A few months ago, during a public meeting, a commissioner mentioned that an applicant and the applicant’s neighbors might have done more to communicate with each other. (I thought that was true, too; as it turned out, there was a great deal of communication in the weeks afterward, all to the good.)
It’s not true, though, that Whitewater – generally – has a communications problem. Nor do residents have a relationship-building problem.
Whitewater has email and telephones and the Internet. We don’t lack for the ability to communicate, nor are people incapable of forming relationships, bonds, and alliances once having become acquainted.
When public agendas don’t contain enough information, when public meetings are held at inconvenient times or places, when public men treat their boards, commissions, and organizations as though they were private clubs, those are not communications problems.
Those are problems of law and governance, of policy and politics, of primary principles not secondary means. Their causes run deeper than mere ignorance or poor socialization. Policymakers know very well how to communicate the messages that they want, and to build the relationships that they want.
Admittedly, many of these messages are ill-considered, contradictory, and easily refuted, but they are messages, delivered as their speakers intended. The last generation knew how to communicate and relationship-build just fine, thank you. Their problem has been that their content and choices have been poor.
Our supposed communications problem is really an ideological problem: the use of public things for private ends, the exaltation of personality over policy, and hopelessly exaggerated claims in the place of simple achievements.
These real, underlying problems will vanish when a more competitive, principle-based majority comes to the fore.
They will vanish no sooner, but also no later, than that.