The volume of conversations about the Columbia Association elections is higher than I have seen before. Whatever your opinion of who and what is driving this conversation, more discussions involving more people in a process that has heretofore been defined by a lack of participation is objectively good.
Unfortunately, the quality of the conversations could still use some work.
Columbia politics are as hostile as any I’ve engaged with. It would be fine if these contentious conversations were over important (or even actual) matters facing Columbia and CA. Claiming, for instance, that Symphony Woods is under threat of development is a good indication that the claimant is ignorant of both the nature of CA’s open space holdings and development in Downtown Columbia (and in general). Or they’re intentionally misrepresenting facts.
Either way, the net result is confusion and fear. And when we’re confused or afraid, we seek comfort.
Many people have grown comfortable with a Columbia Association status quo in which a small but vocal contingent of influential residents and their supports maintain control of CA and the process by which it is governed.
Power is maintained by the creation and maintenance of institutional processes that are designed to make things confusing and complicated.
Look at CA elections! Perhaps the only thing that is standard across all villages is the date—the last Saturday in April. Beyond that, some villages have two-year election cycles, some have one-year cycles. Some villages allow all residents to vote, some only allow one vote per household. Some give all property owners votes, some don’t. Some have online voting, some have mail-in voting only.
CA itself even votes in some villages!
Yes, it is complicated, but it is complicated by choice and by design. And that complexity is a great way for those who know and maintain the system to stay in power.
Of course, once you challenge a system’s power structure, the system will push back. As we are seeing now.
The Columbia Association recently posted a 1700-word response to a flier from The Rouse Project. As someone who has a habit of wordiness and who embraces complexity and nuance, I appreciate where CA is coming from.
But add CA’s response to the even more verbose conspiracy theories being pushed by certain folks and another influential local blogger’s call to “do your own research” and what you get is a large, coordinated misdirection away from the forest and into the trees, or more fittingly, the weeds. This is where defenders of the status quo and their allies hope you’ll get lost.
Yes, the challenges facing CA are complicated. The decisions the Board had to make over the last year were hard and required balancing competing interests.
But don’t mistake complexity with correctness, or difficulty with diligence. Complexity is often a way to keep people out of a system or process, or to keep them from asking the right questions, to make them think that there is too much “noise” and not enough signal to truly get it.
And just because you had to make a difficult decision that doesn't make you immune to criticism for it.
It seems to me that the Rouse Project is asking a set of straightforward questions and critiquing the response--implicitly or explicitly--of CA's leaders to these questions over the last year:
- Do you think that CA’s board should better reflect the demographics of Columbia’s residents?
- Should CA prioritize its community services or its membership-based programming?
- Should CA embrace a less antagonistic approach to its community relationships?
Instead of conversations about the substance of these matters, we’re being subjected to more of the same personal fights and antagonism that has been a hallmark of CA politics for decades.
Tell me, again, whose interests are being served?
Author’s note: I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’m not sure what I’d like to do with this blog anymore, but also, things are hard these days and I need to prioritize my energy. And that starts with being a father and husband, and right now, those roles are being challenged like never before by, you know, ALL THE THINGS. The next priority is my job (also a challenging situation), and then my community commitments.
So, there hasn’t been much time to write.
But, also, there’s the fact that participation in Columbia matters over the years has left me scarred. In particular, I have not fully recovered from last year’s election in which my wife was attacked by the incumbent, her supporters on the village board, and even people from outside Oakland Mills and Columbia who disagreed with her over school redistricting. These attacks continued after her election and culminated with the hateful comments directed at her during early voting in October by participants in one of the local Facebook cesspools. This was all justified by those commenters and their enablers—many of whom like to sit in the squishy middle, standing for nothing—because of the lies they made up about her behavior. And because they’d already succeeded in dehumanizing her.
Thinking about elections brings up some of those hard memories, but it’s more than that.
It is, frankly, seeing people who know how nasty CA politics are defending this status quo at the same time they’re admonishing swaths of the community for not participating in this nasty process.
