The No. 1 industry in America today is the propaganda business. It’s prevalent in every sector of society; a $1 trillion business that doesn’t need tax breaks or promises of cheap hydropower to attract it to our region. It’s something that can be purchased, you can set up a network inside your current organization or you can do it yourself on a daily basis. But make no mistake: if you read broadly enough you’ll find that the one thing Americans do very well — mostly in politics and exclusively as a self-preservation tool — is say one thing while doing another.
We can all be guilty of it on a personal level. We tell anyone who is within earshot that we’ve skipped lunch in order to lose weight while we unthinkingly suck in four pieces of sponge candy someone brought into the office and left in the break room. That example seems funny, but it perfectly highlights the depth of the problem. In business, everything counts. Saying one thing while doing another has real-world implications. People with real money to invest, businesses with real jobs and a sustainable model or citizens who can either vote or stay home on Election Day notice hypocrisy and have no time for it.
Getting 60 percent market share in a dying or dead market is not as good as it is in a thriving market; getting elected when only 30 percent of the population votes is not a proud moment either.
Lying to yourself about food consumption is a personal problem, but it is a problem whether you want to admit it or not. It’s just not a very serious problem to me or anyone else. It’s your problem and for the most part you have to deal with it. Lying to the public about how the community trust funds are safe and secure when in fact the community is bankrupt is quite another problem. And all too often, it’s not a problem anyone realizes is happening until decades later. As Wall Street and the banking industry are proving, you can paper over huge financial gaps for years before anyone finds out. And when someone finds out, the people responsible are often retired, no longer involved in the problem, and heck, you can’t blame the new person right?
Unfortunately, this is where the Western New York community finds itself today. This is our own personal State of the Region message, delivered right to your door in this very newspaper. There will be no commercials, no stoppages for applause and no focus groups empanelled to assess each nuanced word.
Taking a cold, distanced view of our own performance is necessary to move forward. We need to use evidence-based metrics and trust in the results. I miss my 179-pound weight but it’s gone and isn’t coming back unless I change. I miss Jimmy Griffin’s candid advice about how to get through a blizzard: stay inside and open a beer. Now we’re sucking in sponge candy and lying about it — that’s the best that we can do? We’re actually telling people someone else made this blizzard and there’s nothing we can do about it except raise your taxes to pay for the gas in the snowplows and it’s the Arabs fault for ripping us off on oil prices and if we don’t kill baby seals and allow oil drilling offshore at Yellowstone Park the Chinese will call in all our debt and, breathlessly and finally, President Obama caused all of this anyway, and he doesn’t even have a birth certificate.
Lying about your sponge candy intake will eventually kill you. Lying about our community problems will place us exactly where we are today: A dying community which has missed out on any economic booms of the past 50 years and, unless we change, will miss out on all future booms. But unlike human health conditions, communities can rebound and become perfectly healthy if they simply stop pretending and make evidence-based decisions on how to regain financial viability and nationwide credibility. It can be done; it needs to be done.
As a community we need to exit the wild-west days of catching a criminal, holding a prairie trial and hanging him all in the same day. In other words, we’re exiting the time when facts and figures never mattered; when we could say one thing and do another. We are making the leap from prairie town to CSI town. We need to generate discussion not stifle it.
The traditional ending for every state of the fill-in-the-blank message: God bless you, and God bless America.
Tom Christy is founder of FAIR Government, a foundation dealing with local government issues. Visit www.fair-government.org. Contact him at aim1986@mac.com.
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