Why Community Matters

Got excuses?  Reasons why it won’t work out?  Most often, other than sheer apathy, our inability (refusal) to act depends upon our focus, or who we have working with us - those who say it can’t be done or costs too much. 

An ancient proverb takes our excuses and so exacerbates and extrapolates as to exasperate anyone of common sense:  “The lazy man says, ‘There’s a lion somewhere, it will kill me if I go out there.’” 

So extravagant a claim for complacency amounts to hyperbole (from Greek huperbole: “excess”) - a bazaar, incredible, outlandish, incomprehensible non sequitur that begs a ‘huh?’ by way of response.

“The point of the satire,” writes one commentator “is the ingenuity with which the slothful man devises the most improbable alarms.”

Government excels at the make-it-more-difficult-and-costly paradigm.

A few days ago we commemorated a largely-forgotten story - the nine year anniversary of a classic true tale of common sense by common people to get a job done when the official position by the officials was that it couldn’t – at least not cheaply.   

In a story out of Thurston County, the winter flooding of 2002 had “deposited a hellacious tangle of logs, roots and branches on the Deschutes River.  The 1,200-foot-long logjam diverted the river’s waters onto 22 adjacent lots and threatened more flooding,” reported the Tacoma News Tribune (August 27, 2002).  The commissioners (not unlike Fred Allen’s definition of so many committees – ‘a group of people that decide to meet only to decide that nothing can be done’) “essentially threw up their hands in despair, deciding to leave the jam in place after spending more than $100,000 studying the problem – the consultant they hired reporting that clearing the river could cost up to $1.6 million.

“Fortunately, the owners of those 22 affected lots ignored the consultant, tackling the job themselves.”  A jail work crew was assigned to clear a path along the river; volunteers from a nearby church split the logs and donated them to the needy; and the entire project was completed in less than three weeks – for $8,000, “one two-hundredth of the original $1.6 million.”  In defense of the county, the job they gave up on included $1 million to dig a river bypass channel – which turned out not to be necessary.

A monument - to a “monumental and prohibitively expensive affair” – thankfully does not exist on the site where memory serves well enough of the principle that rolled-up sleeves ingenuity and sheer gumption gets the job done. 

It’s the attitude reflected by town founder Captain Prosper Parker who, on February 14, 1884 stated, "...and in virtue of our authority we select this location to show you that we can do it." 

Parker then unveiled the sign: “Welcome to Cando, North Dakota”

Image source: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=191403630880939