20040813 Rabid Rebeccably Numb

Rabid Rebeccably Numb

- Going Rebecca -

August 13th, 2004

Did you feel for the Westminster Mayor when he was tied down and had the Rabid Rebecca attack dog baying and chewing at him at every Council Meeting and street corner in Westminster?

Did reading the Carroll Sun’s shallow and content-less stories and hearing the rumor mongering make you sick?

Or were you like most folks – engaged by the drama, entertained by the scent of scandal, yet comfortably numb about the whole thing? If you have a version of this story – well, then you are part of this story. What did you care – it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.

Many have replaced empathy with an “I”-centered sentimentality.

What is in this community for me?

Feeling has been turned on its head: caring is now a means not for taking action, but for feeling better about oneself or getting attention as long as we can explain it away as “politics.”

We ride the emotional dramas in the Carroll Sun tabloid, wear colored ribbons, and express our love for God and country.

May we all now bow our heads and say “the Lord’s Prayer”. Now we can all enjoy the twice monthly soap opera that the meetings of the Westminster Common Council have degenerated into – and perhaps, even keep score. It’s funny – like watching a bus accident.

Meanwhile, we take no action – at least none driven by empathy. Besides – it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.

Empathy is how we respond to the plight of humanity. It is the bedrock of our moral sensibility that allows us to feel for others, to put ourselves in their place. If you cannot feel, how can you act outside your own wants and desires?

To many today, it seems easier to just deny feelings of empathy, to react to them “rationally” as a weakness in this hard and fast world. Anyway - it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.

But this has a cost. Losing feeling for others, or never developing the capacity to feel deeply at all, means closing off a fundamental part of being a community.

On a global scale, we feel less not just about the millions of innocent people killed by traffic accidents and drugs and violence in the past decade, or the thousands of deaths portrayed on the television.

We have also become desensitized and numb about our own partners, neighbors, community leaders or parents. We joke about concepts such as “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Hey, whatever, it wasn’t you that she was going after – it was someone else.

What most folks have not understood is that Rabid Rebecca is a virus in our community and like mad cow disease – ‘Going Rebecca’ is a plague upon our community.

Rabid Rebecca Disease is a virus that cares not about its host organism.

When the Westminster Mayor continued to Zen the Rabid Rebecca – he denied her the very food that an hysteric virus feeds upon – reaction and words.

Fed by others who enjoyed her theatrics and enabled her, she then, in the famous words of Abigail Adams, became the famous well fed snake that turned to bite the very folks who had fed her. Tis a pity. Oh well, anyway, let’s hope that is not you that she is going after.

It can now be understood that a major attribute of Rabid Rebecca Disease, otherwise known as Councilmatic Disorder is that the person Going Rebecca sees a vast difference in the reality that is based on what the afflicted sees, hears, and feels - and the conditioned reality of what the afflicted has been socialized to understand – as fed by the snake-feeders.

The virus infected mind is driven towards the delusional based on the afflicted’s perception of reality. The afflicted is driven to shorten the gap between his or her perception of their concept of the delusional truth - and conditioned reality. When the gap becomes too great the afflicted will see the conditioned reality as beyond repair and he or she endeavors to destroy it. But certainly it not you that she is attempting to go after, or is it?

In the process of feeding Rebecca, one becomes less human. The snake feeders explain it away as politics. They care not becomes of the community left moribund as a result of her behavior because they do not care about the community – only about themselves or what benefit they chance to gain as a result of their parasitic behavior towards the community.

As this happens, the parasitic snake feeders not only stop feeling the pain of others, they become proscriptive and only more capable of inflicting it. This is the darkest side of empathy’s erosion. If feelings underlie an empathic response, numbness makes brutality viable. Thus, as you happily switch off from humanity, you become a threat to it.

We were comfortably numb about the attempted torture of the Westminster Mayor, and so were the Council members and other interested parties that facilitated the behavior and fed this snake-virus in our community. Those who have participated won’t say they are sorry because they don’t feel sorry.

Simple as that. After all, you don’t have any feelings – it’s only politics.

And if we ourselves, can’t feel for the community and others, who will feel for us?

Perhaps this is part of the general worsening of mental well-being. As a recent World Health Organization study shows, there’s a near-perfect correlation between the rise of alienation in the modern world and the decline of people’s mental states, with mental dysfunction growing globally.

As empathy falls, behaviors predicated on its lack have been pathologized, like narcissistic and antisocial personalities. But these are not symptoms of organic disease. Instead, it is the social system that is in need of radical treatment. “It’s only politics and it is not me that she is going after” is a social disease, often the victim does not know that they have it.

Medicating our numbness, by explaining that it is only politics is one thing, with a long and lonely history. But a culture medicating itself into comfortable numbness and explaining away politically motivated apotheosis patheosis is something else. Fortunately there is an anecdote – allow the Rabid Rebecca to feed herself to the point that she explodes.

The only part left to this Kabuki Morals play is to watch the very persons who created this monster now portray themselves a victim of the monster and heroically place themselves in the position of coming to the rescue of the very community that they continue to parasitically victimized.

KED / August 13th, 2004

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"Voce Viaggio" The Power of Partnership By Diane Jones

The Power of Partnership

By Diane Jones, Other Voices Carroll County Times

Monday, August 09, 2004

"Voce Viaggio" of the Children's Chorus of Carroll County is back from a highly successful first trip abroad.

Undoubtedly there will be those who say, "Oh no, not the Chorus again," and that would be understandable since we have recently gotten such great press coverage. Please bear with me briefly so I can report a few of the benefits of our trip and extend a partial thank-you for the ground-swell of support we received.

We traveled to Finland, Sweden and Estonia and enjoyed the sights, the sounds, the foods and all of the sensory experiences of European travel.

However, the heart of our endeavor was the day we spent in a rather small town in Estonia named Paide, Westminster's Partner City. We had been in Helsinki with its Rock Church and Scandinavian intrigues; we had been in Tallinn with its medieval charm; we were in Stockholm with its cultural and architectural sophistication, but Paide captured our hearts and imaginations.

This is where we sang and danced with children who had awaited our visit as much as we looked forward to seeing them. This is where both the Estonian hymn and the Star Spangled Banner were sung and citizens from opposite sides of the world were moved to tears. This is where children from both countries sang in Estonian and English and even incorporated sign language into their presentation.

This is where our children learned Estonian folk dances and the Estonians learned the macarina in an impromptu gathering on the street in front of the town church. This is where e-mail addresses and gifts were exchanged with promises of seeing one another again. This is where friendships and the beginnings of international relations began. And this is where international peace was reinforced through learning to delight in the differences and commonalties of others.

Voce Viaggio has been the beneficiary of a successful series of partnerships that enabled us to make our dream a reality. The Westminster - Paide Partner City Program captured our imagination and provided our goal. Thomas Beyard, Kevin Dayhoff, Audrey Cimino and other Westminster - Paide Committee members supported us by networking within the community to raise funds and give our trip visibility.

Many organizations and individuals partnered with us, sharing our vision and helping make our trip possible. And of course, there are our Estonian friends, our new partners, with whom we have begun friendships with the promise of more personal and cultural exchanges.

This was more than just a trip to Europe with performance opportunities. In Estonia, the struggle between tyranny and freedom is very immediate and tangible; not one of us will be the same after experiencing this post-Soviet culture.

For example, our sense of materialism is put into perspective after being in a place where the standard of living is much simpler, but happiness comes from more fundamental sources, such as friendship and nature. The blessings of the United States are highlighted as we hear first-hand accounts of women and children being deported to Siberia just because they weren't Russian. Our own national anthem takes on greater significance as we meet Estonians who were forbidden to enjoy their national hymn or cultural heritage for 50 years.

The 24 students and the adults who traveled will be forever changed, their knowledge base and sensitivities having been greatly expanded. Sincere thanks to those of you who helped make this possible. It will be exciting to see where our partnerships take us next.

Diane Jones, of Westminster, is director of the Children's Chorus of Carroll County.

20040809 The Power of Partnership Jones
Kevin Dayhoff www.kevindayhoff.net http://kevindayhoff.blogspot.com/

20040728 Time to change Frederick county government gazed

Time to change Frederick county government

Gazette editorial from July 28, 2004: Time to change Frederick county government

Unfortunately, I do not have the URL for this Gazette editorial available. I will paste the entire editorial in this post for a reference source for future discussion about the future forms of government in both Carroll and Frederick County… Perhaps there has come a time for Charter government in both Carroll and Frederick Counties. Kevin Dayhoff November 8^th, 2006

Time to change our county government

Many questions tend to surface every election.

Among them are these two: Should we give a pay raise to our county commissioners to compensate for the long hours they put in for what is supposed to be a part-time job? Should we change our form of government?

These questions may seem unrelated, but they are not. The form of government we have in Frederick County has a lot to do with the kind of leadership we elect, and what we expect of those leaders, as well as what we are willing to pay them.

These two issues will not go away given that our once rural and small county is growing into a major metropolis. As the population continues its climb, and the demands put on the five board members follow suit, the time has come for a change in the county's form of government.

Under our current form of county government, commissioners receive $30,000 a year for what is supposed to be a part-time job, but all five work at least 40 hours a week, and some put in many more hours. They meet twice a week year-round as a body to debate policy and make budgets, but each member also serves as a liaison to county departments, and they all attend public functions as commissioners and interact with residents every day.

County residents have repeatedly voted against a change in government, most recently in 2002 when residents voted against code home rule, a decision we supported because it was not a form of government suitable to the needs of our population.

But in a 1997 Mason-Dixon survey for The Gazette, 78 percent of the 411 residents polled favored a charter government that included a county executive and council. We believe had the voters been given that option in 2002, they would have chosen it.

Maryland allows three types of government for its counties: commissioner, code home rule and charter. In a nutshell, under the commissioner form of government, board members who are elected at large must present legislation to the county's eight-member delegation to the Maryland General Assembly. The delegation, not our county commissioners, chooses whether to take the bills to the full assembly in Annapolis, which must approve any new laws or taxes.

Under code home rule, commissioners remain, but they have a little more power to propose and enact legislation, and power to levy taxes and borrow money through issuing bonds, although both are regulated by the General Assembly.

In a chartered government, the county has a system that most resembles our national system, with an executive and a legislative body. Under charter, local voters create and approve a document that describes how the government will run, including how many seats would be on the council; whether or not they would be at-large, districts, or a combination; whether or not there would be an executive branch; what checks and balances would exist, and more.

The approval of the charter means the voters agree to be governed by the document.

A wise man once said, "The form of government is only as good as the people we elect to serve us. If we elect idiots, we get idiotic government no matter the form of that government." Whatever our form of government, we need to elect good people who have the interest of the voters at heart.

But with the growth that has come, we do not just need good people, but a better form of government, more suited to the growing demands of county residents.

Our commissioners lead a county of 2,000 employees, with an operating budget of $330 million. We pay a county manager to run the day-to-day part of the government, but rely on five part-time people, making $30,000 a year, to run a county this size.

A $330 million company would pay its executives significantly more, and would expect them to work full time. We realize, of course, that there are some differences between government work and the private sector, so we are not advocating a six-figure salary, but we should recognize that the job of county commissioner is not part time. We should call it what it is, a full-time job, and make the pay equal to that to attract good talent that does not have to work second jobs to make ends meet.

The Frederick County delegation to the General Assembly tells the commissioners to delegate their work if they have too much, but it's not that simple. This commission form of government has existed in Frederick for 153 years, and what was state of the art a century ago is obsolete today.

Frederick County needs to control its own destiny, not be tethered by legislators who are looking out for the state's interest. While state and county interest might coincide most of the time, the two can conflict.

It is time for Frederick to have a charter form of government, where the voters decide how the government operates. Our commission form of government has too much oversight by the General Assembly, and local wishes can be overridden by eight people, the county's delegation to the General Assembly.

And beyond them, laws we want must then be approved in the General Assembly. That's too much control in too few hands and by too many people who do not have a lot to do with our county. We have reached the point of maturity, and should govern ourselves.

According to "Home Rule Options in Maryland" by Victor K. Tervala, the state has two procedures to adopt a charter. Neither is easy, and both can take years. Of the nine charter governments in the state, most have used the original method, and that would be our preference.

The process is thus: county voters request the creation of a charter board via petition (with 10,000 of the county's registered voters, or 20 percent); commissioners nominate five people to draft the charter, or petitions would have to be circulated to nominate the board; at the next general or congressional election, people vote whether or not to create a charter board with the members presented; if the charter board is approved, it has 18 months to draft a charter and present it to the commissioners; people would then vote on it during the next general or congressional election.

The process is long and complicated, but good government is the result of thoughtful and deliberate movements.

We call on Frederick County residents to bring a petition to change the nature of our government.

To do so this fall would take a monumental, grassroots effort. The county commissioners would need to nominate a charter board by Sept. 22, no fewer than 40 days before the Nov. 2 election. Alternatively, five people could be nominated via petition (signed by no fewer than 2,000 registered county voters, or 5 percent of the voters) by Oct. 13, no fewer than 20 days before the election.

Even if we are not successful this fall, we call on the residents to continue the process until we have the kind of government that reflects the needs of our county.

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