Community Organization

Last night the Point Roberts Taxpayers’ Association held its monthly meeting. (I’m not down at the Point right now so I didn’t attend and can't report on what happened.) Both the Voters’ Association and the Taxpayers have recently been making considerable attempts to renovate their status, to reinvigorate their memberships, to become more relevant, more in-demand, more leaderly, for lack of a better word. Having put in a year on the Point Roberts Community Association, a group that continues to wither on the vine as I type these words, I can understand the desire of members to make these other groups work. But, there is also the reality of history.

As far as I know, there are no long-standing community-governance-type groups in the recent history of Point Roberts. By that, I mean groups that have even a 10-year history of creating, maintaining, and pursuing a coherent community-governance agenda. Which does not mean that there are not regular attempts to create such groups, but just that the results of such groups are spotty, at best. So, the prospect for the Voters and the Taxpayers does not look good. Currently, the two groups are considering amalgamating their groupness, thus metamorphosing into something that might be called the Point Roberts Taxpaying and/or Voting Association.

The problem with such fusion is, perhaps, that a single organization will not have enough slots for all the would-be chiefs. Two organizations? Twice as many slots. One organization? Half as many. The Taxpayers are apparently (according to their minutes) also looking into creating municipality status for Point Roberts: an option that may also create some problems around chiefs status, even fewer slots in the governance of a tiny municipality. Point Roberts may have more than its share of chiefs-in-waiting, or it may just be another by-product of American Exceptionalism—and thus found in every small and large U.S. community—whereby almost everyone thinks of himself as a potential leader.

I have been reading Winston Churchill’s books on World War II. Here was a leader. It is quite remarkable how committed he was to his vision of what had to be done. I suppose that is a good part of the definition of a leader, which may be why contemporary Liberals tend to do so poorly at the task—they always sound pretty apologetic about even having a view, let alone insisting on it, or, finally, about drawing others to their organization because of the strength of their commitment. It’s more like ‘Why don’t we all get together and see if there’s something we can agree to support/pursue/encourage/whatever.’ If the Taxpayers and the Voters get together, will they then have to figure out a mission they all can drum up some enthusiasm for? Tune in later, and see, I guess. But at the moment, if I had to pick among the Taxpayers, the Voters, and a revived Thursday night Bingo Game, it wouldn’t be a hard choice.