Sixties Momentum

This past Thursday was the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts Community Association. Everyone, at some time in his/her life, goes to meetings like these, I imagine. A somewhat amorphous group with a somewhat amorphous purpose struggling to find a way forward. Such meetings are profoundly frustrating in some ways (can’t we just do what I want and then get on with doing it?), and profoundly interesting in others (what’s really happening here?). The frustrating part is immediately available to everyone, I think, but the interesting part takes a little more work to discern.

The ten-twelve people who show up for these meetings do not come from the same generational, educational, or experiential backgrounds. They are not all committed environmentalists, or political enthusiasts, or evangelical Christians, or home schoolers, or anything unifying. Except for the fact that they live in Point Roberts—well, that’s the unifying point. And it’s often hard to believe that that is enough of a shared experience to make the group work.

It sometimes feels like that reality TV show—which I have never seen, so I may have it wrong—in which a bunch of people get put on a desert island and each week, I think, someone is voted off. Similarly, at the end of each of our meetings, I worry about whether someone will decide not to return the next month. After all, if the members of the Point Roberts Community Association can’t get along together as a group of people willing to try to work together, why would we think that the larger community, whose members have not made any particular commitment to trying to do something together, could operate in a more harmonious fashion?

Why would we think that just showing up in the same place (either in Point Roberts, or at the PRCA meetings) would be enough to enable us to overcome all our differences? I ask myself this frequently, and especially right after the monthly meetings. And the answer, for me anyway, is that I come from the land of the ‘60’s, when people with vastly different views, ages, experiences, and backgrounds came together all over the U.S. in very different groups and made something happen.

It’s hard and maybe impossible to explain the sixties (and early 70’s) to someone who wasn’t there. The feeling of hope, the feeling that things could change, the fact of endlessly multiplying groups that formed to carry forward those hopes and actions, ranging from the many groups that went to form the Civil Rights Movement (it wasn’t just Martin Luther King), to the Black Panthers, to the Free Speech Movement, to the Students for a Democratic Society, and on and on. This blog post would be a lot longer if I just let myself list all the groups I can remember. And though all those groups had disagreements with one another, there was a steady sense of forward movement in which the various institutions of society (the press, the courts, even the U.S. Congress and state legislatures) seemed to be reflecting, following, or even leading, on occasion. That sense of movement is what kept us going. And momentum is a very big thing.

Not so much now; really, not any now. Starting anything nowadays is starting from pretty much a dead stop. The internet is full of recently-formed groups/movements, but they pretty much just talk to each other and/or send checks/emails to one another. So, the fact that a dozen people are willing to come to a meeting in a building once a month and do anything at all is a great success, I remind myself. At least we aren’t voting each other off our island.

The sixties made it seem easy. But it wasn’t, even then, as I recall.

I'm Not Organizing Sox

When I was in California, last week, I took some time to read Barak Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which gave me some more sense of who the guy is. But what interested me more, in some ways, was his recounting of his 3-year experience as a community organizer in Chicago after he graduated from college.

I’ve been reading about community organizing since the 60’s, I’d say, and I always thought of it vaguely as something like organizing a labor union. Or maybe organizing anything—your children, the sox in your drawer. But I never really thought about the nitty gritty of it. That is, you try to organize workers, you already know what it is they have in common: they are workers and they are not management. You organize your children, and you have some previously established authority, as difficult as it may be to get them to follow your lead. You organize your sox in a drawer, they stay where they are put.

Organizing a community, by contrast, is quite different. It requires attempting to get people to figure out what their common interests might be when there is no previously-defined common interest, no community necessarily other than in your head; when you have no authority to do anything at all, and no one has any reason to go where you put them or to stay there once they’ve been put there. Probably more like the much-quoted job of herding cats when the cats didn't ask to be herded. And what interests me about this is that, after reading about Obama’s experience in Chicago, I realized that community organizing is what the Point Roberts Community Council is trying to do, even if it doesn’t necessarily think of it in those words.

At the last meeting, the ‘Council’ voted to change its name to the Point Roberts Community Association. The general rationale was that ‘Council’ sounded too much like an elected, representative group, and nobody had elected any of us to do anything and we represented people on the Point in only the vaguest of ways. So, now we’re an Association, which makes us something that anyone who lives in Point Roberts can join. We are choosing to associate with one another because we have some common interests. And because we have some common interests, we have the beginnings of a discrete community, even if, at the moment, it’s only the community of the Point Roberts Community Association. One common interest that this small community identified was a need to improve the Community Events sign on the main street. And, with some group work now completed, a new Community Events sign will soon appear. Results!

The next task, then, is to find out if other Point Roberts’ residents have other common interests and whether they and the community of the Association might join together and find some way to advance a common cause. It's baby steps, but I think I’m learning.

Volunteer Rules

My daughter is a volunteer Girl Scout Troop leader. She says that the G.S. Council doesn’t have a lot of rules for the volunteers, but the one they really impress upon them is that they are NEVER to talk to the press. If something happens, let the Girl Scout Council’s media person talk to the press. Seems like an interesting rule, but its importance was made apparent to me last night when I was alerted to the fact that there was an article about the Point Roberts Community Council in the Bellingham Herald.

The Herald is the daily paper in Bellingham, the seat of Whatcom County, the county that houses Point Roberts and administers most of such governance as we get. Well, a little publicity never hurt anybody, right? Except, the front-page (on the Net, anyway) article focused on the idea that Point Roberts is very distressed by the nature of its relationship to the county and the residents are talking about seceding from the county, the state, the world, maybe, and that the Community Council is a venue for discussing this, maybe making it happen. The article was accompanied, at the time I read it, by 26 comments, most of which felt that selling us to Canada would be the best thing that could happen to Whatcom County and that we were a community of whiners and foreigners, so who cared what we thought or what happened to us.

Ah, I thought, that article is definitely not accurate and certainly not helpful. And it was even more not helpful that the only two people from Point Roberts who had been interviewed for the story were people involved in the formation of the Community Council, with the vague implication that they were speaking on behalf of the Council and endorsing secession. If only the Point Roberts Community Council were as smart as the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Girl Scouts Council we’d have had a rule that prohibited any of us from talking to the press.

Perhaps we should tell the Herald that the only act the P.R. Community Council has so far set in motion is to redesign, rebuild, and landscape the Community Events sign. Surely not the act of a lot of secessionist hotheads? Or maybe that’s where hotheads do start if they don’t have Fort Sumter to work with? I’m invoking the rule for myself: no volunteers speaking to the press on behalf of the Community Council. But there's a lot of talking among ourselves about the article: unhappily, it was, last night, the #1 'most emailed article' in the Herald.

Job Openings in Point Robert

If you lived in a big city, there wouldn’t be a community events sign because there would be too many events for one sign. Maybe there would be many such signs, but my guess is there wouldn’t be any such sign. The venues for events would have signs about what is going on in that venue. But we are a small community, so we have a Point Roberts Events sign. But it is in terminal distress. You can see from the picture that it has lost all its stars on the bottom row. And the paint on its legs has seen happier days. And, although you cannot actually see it, I am told that it is none too stable when one is trying to post a sign.

And that is why the community council, which may in the future be called the P.R. Community Association, has decided to get this sign redesigned and rebuilt so it is more useful and more aesthetically pleasing. The landscaping at the base is to be replaced. Well, if you call weeds and blackberry brambles landscaping, the landscaping will be replaced. If you don’t, as I would think is the correct stance, the surrounding ground will be for the first time receiving some landscaping. I doubt seriously if the stop sign and the speed limit sign can go someplace else and the same goes for the library sign, so the overall aesthetic impression may still be somewhat less than desirable, but the sign itself and its groundwork will be soon a thing of beauty.

If you lived in a big city and they actually had a community events sign, then the city government would look out for the condition of the sign and would replace it or restore it when it became unsafe and unuseful. But when you live in a little town that has no independent government to speak of (we have only a Parks Board, a Water Board, a Fire District, and a Wellness Clinic Health District), such things don’t automatically get done. And that’s why government and the concomitant taxes required to fund government can be a good thing if they take care of such things. I am inclined to think that we pay a lot more taxes to our official government in Whatcom County than we receive back in services, but the County does not seem to care much about that. Which is why government gets a bad name, of course. But even if the county government were loving, generous, and kind toward us here in Point Roberts, I doubt if they would care about our community events sign. At some point, even here on the Point, residents have to take some responsibility.

To get the sign redesigned and rebuilt and landscaped, somebody has to find out who owns the property the sign actually sits on. Now, the stop sign and the library sign are clearly within a foot or so of the curb, so one might think that it was public property, but apparently not. The person who owns the land had to be contacted and had to give the community people permission to fix the sign. But first, the county person in charge of Public Works had to be contacted because he too must give permission. And when both permissions were granted, the Parks Board of Point Roberts needs to say what a good idea it is. And that, too, has happened. But, somebody had to make all those calls, somebody who didn’t have a job description that included making those calls, getting those permissions, someone who just volunteered to do it. And actually doing the new design, rebuilding, and landscaping work will also require people who volunteer to spend their time making things a little better in Point Roberts.

That may be what it means, ultimately, to live in a small community if it’s going to be a community you actually want to live in. A lot of volunteering and a lot of volunteer work, positions available to everyone, no interview required.

Giant Steps?

The Community Council met again last Thursday evening. After three meetings in which the primary question seemed to be ‘Who else should be here?’, this meeting began with none of the original members present for the meeting. So, right away, we knew who else was supposed to be there. As it turned out, all five of the missing were missing for different reasons, but there I was, for the first half hour, the institutional memory at this meeting which featured four or five new people, the other ‘who elses’ we had been so anxious to gather. The institutional memory had people at hand but no agenda. (By the end of that first half hour or so, two other people who had each attended a previous meeting or two finally showed up. We had also been joined, on time, by a reporter from the newspaper, further making me wince at the disarray.)

Suffice to say, I was experiencing a certain level of irritation at having been left in this particular lurch. I had attended two of the three previous meetings, but at no point had there been any general agreement about what the group might do once everybody who was supposed to be collected had appeared. The new collectees were pretty gung-ho; happy to be invited, they wanted to know when the events were to begin. I didn’t know; didn’t even know what events might be on offer.

Because there is a certain repetitiveness syndrome that all meetings engender, we began with asking who else, other than the missing founders, should be there? We made yet another list: it had not been enough either to offer an invitation in the newspaper to Point Roberts’ groups, nor to send a general purpose invitation by email to groups across the Point. Now, it behooved us to actually talk in person in some way to each group to get them to sign up for something: become a member or at least name a liaison.

Of course, since none of the original people were there, neither were any of the previously-constructed lists, so we did it yet again. And then, we considered adjourning so that next month there would be enough more who elses to keep us from having to repeat item again. But it occurred to me that we might as well use the remaining hour to decide at this meeting, what we would do at the next meeting when hail, hail, the gang was at last all here. Otherwise, I was afraid that we'd start the next meeting by addressing the question of who else ought to be coming to the meetings.

I proposed that we offer some general project that would be used as an exercise for the group to begin thinking about how it would actually do something. I emphasized that it wouldn’t have to be something that the group would, in fact, have to be committed to. Rather, it was a kind of practice piece. The reason for this, from my perspective, was that, if we tried first to select a serious project, the meetings would decline into months of arguing about what was the most worthy project. In the process, the group would fall apart from divisiveness, discouragement, and despair. By contrast, starting with a specific idea might end up eventually--I was thinking maybe after a couple of months of meetings--with either some commitment to the original idea or to some other idea that was generated along the way.

Somebody pointed out that we needed a much better community center, indeed a different community center with a different building. Someone else countered that the community center we’ve got could be better used, particularly it could be used to create more sense of community. From there, the discussion suddenly centered on how the community center might be used in a different way, might be made to be more inviting. (The Community Center currently houses the library, two adjoining largish meeting rooms (one of which has a small stage/platform area), kitchen facilities, a small office and storage room, and a computer center.) From the community center, the discussion moved to the community events sign, up at the end of the street which announces, awkwardly, what’s going on and which, according to those who use it, was falling apart.

By the end of the second hour, there were several work groups in place to carry out preparations for redesigning and rebuilding the community events sign, to figure out how to get the community involved in a kind of ‘extreme 24-hour Community Center makeover,’ and to think about how the Community Center and the community at large could be more directly involved in this August’s 100th Anniversary of Homesteading in Point Roberts. After several months of near stasis, suddenly the group was jumping ahead.

It wasn’t going to be an exercise or a practice session. It was like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were right there with us, saying, “Let’s do the show right here!” It was definitely an up-with-people kind of moment. What’s to become of it all? Stay tuned, month by month.

Impulse to Neighborliness

The local newspaper, which comes out on the first of the month, carried a little article in its May issue about the slowly developing Community Council. I attend the meetings of this group, and it’s not clear to me that the Council will ever come into existence, but if it did, and if it provided some community voice for issues that are not really the province of either individuals or any one group, it would be a good thing, I think. Even discounting the border problems (and how could one do that?), there are a number of issues that really need to be dealt with, including such things as road plowing when there is snow in the winter. It’s just not practical for everyone to go out and shovel or plow the street in front of their house, which would be the preferred solution, I guess, for the ‘every man/woman for him/herself’ cadre here on the Point.

I expected that, if the Council got so far as actually attempting to do something, the letter-writing libertarian folks would be getting their pens out. But, to my surprise, this little article about organizing the group produced one of these letters. It was sent to the newspaper, of course, but it was also circulated widely on one of the Point’s all-purpose email lists. Let us just say that it was a somewhat intemperate missive (at first, I wrote 'missile,' which might be the more accurate noun) threatening the Council, should it ever do anything to irritate Mr. H, with litigation. Mr. H reminded readers that he was from the South and that they weren’t yet finished with the Civil War down there and he wouldn’t stand for anything that might lead to increased property taxes for him. Further, that to aggravate him meant a much greater response than the aggravating force might want. So, beware! I feel pretty sorry for him at the thought of his response over the coming decades to those inevitably increasing property taxes, but he’ll just have to work it out. My condolences to those with whom he works it out.

It’s hard to imagine just what inspires such fulmination; at least hard for me to imagine it. It’s a kind of bullying letter, but it is, after all, from a man who is one of a thousand full-time residents here. He must have lots of ordinary interactions with people here in the market, the post office, etc. I think I saw him at the nursery the other day. My guess is that he’s not interested in John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ thesis. But what is he interested in? A life that is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’? The kind of life that Myanmar is showing us? I just don’t get why somebody wants to go so far out of his way to irritate and offend his neighbors, even if, as he says, he ‘likes anarchy.’ Has it never occurred to him that most people aren’t that crazy about anarchy and therefore likely to make his life difficult in their own way?

What may be harder to imagine is why one would reply to such a person. I can’t explain that, either, but after a lot of dithering, I did. I suggested that if he was going to have a career as one of a slowly increasing group of intemperate letter writers here in Point Roberts (I think he would be the third one), he might learn to incorporate a little more humor in his work. In his prompt reply, he pointed out that I was a moron and that if I should be so rash as to reply to him again, he would delete my e-mail unread. Ahh, the horror of it all. Deleted, unread. Which may say more about him than I had expected by way of a reply.

The world is doubtless filled with people who long to be heard, to be read, but who feel they are being deleted, unread. Here in Point Roberts, virtually anyone can be heard, if not in the newspaper, at least on the email lists. On the Internet, of course, as the classic New Yorker cartoon pointed out, ‘Nobody knows you’re a dog.’ In a small town, however, not so much. And deleting is a keystroke available to us all.