It’s time to think, not just feel and believe
I’m a fan of the Jayhawks, the Packers, almost anything “Star Trek,” and a strange little Canadian program called “Air Disasters.”
The hour-long plane crash series has replaced two other Canadian shows — “How It’s Made” and various incarnations of “Holmes on Homes” — as my go-to viewing when I don’t feel like wasting an hour clicking through — but never picking —things to watch on Netflix, except for the two or three things I’ve watched more times than I can count.
I come by these biases naturally. I’m a second-generation KU alumnus, and what’s hard about watching a perennial winner?
The Packers weren’t when I started watching them, but I lived in Wisconsin, and if you wanted to have any sort of conversation with anyone on a Monday you had to memorize all the plays from the game the day before.
Some might think I’m a geek about “Star Trek,” and I do admit to a few geeky tendencies, like relaxing by writing computer programs. But I’m not particularly a fan of “Star Wars,” sci-fi horror movies, or any of the other space operas.
I like “Air Disasters” because I learn things — stupid things I’ll never have any reason to know, but it’s kind of fun to learn them nonetheless, even though I now panic when I get on an airplane if I can’t see that the pilot has extended the plane’s flaps before takeoff.
The point is, I know why I have the biases I do about things I’ll tend to blindly support if anyone were to challenge them.
I can’t say the same about my political views, which tend to change depending on what a politician actually does. Too bad that doesn’t seem to be the case for most voters.
Come up with a list of screwy things some politician does, then change the name of the politician. Suppose it’s Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump who wants to — well, you can take your pick of invading Venezuela, threatening Iran, wanting to seize Greenland, imposing tariffs like a sailor swears, chasing everyone who isn’t Anglo out of the country, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, wanting to do the same with Dulles Airport, putting his last name on a new prescription website, or insisting it isn’t the Gulf of Mexico or the Department of Defense.
If you’re a dyed-in-the-donkey Democrat, would you think those were great ideas if someone else were to propose them? If you have a Republican elephant brain, would you think they’re terrible?
As a nation, we’ve become so polarized by social media and ostrich-like in our examination of issues that we blindly praise or condemn things merely on the basis of who proposes them.
But it’s not just a national phenomenon. We see the same sort of thing in the state legislature and even in the halls of city and county government, where some things are immediately condemned merely because someone read something on some crackpot website saying they were bad.
The real problem is, the warfare never stops. Those who oppose wind energy could easily resolve the question by adopting a rule saying two wind farms are enough. Let some other county invite them in instead. But wind farm opponents, like the worst Monopoly players, have to rub everything in, stack the deck, get a pound of flesh, and kill whatever shard of an idea for additional wind farms exists with an 18-inch cannon.
The turbines aren’t coming down. No one’s going to extort more money out of them. Game over. It’s time to move on.
But that’s not the only thing politicians insist on. They create commissions and committees and all sorts of panels to examine issues in detail, but before they let them do their studying, they have to tell them what to conclude.
This is not just bullying behavior. It’s closed-minded ignorance, petty biases that they won’t admit to and can’t be dissuaded from.
Much as I’d love to blame politicians, I really can’t. Power corrupts. The temptation is too great for them to think of themselves not just as above the law but also as not bound by the basic principles of researching, learning, and sometimes changing minds that have propelled our world forward since the Dark Ages.
So, who’s to blame? We are — we the people who put them in office and then fail to hold them accountable, fail to say enough is enough, and fail to put forward our own ideas, instead opting to privately carp about theirs.
Not wanting to be the kettle labeled as black by the pot of negativity roaming through government meeting rooms, here’s an idea — a positive one that may or may not be worth anything but at least could change the topic to one more productive.
How do we get our community’s economy to advance? We can do nickel-and-dime promotional gimmicks and “Field of Dreams” wishful thinking, but at some point we need to come up with an idea some vocal minority won’t object to.
We can bring in big corporations — if they ignore our tax and utility rate and lack of readily available skilled workers with superior work ethics — and watch them chance away our best and brightest and working capital. Or we can look inward and see what it is that we already have and how we can build on it.
What we have are a lot of retirees — people might like to work, maybe two or three days a week doing something they love. This is the key ingredient needed to transform our lagging retail sales by focusing more on out-of-county visitors looking for unusual crafts, artwork, or services.
To truly implement this, we’d need to transform our communities — preserving old buildings and, when not possible, at least erecting Victorian-style facades on modern structures.
To capitalize on this tourism, we need not low-income housing but more middle- and upper-income housing, transforming ourselves into more of a resort community that might lure a professional who, in the age of instant communication from anywhere in the world, might relocate his or her professional service business here, bringing highly skilled and more affluent workers with it.
An impossible dream? I’ve seen it done in a town where I spent 20 years in Wisconsin. It might not work here, but isn’t it more pleasant thinking about grandiose ideas like this than it is tilting at windmills?
— ERIC MEYER