to pooling our resources to address regional cooperation and to develop a vision of a unified future that transcends a road sign that marks “you are entering ______.”
In Charlotte, the result of several years of VERY intense “thinking regionally” identified over 150 action steps necessary to achieve regional vision and cooperation. Each county around Charlotte finally realized that what went wrong in another WAS its concern after all. The pooling of resources became important to regional success.
Here in Central Virginia we all seem to promise cooperation but ultimately become bogged-down in partisan politics and stand-your-ground, “not-in-my-backyard” turf wars. I think that this will yet again turn out to be true for our proposed new downtown regional arts center—my guess is that we will only have enough money to tear the old buildings down.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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