Hypothetical School Proposal Marches On With A Lot of Help From Its Freinds ... However
There is more than one way to hold a discussion
Spoken words that crystalized my understanding
Once, when my Dad fell and injured his head, I went to the hospital to find Dad muttering about systems management and fishermen. My thoughts went to the fishermen in the Philip K Dick novel, Valis, which Dick said was a true story that no one would believe to be true, and so Dick wrote the story as fiction.
Valis is about a time in the 1970s when Philip K Dick was seeing ancient Rome transposed on the streets of San Fransisco. The fishermen were a symbol of Christianity.
Dad called himself an agnostic most of his life, but in later years, when he could no longer read, he listened to the entire New Testament on tape.
The day after his brain injury, Dad was walking down the hospital halls with the aid of a walker and the older physician was telling the younger physician “Just forget you saw that brain scan”
As I listened to Dad repeating “system’s management” I realized that Dad was system managing his own brain recovery and that was when I understood that systems management is one of Dad’s great talents that no one had hitherto labeled. I had grown up in the midst of the system Dad created and taken it for granted as one takes it for granted that the sun will rise, day after day. It’s a worthy system for a life lived through engaging work, an economic development system, created through years of work and deserves to be part of the future.
Recognizing the value of a brand
A different revelatory moment came by way of one of my most obnoxious encounters ever with the Maine economic development system.
We were working with a business consultant reputed to be very sophisticated in the arts and business, made available to us through a state program.
The consultant directed us to do a task that was quite useful but once submitted, the consultant did not respond to any of our correspondences. I contacted another agent in the system to ask for support with the project. Soon afterward the consultant scheduled a meeting but stipulated that he would meet with only one representative of our company. I put my foot down and several of us went to the meeting.
The consultant asked me why I thought we were there and I said “to have a dialogue”, and he responded “You know what I think a dialogue is? Me talking and nobody interrupting” and so we listened to his soliloquy, paid for on the taxpayer’s dime. It didn’t have much to do with us.
Needless to say, the meeting was useless except that the consultant could not stop gushing over the value of our product line and our brand. It helps to have someone else recognize it and is perhaps even more powerful when it comes from one who clearly does not want to help us, looks upon us with disdain, but can’t stop himself from speaking such thoughts out loud. Whoops!
The quality of our products is widely recognized but the brand itself is not often identified as an asset as the consultant had done. Both the brand and the product line are assets that can only come about through time spent practicing skills and using our talents in the service of a philosophy of life, art, and economic development. Until I started writing, no one put it into words. Everyone was too busy with all the other aspects of operating a very complex business. However, I am very familiar with the way my Dad thought and his influences and feel that we share a common philosophy.
Meanwhile…..
The Hypothetical School Proposal Marches On With A Lot of Help From Its Freinds.
Today there is a new article in the Boothbay Register advocating for the fifty-million-dollar school that the public will get to vote on in the year 2023 and in the interim, it will be written about as if it were already decided that it is what the public wants.
This newsletter will continue to write about the fifty-million-dollar school by contrasting it with an alternative vision of a Peninsula growing through grassroots entrepreneurialism rather than large institutionalism.
The latest article about the school agenda is intended to put forth the idea of community inclusiveness, but it is controlled community inclusiveness.
The format is a zoom meeting. The organizers are calling for around 40 people for three 2.5-hour Zoom meetings in January and aims to have members from the schools' administrations, teachers, staff, and students as well as members from the wider community, In other words, highly populated with vested interests. One expects the vested interests to be having their own meetings, not that they are not also part of the wider public but they are a specifically favored group to be in the Zoom meeting groups, slanting the test groups in a particular direction.
The committee is going to break the group up into smaller meetings. The given reason for doing this is so everyone can speak.
But not everyone can hear what everyone is saying so it is not really a group of forty people but several smaller groups likely selected and organized into subgroups by the committee.
The committee hopes the end product will be “the core of the community's desires and concerns”
Afterward, they will reach out to the community with virtual meetings, and in-person meetings based on the talking points derived from the test groups. The initial meetings will not be broadcast to the general public and so the public cannot know how the talking points are edited by the committee. If the intention is to convey valuable information about the condition of the schools, that information should be available to all. If the test group has questions about the wisdom of placing such a school on this Peninsula or the core reason for doing so, that can be edited out, which is a speculative reason that the zoom meetings will not be broadcast to the public. Information the public needs to know can be made available to the general public at a later date after the talking points are developed.
Why would this setup effectively represent the core of the community's desires and concerns? Why should we assume there exists only one core? As I have been writing in this blog, I do not think that it is the case that this community has one set of shared core values but rather factions with diverse and often competing concerns.
I took the opportunity to announce in the comments that I am having my own discussion on Substack, which allows time for a discussion to evolve over a longer period of time before the day when the public gets to vote on whether we want a fifty million dollar school on the Peninsula.
There is more than one way to hold a discussion. This newsletter is building momentum, tripling its readership in the last six weeks.
There is another vision that needs to be developed and publicly visualized, which is the one where the fifty-million-dollar school is located in the region and off the Peninsula. That is something I would support but it is not my area of expertise.
There needs to be a regional exploratory group formed for this purpose. If a small wealthy people’s caucus on the Boothbay Peninsula can raise two and a half million dollars to hire architects to design a fifty-million dollar school to be located on the Peninsula, a regional group exploring the possibility of a regional alternative should be able to raise a similar amount. There is no discussion about how the school will be funded but the Industrial Partnerships Act likely has a few clues. It will be done with public money, so there should be more than one aggressively developed option for where such a school should be located. Groups for other options need to step up and get organized
On another note…
Caucus days are coming up. January to March 19
I became involved in the Maine Independent Green Party when I heard talk from realtors and developers about changing the zoning ordinances that protect the working waterfront.
There are probably a lot of Maine Greens on the Peninsula and within the greater region. With the Peninsula’s water issues and our aggressive developers and with entrenched but unconstitutional laws affecting ballot access struck down, now would be a great time to form a Green Party Caucus on the Peninsula.
It’s not complicated but there needs to be a registered Maine Independent Green to be the official convener of the caucus. You can find out all the information you need to know to convene a Green Party caucus on the Green Party website HERE.