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Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
As a matter of choice, I don’t ordinarily respond to letters to the editor. Today, I’ll make an exception, for reasons which will presently appear.
Last week, the Village News published a letter by Ms. Gloria Sauer. If you’ve yet to recycle that issue, I encourage you to read it. It’s an instructive document.
According to Ms. Sauer, my July 30 piece – suggesting a moratorium on new development while the County sorts out the impact of rising energy prices – left her “fuming.” Rather than simply waste energy, Ms. Sauer – as a responsible citizen – used these fumes to power an epistle of considerable length, taking me to task on numerous subjects.
Now I don’t intend to defend my recent column. The whole point in writing an opinion piece is to make a complete argument in the space available. To the extent a particular piece persuades the reader – or at least causes him to think – it’s successful. To the extent it doesn’t, it fails – and no subsequent column can salvage it.
Thus, for example, if my praise for the movie Mamma Mia! was so casually written that a reader could suppose I enjoyed Pierce Brosnan’s singing, I have only myself to blame.
Still, I take note of Ms. Sauer’s letter. What I genuinely value in it is her clear presentation of a set of assumptions, attitudes, and values which, she claims, is shared by most Chesterfielders.
In future columns on development issues, I will find Ms. Sauer’s letter a valuable resource, for – unless I can challenge the ideology she champions – I can hardly hope to justify policies restraining future sprawl.
Nor do I assume that this task will be an easy one. Ms. Sauer pointedly suggests that I am out of touch with the “common man.”
And that is certainly true.
I know a good many people – by name or by sight – but I’m fairly sure I’ve never encountered an entirely common man – or woman.
I keep running into individuals.
I had this same difficulty when I was teaching. Educators – especially at the administrative level – were forever talking about the average student. But in more than ten years in the classroom, I never met him.
Despite the best efforts of our school system to turn every student into an interchangeable component for future insertion into some corporate or governmental bureaucracy, the kids I taught seemed destined to remain unique individuals.
Indeed, the only way you can really discuss the average student is collectively, since adolescents do often try to behave the way they think everybody else is behaving.
But that only happens in group situations.
Give that average student an opportunity to express himself – free of peer pressure – and you’ll discover that he has thoughts, feelings and modes of expression uniquely his own.
I’m guessing this is also true for the common man. He doesn’t really exist as an individual. Put him in a large group – subject to peer pressure – and he might fall back into the comfortable, but outdated, views Ms. Sauer attributes to him.
He might abandon thinking in favor of what is called – in a perfect oxymoron – conventional wisdom, professing the sort of economic and political nonsense that been so widely bandied about by so-called conservatives over the past three decades.
But separate him – or her – from the herd, and the common man morphs back into an individual with a mind of his or her own. The conventional wisdom loses some of its grip. Doubts creep in. The questing intellect reasserts itself. Growth – of the best kind – becomes possible.
It is for this reader – the doubting, questioning, thinking individual – that I write. For Ms. Sauer is quite correct: I do not know the common man.
Nor do I care to.
Now, if all this seems a bit airy and philosophical, let’s consider a concrete example.
Last week, another paper reported that Chesterfield’s Chamber of Commerce – an organization claiming hundreds of members – had voted to oppose new water quality standards for the Swift Creek Reservoir.
Unanimously.
Now, in my experience, businessmen (and women) are instinctively suspicious of government policies which restrict the making of money. But they also tend to have better-than-average foresight and a talent for adapting to changing circumstances.
That’s what they’re not ex-businessmen.
So, though when voting with their peers, members of the Chamber unanimously opposed new restrictions on growth – I suspect a good many individual members are already planning for a future in which suburban sprawl no longer plays a part.
A future in which home-builders can still earn good money, landowners can still use their land profitably, and Chesterfield County can still raise new revenues – but not in the ways which became so familiar in the era of cheap energy.
In the end, that’s the real difference between my approach and Ms. Sauer’s. She defends an economic model which is passing. I’m trying to figure out what comes next.
Ours is a debate with the highest stakes for all Chesterfielders.
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