Our emerging dictatorship follows an old path: in their quest for power; our representatives have become deciders, and now rulers. How could this happen? That’s old too: greed is the bait on corruption’s hook.
Spoiler: The click of our shackles will come with the enactment of Climate Change Disaster Laws.
Ithaca is the place where everybody wants to live: because it’s the only place in the county where people have individual worth.
While Ithaca rules the county – it never leads by example. Their plan to blanket rural Lansing with CAFOs is balanced by their own petition to the New York State Supreme Court: enumerating serious concerns about lack of CAFO and Agricultural regulation and oversight, lack of disclosure, and the possible effects of modern farming practices on their own residents and the their own town’s environment. Lansing’s puppet government has expressed no concerns at all.
Ithaca is Camelot: A castle community where people dump their slop on the unprotected commoners outside the walls – without a second thought.
Where would you want to live?
Policy making in Tompkins County is a purely mechanical process: every outcome is decided before the issue is revealed.
The round of comments, and meetings and surveys is only a meaningless backfill for an edifice whose foundations have already been laid.
The “meeting” for a radical zoning change for the rural Lansing community is called an “Open House” – a PR phrase for an exclusionary paradigm shift that denied that same rural community any participation in its planning.
When you connect all the dots — it’s a picture of money.
When people ask you; “How are you doing?” – just say “Good” or “I’m doing OK” – because most people don’t want to hear your problems — the same thing is true of surveys.
Our Town survey, like everything to do with policy and politics, comes from Cornell. The cold-call telephone questions were loaded, open for interpretation, and asked well in advance of public awareness of the issues they would be used for. When the agenda of the survey emerged – its authors quickly backpedaled in an angry Town meeting: claiming it was only a preliminary indication; and of no great importance — this same survey was later used as the sole determining mandate from the residents for the Town’s Comprehensive Plan and all future development.
Surveys are used to provide an appearance of public legitimacy to the unilateral decision making of Cornell County planners. When residents claim that they are inadequate, biased, or deceptive – county officials merely defend the results; and make no changes,
People may not make the right decisions — and surveys are an important step to prevent that.
Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice; modern science takes great pride in its knowledge of how to make things happen — without the wisdom of learning how to make them stop.
Our world is like a giant Jeopardy show; with scientists guessing at the answers – in a competition for fame, fortune, and the realization of a dream.
And if they guess wrong, and it’s Game Over for all of us — at least they got their time in the spotlight.
It may be pointless bureaucratic chatter to you, but for them; it’s money in the bank – and traditional “Quid Pro Quo” politics. It may be wasting your time – but they’re being paid to waste your time: and the tip they’ll receive is to insure their career longevity.
The real power of public meetings is in the ability of those in charge to delay and deflect important matters with unimportant questions, quibbles, and investigations – and postpone the vital issues that you came to hear and comment on for a month, or two, or six . . . until they can be short-circuited, reimagined, or reformulated.
Unimportant matters are the grit in the wheels of public participation — a grit that’s never allowed in the smooth running machine of power.
It’s all about the process. Whether it’s “Flow charted” or “Templated” – if your ends are relegated to the completion of assigned tasks; you lose half your humanity. And if those tasks can only be undertaken by following pre-designed paths, and through pre-designed forms; you lose the other half.
Work and play is what people do — Art is what people are.
In our authoritarian society; it’s all about force – whether it’s doctrinaire or regulatory, social or emotional: everything and everyone must be made to conform — or be destroyed.
Whether it’s wolves and sharks; or drug dealers and murders – the elite are ensuring right of predators to roam the communities of poor and undefended prey.
Protected by privilege and law; they see human lives and suffering as only one part of a bigger picture — their bigger picture.
Is it a coincidence that we now have world destroying technologies at the same time we have technologists eager to play with them? And it gets worse . . . we have authorities willing to overlook any consequence — as long as they can solve desperate problems; while keeping business as usual.
Black holes, Nano-technology, Gene splicing – “why not.”
The human race has become a plaything for those in power; and as for the world — if they can’t have it; no one can.