Ann Arbor change agent William Tozier rants about ‘the good people’ that surround our localities and suburbs – marketers and agents and landlords and bankers and people who publish shiny color magazines and promote their sunny offices in office parks….
He says,
“They’re good people.
“That said… Like all of us, these are plain old human beings armed with the standard human cognitive heuristic toolkit… personal experience… cultural norms… the sense of massive importance of all that…
“They try, really. But they’re crippled by insularity, by the people they hear and choose to listen to, by their distance from the Actual World. Hell, it’s a handful of them that even know the world exists as it does.
“No sense of the timescale…. a milestone on the road to obsolescence.”
Why are powers in London, New York, the Caribbean, and not at home? Our localities are where we live!
The most potent and trained and talented must come home. Until we are happy in our own neighborhoods, dusty democracy has never been, and Plato’s assertions to build government have been diluted to obscurity.
Place is where we build our powers. But today, we give our place away. We invite corruption to our town, a ribbon from underwriters to peddlers, and we are bled away.
We fail to create the nearby. For me, that’s nuts. Law allows us to invent pleasant, prosperous and sustainable places. Until, I think, we put fortune in our day to day culture, we are mere barracks.