We used to help build
each other’s barns. When a family was in need of help the community would come
together for a good ol’ fashioned barn raising.
The church basement once
was the main home of community social services. The doors would be open wide to
host soup kitchens or a shelter when our neighbours were in need of warmth in
their bellies and their spirits.
To be clear, these first
few sentences are less a critique of those doing important work in faith / service-based
organizations. Rather, it’s a social lamentation that as an elected official
I'm looking to resolve.
Governments
are sucking the life out of community and replacing it with an ever-growing
network of loosely connected policy, agencies, ministries and
processes. Government has weened citizens from a culture of community
self-reliance.
Instead we are driven by
a philosophy that “government knows best” and only they can provide these
services to the public.
The problem is that,
increasingly, government can’t afford to do all the work on its own. When these
"systems" break down, the fingers are pointing in every other
direction. As a result, there are hundreds, thousands, of non-profit
organizations desperately trying to fill in the gaps.
As politicians
feverishly work to consolidate power and authority into fewer offices and build
structures that reinforce that, all of those communities that used to be able
to support themselves increasingly look to government to fuel them.
Perhaps a key problem is
scale. Back in the barn-raisin’ days, communities were small and life was
simple. We can’t possibly build complex concrete cities by volunteer power.
True ... however, we do
have to address the growing demands of an expectant public. It’s one of the
hazards of building a society on the premise of government always saying “trust
us, we got this!”
Growing expectations
It's the politics of
power. Politicians want all things to flow to them yet we are loath to say to
our voting constituency that the problem is your level of expectations that we
have created!
We politicians should
also be looking for ways to empower communities, to share decision-making and
responsibility, so that they are not having to come begging to the provincial
government to stop logging or mining their watersheds, for example.
I believe that success
in this century will depend on our willingness to trust each other and share
the load. We should raise the barn together.
Lao Tzu taught us
thousands of years ago that the best leaders were the ones who were barely seen
and the people said, “Look what we did for ourselves!”
Adam Olsen ... is a Green
Party Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for Saanich North
and the Islands.
Born in
Victoria, BC in 1976, Adam has lived, worked and played his entire life on the
Saanich Peninsula. He is a member of Tsartlip First Nation (W̱JOȽEȽP), where he and his wife, Emily, are raising their two children, Silas
and Ella.
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