Gene Miller: We need more meaningful citizen involvement, not just complaint
It’s Tuesday evening, and I have just finished listening to our prime minister deliver an extraordinarily courageous and cautionary speech at the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland.
It was breathtakingly courageous because it was utterly truthful about the rapidly emerging new world order and what that implies
It was also courageous because it represented, and in some ways defined, a new and enlarged role for Canada on the world stage — a role, in my view, that all of us should be proud to embody, to make our own, while not blind to risks when you pop your head up.
It was — and I use words not often associated with Canada — powerful, persuasive, riveting, profound.
One for the history books.
It will be consequential.
U.S. President Donald Trump, whose name Carney never mentioned, will, in the privacy of his White House office, curse our prime minister and our country and nurse revenge.
We will move to the front of that insane president’s retribution list.
While Carney’s speech was filled with a shockingly honest description of current geopolitical realities and prospects, he pointed unerringly and scarily to where all of this was headed: rupture and the end of global rules-based order — to a near-future more filled with basic appetite and aggression than modern.
To his credit, then, Carney, virtually stating that the world was headed toward an economic and, it appears, territorial war with the U.S., smoothed over nothing in his portrait of humanity’s next chapter.
Let’s leave the terrors of Davos and shift to a local frame.
I’ve lived in Victoria since 1970, when the Empress Hotel, that breathtaking architectural confection, was the crown of the capital, imperious and self-important.
Now, in its full embrace of modern times, Victoria has become a thriving and dynamic metropolis whose greatest cultural export is complaint, in bike lane, pothole and road-closure flavours.
I joke only to point out that citizen involvement has been reduced to complaint.
As many significant political and social thinkers are stating, “normal,” with its basket of traditions, shared assumptions and understandings, bows and curtsies, is going or gone, finished, exhausted.
While some new normal hasn’t coalesced yet, there are hints bathed, worryingly, in a sick yellow glow.
Consider the possibility that cellphone culture and Trumpism might be the new normal. A nightmare, but one we may wake to.
This column is constrained in its geographic and social reach, but in the face of mounting social urgencies, it asks readers, local and elsewhere, to look up, that is, to see the times for what they are.
In functional, operational terms, it calls for more civic conversation about matters larger than construction congestion and more credible than forged political accomplishment.
In the same way that physical exercise builds muscles, community conversation and project involvement build social muscle.
People — all of us — need to be better and more broadly informed about what’s happening in our communities and cities.
I’m in the habit of noting we are living in the middle of HISTORY. There’s a case to be made that threatening and tough times require a more prepared community with stronger psychological resources.
These don’t come from nowhere.
It calls for informed citizen passion and a hunger for informed viewpoint, for engagement.
In that context, shouldn’t we, in a small reflection of global realities, try to get to the root cause of local public abdication, the withdrawal of citizen energy from the civic concerns that affect quality of life here?
To do so, don’t we need to be more “here,” more present?
Turning everything over to mayor and council is a voluntary “donation” of social power by the public, and it always has “strong leader” consequences, sooner or later.
Sound familiar?
What is mysterious is not just the slow drift or transfer of social power but the failure of a community to recognize that it is taking place.
Elections, unfortunately, are the worst social tool for citywide conversation. They come too late and blunt legitimate interrogation of council aspirants and would-be returnees.
(Eight months from election time, we are starting to receive harp-string messages from multi-termers listing their accomplishments.)
What this writing calls for — as it has before — is kitchen-table and coffee-shop discussion about the appropriate distribution of social power in our local political environment, and whether accomplishment through a more direct city/citizen partnership might lead to more potent and successful outcomes.
A better next.
Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, founder/developer of ASH houseplexes, and currently writing “Nothing To Do: Life in a Workless World.” He’d be pleased to receive and respond to your thoughts. genekmiller@gmail.com
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