BATH — A few years ago, I worked with a cluster of communities in deep crisis. Geographically, the four occupied a space smaller than that of a large town; however, they had four governments, two complete school systems and redundant services, e.g., police, refuse and fire. My colleagues and I were brought in by leaders of all four communities to help them consolidate services so that they could re-deploy the savings for desperately needed economic development.
During the yearlong project, we facilitated a citizen-created visionary focus and generated substantial community engagement on seven of eight objectives. At one point, over 200 volunteers were working on 12 cross-community projects identified and prioritized by consensus by area residents. Our efforts were validated when the towns successfully consolidated their school systems and mobilized $25 million to $50 million for community development.
Unfortunately, at the height of that success, we met with ferocious hostility from leaders in some of the communities. Suddenly we had a local equivalent of Breitbart News calling us “Nazis” – “Nothing personal,” I later learned from the editor’s wife. “We just had to stop you.” A town councilor in the largest community accused us of being secret agents for Agenda 21, which spurred knowing nods at the meeting. None of my team knew what that was; we were astonished by what we learned when we researched it.
Nor did we succeed in consolidating additional services despite a massive, months-long effort by a cross-community group including all the local service providers to document what was possible to achieve and how to accomplish it. They produced a phenomenal plan for the area to no avail.
To us, it seemed like some of the leadership had gone crazy. One town’s board refused to accept a $10,000, no-strings-attached community grant we arranged.
Nevertheless, the state agency that funded the project was pleased with what we accomplished and considered the project a rare success for the region. We had to declare victory and let it go.
However, at least emotionally, I couldn’t. I was nagged by what seemed to be a wasted opportunity. The potential of the region is immense and, tragically, continues to be unrealized.
At first, I thought that we had been thwarted by the “iron law of institutions,” that people in power are willing to throw anyone overboard, even destroy their institution, to retain their position. Still, that didn’t seem like an adequate explanation.
Then I recalled work I did early in my career with Vietnam-era veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I recognized parallels, if you accepted the possibility that a whole community could suffer from PTSD.
Large segments of the communities had unwittingly contributed to a series of economic traumas. Friends and neighbors had been “thrown under the bus.” Everyone suffered; at one point you could buy a modern, four-bedroom house for $25,000.
Only a handful of people had ever spoken with us about how the communities had fallen on hard times. We, I, failed to grasp that the trauma had never been addressed, accepted and resolved. By opening the communities to each other on a compassionate as well as practical level, we weren’t just solving an economic development problem – we were exposing unhealed wounds and threatening to expose buried guilt and remorse.
That insight has allowed me to think differently about our state’s and the nation’s failure to achieve our potential and address our enduring social problems, especially those rooted in inequality, like access to health care. With health care, we watched the craziness play out in the effort to reduce the huge addition to the national debt caused by the Republican tax cut by eliminating insurance subsidies that were essential to 13 million people’s health.
For me, that incident flashed a light on America’s oldest, deepest wound: the pernicious conflict between privilege (affluenza) and fairness, whether our society’s purpose is to exalt a few at the expense of the many or to exalt everyone as much as possible.
So, let the healing begin. It’s past time to reaffirm our commitment to create a society for the ages.
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