My good friend Jim Stiles and I were talking about the differences in the degree of energy or apathy shown by citizens toward various issues encountered through the years. Apathy tends to be an ebb and flow cycle. At times, the energy expended for a certain project, such as the Book Cliffs road, was phenomenal. And for other projects a high degree of despair set in.
But why so much apathy and despair in people today? Why aren't issue-involvement so important to people any more? Why aren't more people voting? And I wonder if this lack of involvement is my perception only or is it something else.
Let us look at a few of my concerns, if you would, and the overall problems facing us. Essential information was desperately needed in all of the following issues, but in most cases it was not forthcoming.
To begin with, a number of our San Juan County officials continue to promote their mythical "sagebrush rebellion" ideology. They fight against the introduction of the condors. They grade and tear up the landscape where roads have never been. And while fighting wilderness designation, they promote hazardous nuclear waste dumps. The environment has taken it on the chin and our lands are a mess.
Our commissioners, with the exception of Mark Maryboy, travel often and at long distances. Their travel expenses are astounding as they traip across the state and nation to satisfy their own ideological agenda. They should stay put on their own porch, rather than neglect many immediate and urgent local issues that need their attention.
Witness this. The teetering health system of San Juan County suddenly found itself some $500,000 in arrears and sinking fast. If it was a private business it would be bankrupt now, but county taxes bailed out the department.
The Commission paid out huge sums of money in the past few years for projects in which it should not have involved itself. For instance, the white-elephant airport near Hall's Crossing drains needed county funds. Furthermore, money is expended continually to pay other counties' legal expenses---fighting and tilting against the establishment of the new Escalante National Monument. This mimics the Commissioners' past support of the defunct Book Cliffs road.
The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is disrupting the county, resulting in a growing inequality and poverty among our people. Racial problems continue to fester, and we seem unable now to outgrow that intolerance even though, hypocritically, we boast of our good works at church.
A proposal was made to the Commission to study a possible change of county government from a Commission to a Council form comprised of five members so that the Navajo people could experience more equitable representation. Not surprisingly, the two white commissioners rejected the proposal. In opposition to this, the Commission initiated, because of racial issues, a study to split the county into two counties along Navajo Reservation lines. This was but a maneuver to divide the county rather than bring the diverse cultural groups together into a unified whole.
The two-party system in San Juan is nearly non-existent among the whites. The Democratic party in San Juan and the state are in shambles. Authoritarian and radical-right government, accustomed to bullying and ruling the roost, remains alive in San Juan County. Equal participation by the enslaved poor and discriminated peoples is not at all possible.
Our political leaders continually fail to meet the challenges of change which has risen to destructive intensity. Oppressive taxes are mounting to the point of discouraging capital investment and productive stimulus.
The county justice system is in desperate straits. The County Attorney can't keep up with his case work---resulting in cases not filed on time and in cases lost---and justice denied. There's been too much time spent in fighting the condors and throwing an innocent kid, trying to protect the environment and the law, into jail. Surely misplaced priorities.
And once again the perilous nuclear industry attempts to buy us off and to seduce us into accepting hazardous waste. We've been lied to over and over during past years by the industry, and still we take the poisonous bate. The huge corporations are at our throats as our officials sell us down the river.
There are so many problems before us, they now seem insurmountable. And because of the strong-armed local government, a cheerless apathy raises its ugly head. Citizens that used to be active, aren't any more. And because of a feeling of hopelessness, havoc will surely continue to rein in San Juan County.
Great minds preach against the workings of cynicism and apathy. Robert Maynard Hutchins said: "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
I reviewed a long list of those things that might bring on feelings of apathy and despair. An important one is apparent. This is the act of denying and withholding vital information that rightfully belongs to the public. It's such a hard struggle to get the details on varied issues from hostile or non-caring government officials. As it takes so much effort, with but little time available to the layman, it becomes extremely tiring to continually beg for the facts and essentials that would make life easier to live. Whereas the denial of this data throws me in a quandary, I'm sure it also equally discourages many other people from participating in civil matters.
The withholding of these specifics takes many forms. I give an example. A couple of months ago, I requested of the San Juan Commission that public hearings be held so that vital information could be provided the public concerning the proposed and threatening new nuclear waste dump to be established near White Mesa. County citizens had extremely little information about the haul of uranium and related chemicals that would pass through their communities and about the impact it might entail. Commissioners Ty Lewis and Bill Redd shot the idea down. Lewis said that the people didn't need the information and even if they had it they wouldn't understand it any way. Only Commissioner Mark Maryboy pushed for hearings and meetings.
But the resistance to providing specific information also permeates our state and federal agencies. For instance, I've been trying to get environmental information from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for three months and have not yet received it. At a follow-up nuclear waste meeting, I asked for the same environmental information of one of its officer's, a Mr. Holonich, but again I did not get it. I finally sent a Freedom of Information request to NRC, but still the agency stands in defiance.
Similar negative efforts are disheartening to all citizens that need help. It is small wonder that so many citizens give up and lapse in a state of hopeless apathy and indifference.
We must all join together and seize opportunities to fret and act on the stage too. But where are these young people who are full of action and vim and vigor who can ferret out the information? Someone is desperately needed to take over the reins of local government.
In San Juan County, in nearly each issue of the San Juan Record, I note that many of our energetic youth are being sent on church missions, but damned if I see few of them entering politics and local government service. Others of our young people leave to go to school or to enter the work force. Once out of the community, most never come back home to sink their roots.
So the work continues in the hands of the old guard. And to loosen the tight grip from these cobwebs of antiquity a pinch bar or sledge hammer is often necessary.
Having come to this world in the summer of 1929 just before the stock market crash, and living on through the years of the great depression, I experienced the dreadful trials of my parents. We were about to lose it all. A third of Americans were soon out of a job and a fourth of the nation's farmers lost their land. We scrambled for ways and means which would preserve us. There was no time then for a bleak outlook or periods of apathy as we all fought for survival. Hard work and cooperative efforts erase feelings of apathy. It works.
It took President Roosevelt and a horrid war to set the stage for better times. And in one of his famous Fireside Chats, he made a profound statement:
"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government."
There it is. The people must be informed in order to be strong. Francis Bacon, once wrote that "Knowledge is power!" This relates in someway, does it not, to the slogan "Power to the people?"
How inadequate those phrases seem in San Juan County. The county continues on in a provincial world of its own. Power is in the hands of certain leaders, not in the hands of the people.
I've been reading Gerry Spence's fine new book, Give Me Liberty, in which he goes around asking people if they are free. He concludes that we are not and he tells us why we have become the "New American Slaves":
"We have been trained not to look, like old horses with blinders affixed to our bridles. We have been trained not to think, not to speak, not to protest. We have been trained since we were children to believe that silence is golden."
And I might add that we have not been given the bare facts necessary to make wise decisions or even to protest bad decisions. Spence graphically describes the problems as:
"an entanglement of megacorporations on the one hand and an omnipowerful national government on the other, each stuck to the other like a pair of copulating dogs, each unable to move without dragging the other behind it, each dependent upon the other, hating the other, but welded to the other in a dissolute enterprise."
How in the hell did we get in this predicament? We've dug our own graves because we've failed to select the right people. But Thomas Jefferson cautions us: "Offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man has cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct." And often that "rottenness" of which he speaks begins by the withholding of essential material.
Commissioners Ty Lewis and Bill Redd, and planner Ed Scherick, must know that this is not their exclusive domain. Aren't they servants of the people?
Maybe these officials, in living their myth, are protecting us from something more dire. Maybe they think as Descartes: "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and in much wisdom is much grief."
Peoples of the world have raised the level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history. We have been born with a rich heritage given us by the minds of centuries. I wish that each person could access the universities, libraries and museums that holds the intellectual and artistic treasures of the human race. Just how our leaders transmit that legacy to us is the question. They have that duty.
We tend to respond in stereotyped ways, but can we not develop that excitement of innovation---a new adventure every year? We can meet those challenges by enlisting energetic and creative individuals to work together to use this past knowledge. Then surely, there would be no room for despair.
We must break sharply with the past. It's time to work like hell to right the system. We've been buffaloed and boogered long enough. All officials must know that it's morally wrong and an ethical crime to withhold vital information from us. It's our government, and it's our records.
To make democracy work requires the widest spread of intelligence. Otherwise ignorance lends itself to the forces that mold public opinion. It has been said that a person's judgement cannot be better than the information on which it is based. So let's demand that administrators lay the necessary facts and information on the table for all to study, warts and all, controversial or not. People would then gain a base on which to make wise decisions.
I have to agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said that "a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
And the great psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, wrote that emotion was the chief source of becoming conscious. That there "can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion."
Pray tell, may a little emotion and rebellion save us yet.