Herb McDonald, MD
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The Membership Committee salutes you, CHAB and CHAT members. You deserve recognition and honor, not just those of you who are here, but those members who have preceded us, and those who will come after. At the September CHAB meeting Cheryl Connelly of the National Association of City and County Health Officials congratulated you for your impressive community mobilization effort, in comparison with other Environmental Health Assessment Projects in the country. Please give me a few minutes to expand on that. This decade of the 90’s is arguably the most prosperous and peaceful in our nation’s history. The stock market has boomed bullishly, unemployment and inflation are at record lows, interest rates are lower than in the past 25 years. Major employers, e.g. the auto industry, have made striking comebacks. Federal and State budgets are running surpluses. Crime, even among teens, and illegal drug use are declining. Teen pregnancy rates are dropping. Air pollution in our largest cities is lower than in a generation. Science fiction can barely keep ahead of medical and technological advances. New drugs are discovered weekly. Steady progress is made in treatment of cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, heart disease, stroke. Genetics and Molecular Biology have revolutionized our understanding and treatment of congenital and acquired diseases: gene therapy is a budding reality. The power of computers, office-ready and family systems, their speed and quality, go up and up as prices fall, increasing productivity and giving us all free travel to the wonderlands of the world wide web. (Monday I was trying to access our National Medical Library and I stumbled into the National Medical Library of China in Beijing!) Globally we are the only Super-power. Historically intractable problems in North Ireland and South Africa are close to solution. And the citizens, the amateurs, are making it work. NPR Radio this morning reported about new Irish dancing classes in Belfast, taught by a Catholic woman to Protestant children in a Protestant church! India and Bangladesh with our help are now nearly self-sufficient in food production. Chronic crises in the Middle East, Bosnia, and the Asian Subcontinent are being contained. Yet the US public in this decade has become more deeply alienated from, frustrated by and cynical about our government. Since WWII our attitude toward our government has changed from that of patriotic citizens to cynical tax-payers, from seeing ourselves as producers of government to consumers. We have stopped doing the work of citizenship and started expecting government to do it all. Our loss of confidence in government when it cannot solve all our problems has profoundly undermined the effectiveness of government institutions, has pushed government to be progressively more inefficient, wasteful and self-protective. The problem and solution are not with government. The problem and solution are with citizens who now feel powerless and disconnected. In the 90’s, only 1 in 5 Americans participates in a civic organization of any type, compared to 50 years ago when civic clubs, Churches, social groups, and youth organizations were the driving forces in every successful American community. Citizen participation, relearning how to work together to improve the community in which we live together, is a growing grass-roots movement that seeks to reverse that trend in this decade of progressive non-involvement by citizens. So for us, CHAB and CHAT are fresh feeding springs to put us, as citizens, back into the mainstream of public life in our own communities, giving us a forum (or public space) as citizens to work with others to nurture our community. CHAB and CHAT present forums for our local government officials to seek and to receive policy direction from us citizens, so that we the people play a key role in community problem solving and public decision making. The key to success of citizen projects which are springing up throughout our country is that a mix of citizens with all types of interests – people from all walks of life – meet together for meaningful interaction among themselves, and then meet with government to achieve what neither could achieve alone... solving community problems, present and future. In one notorious section of North Philadelphia, the Fraulford Neighborhood, and in a similar battleground of civil deterioration in inner city of Baltimore, local citizens recently joined together, activated themselves, worked with local government officials, and almost miraculously reversed the downward spiral of their communities, which are now safe and healthy again. We in CHAB and CHAT welcome the national trend in Public Health to go back to small geographic areas. Citizens within groups like ours can work on our common problems, weigh options, make choices together, focus on solutions, bring about change. In this process, as we talk and listen, discussing with each other complex issues in a non-confrontational setting, prioritizing, discussing trade-offs, acting together to deal with our community needs, we citizens discover common purposes, we deliberate, we make choices. We work together for Island County’s best interest. We create an infectious environment of activated citizenship and share that process as a lasting value to our community. This, at the millennium, is our redemption back into the governing process, our reconnection with our government, our revitalization of our self-governing democracy. Studies have shown that communities in the US and in other countries – Italy for one – which work together with small-scale groups such as CHAB and CHAT are in fact rejuvenated culturally and economically. Without such groups there is stagnation and decline of neighborhoods and nations. Here in CHAB and CHAT we see the difference the individual makes: Miriam Raabe, whom I thought we could not do without; Bernita Sanstad, who took Miriam’s place without skipping a beat and attends even when there is no sun; Eileen Rosman so faithful, productive, re-uniting us with our other island; so many others, e.g. Marshall Bronson who’s in Nova Scotia tonight: Can you imagine CHAB without Marshall? And he almost left the first meeting because of Jan and Toni’s touchy-feely exercise. We must think of ourselves as citizens, not just taxpayers. The citizen says: "It’s my responsibility to do something." The tax-payer says: "I pay someone else to deal with it." We need to teach our young people that Community Service is not just what you do after getting busted, but is the obligation of all citizens. We must show them that satisfying our obligations is as important as invoking our rights. CHAB this year is incorporating high school students as members of our group, consistent with the national recommendation to emphasize in civic education the importance of getting involved with your community. There are recognized obstacles to rediscovering citizenship:
At our last Orientation on April 23, some of you said you felt overwhelmed by the detailed information and work generated at CHAB meetings, but you also recognized that the challenge and pace of the work obviously keeps members coming back. The feeling of inadequacy that all of us non-experts feel was addressed over two centuries ago by Thomas Jefferson: "State a moral case to a plowman and a professor," he said. "The former will decide it as well, and often better, than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." Eighty years ago President Woodrow Wilson expressed fear for democracy that "a government of experts" would seize democratic institutions, pushing out citizens. Wilson said democracy depends on the dedicated amateur who understands what policy means when it affects the common citizen. Both Wilson and Jefferson would be shocked by the more that 100 policy research groups or think tanks in DC today (two-thirds have come into being since 1970); or the more than 20,000 registered DC lobbyists (compared to 2000 in 1965) whose budgets last year totaled 1.2 billion dollars; or the admission by the respected Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut that: "Those who write the checks, write the laws." Our democracy is built on the belief that ordinary citizens can exercise extraordinary judgment, that we do as well or better than experts, especially those experts hired by special interest groups. Not that we don’t all have our own agenda, but we amateurs are more likely to listen and to make trade-offs for the good of our community than those who are paid for their view. The COMMUNITY HEALTH PROCESS that we use in CHAB and CHAT is not science fiction or too idealistic. It has worked for us and will work in the future:
We CHAB/CHAT members are charged to be advocates for the community health process, to help develop a vision and plan, to connect our community to the process, to prioritize issues, to recommend difficult decisions in response to the needs and desires of the community, to stimulate team building in the community and turn civic spectators into a community of players. As dedicated amateurs, for what we have done and what we are going to do, we deserve a hearty round of applause. Some information from National Issues Forum Report sponsored by the Kettering Foundation and from National Commission on Civic Renewal Report financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and co-chaired by Democrat former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Republican William J. Bennett, author, former Drug Czar and Secretary of Education; both reports represented as bipartisan. |
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