Two Is Too Few

If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede (in my case), I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we talk about how 'somebody needs to take on for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head.  Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.

We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time, since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto  becomes 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.'

You remember the City Manager's proposal, department hearings, and public hearings? All opportunities to deploy pronouns like "us" and "we." Instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one likes, including the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)

Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an art form when it suits our purposes. 

"Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.

Every year, we have the same tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, capital improvements, and economic development. When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.

Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? Don't forget that all of "us" support enhanced public safety, but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. 

What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you that can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny