[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I think of elections as being a long series of compromises. You never actually get what you want, and the bigger the race, the more diluted your position becomes. That's the way it just is, and the way it has to be if everyone is going to have a vote. You have the most power in your local elections, like your city council and your state representatives, and the higher the office, the more you have to compromise. So when you get all the way up to national or even statewide elections, you're compromising so much you're never going to get what you want.

I hate it too, kind of. I've never gotten my way really, and I am resigned to the fact that I never will. I do think that we need better education and better journalism and a lot of things so that people can make better informed decisions, but I don't think that's going to naturally conclude with me always getting my way, either. (I do think we'd get closer, though, to be honest.)

Ramen, pea.

That's where I threw my energies. I served as a volunteer in neighborhood associations, serving as an officer in two separate city-sponsored and recognized districts to address usage of city resources in our neighborhood....crime prevention, traffic calming, zoning. It sounds boring and it is. You have to attend lots of meetings a deal with lots of egos. But, out of three decades, and innumerable public meetings, I have been part of creating two new pocket parks, halting a huge chain burger joint, creating a guiding planning document, and bringing in to being a critical portion of a regional traffic control system to reduce speeds and volumes of auto traffic on our streets....this, in turn, led to streets being recognized as 'bicycle throughways'. I also volunteered to be trained by the city parks arborists to be a 'neighborhood tree liaison' and participated in a community group in recruiting sites and planting street trees. Now we have shady tree-lined bicycle streets. We, a group of pretty ordinary lower-middle class, public servant types, built a cohesive community and gentrified the whole neighborhood to such a point that the elders like myself are now in danger of being priced out of their own community.

Not everybody lives in a trendoid urban city center neighborhood, though.

I've always wondered what might be accomplished with effective P.U.D. organizing. What kinds of alternate governance might be provided at more comfortable scales.

Also...I'm a bit of a secessionist, rather romantically buying in to Ernest Callanbach's Ecotopia model of Cascadia. A sovereign nation built upon ecological boundaries (watersheds) makes a shipload more sense than the silly arbitrary political boundaries drawn by squabbling competitors. It's a totally deluded fancy of mine.