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No Respect for Gravity | One –

Seizing Initiatives and Making Recruitments

 Nine one one.  A popular phrase that precedes a question.  In use by emergency dispatchers throughout the United States, it would be punctuated as a question in the operator’s manual.  It is not, however, a question when you write it out.   It actually functions as a triage employed to gauge the urgency of a situation, number and type of casualties, and what treatment of responders are necessary.  Those would be the questions.  Eventually, those questions would lead to identifying the nature of the emergency.  Multiple three-digit call centers have been established since the original hot line to help was introduced.   All have been attempts at answering those questions.  A natural gas leak is treated differently than, say, a homeless encampment.  Both can lead to very serious problems, but have different causes, and so different solutions.  At large, the question of homelessness is the more frequently asked of the two.  It is so prevalent, that it has become a question that begs a question, for which there is no number yet that addresses it.  Here, we will write that question out.  We will look at what emerges as its cause so as to see its solution.   We will not be parted with any of our money, you should be glad to know, as is usually the case in these investigations leading, almost always, to government solutions.  We will, though, need to be men and women of initiative.

Before elaborating further on such figures and actions they might take, we must draw a distinction between initiative, as exercised by individuals, and initiatives, as placed on the ballot.  

Here, Initiative is the quality of being able to independently assess and evaluate problems, and use such opportunities that are available, and powers that are possessed by the individual, to initiate a first action to solve those problems.  The exercise of initiative may also lead to a series of actions, taken by themselves, and or others, to solve a problem.  There, such as in California and twenty-five other states, Initiatives that most resemble our working definition are those of the direct initiative process.  This is where laws or constitutional amendments are proposed by the citizens.  That process requires a text of the law to be written, petitions to be circulated for the necessary signatures to be gathered, and verifications made and deadlines met in order to qualify for the ballot.

Because laws can benefit some while at the same time negatively impacting others, a host of other actors and actions are usually attracted to an initiative early on in the process that often succeed in changing the solution originally envisioned for a particular problem to one with drastically different, less desirable, consequences.  Initiatives that have made it onto the ballot and were approved by the voters have a mixed track record.  This is because they are often deceptively named and marketed.  One from back in the nineteen-seventies is still protecting home owners from excessive taxation, making it possible for them to remain in their homes.  One approved only a few years ago, with a related referendum that followed, were so poorly written and badly executed as to make those same home owners desire to sell their homes, and leave the state as soon as possible. 

While initiatives can be the grassroots verity of democracy, initiatives are often the product of campaigns steered by special interest groups.  These groups may agree with the sentiments of the foot soldiers, benefit in some way from their victory, and may have placed the armies on the battlefield themselves.  Their motives may be ideological, or they may stand to profit from providing services the new law would require, or they may seek to ingratiate themselves with the public for future endeavors that would trade on any good will created.  One way or another, money will be changing hands upon an initiative passing, and that money will come from the voters.  It will also come from, and this is tragic, the rest of the citizens who don’t vote.  This is tragic because those citizens are probably better situated to evaluate propositions and outcomes if only because they are largely unaffiliated with unions, guilds, and other activist organizations promoting identity politics and exuding political pressure on their members to conform.  So, instead of ‘voters’ they may be referred to as ‘toters’ because they will nonetheless shoulder expenses arising from successful initiatives absent the prestige of being referred to as voters.     

Most voters, and toters, sadly, do not know, or fully consider, this aspect of voting; that the ballot is actually a shopping list.  To appeal to shoppers, items must not only not only sound good, it also helps to have them on sale.  To make propositions put before voters sound good, supporters rebrand them in ad campaigns.  For instance, the Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative of twenty fourteen was hailed by supporters as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.  That re-categorizing felonies to misdemeanors would be anything but safe for neighborhoods is acknowledged by the name change.  

It was also on sale, with the money saved from processing and housing criminals to be diverted to programs to assist wayward school students by preventing them from being truant, and from dropping out.  To keep offenders out of jail, programs for mental health, drug abuse, and others would be included at no extra charge.  To keep repeat offenders out of jail, the bars would be raised on most property crimes, and no additional penalties could be added for repeat, and repeat, offenders.  

History, and very little of it was required, has shown that neighborhoods, retail outlets, convenience stores, gas stations, shopping malls, and the streets and the freeways were immediately made unsafe by the new law, and they remain so.  Thousands of inmates were kept out of jail, and kept very busy, and very organized, in neighborhoods all over the state.  When the price of a theft was increased to cause the volume of charges for property crimes to decrease, everything went on sale for the criminals.        

Voters are often too easily persuaded to ‘purchase’ an initiative by believing claims that costs are negligible, or even transitory.  The host of, seemingly, unforeseen or unintended consequences of these bargains often prove very expensive.  Expensive at a personal level, where, for example, becoming unexpectedly transitory without a catalytic converter can mean thousands of dollars.

Whatever the problem that is pitched to be solved by a new law, there are usually tactics resorted to in these campaigns that leave the voters who were coaxed along tarnished by the experience.  While there will be activists who stand to bask in golden rays of success, like a sunset to a victorious end of rigorous campaigning, most will not have the luxury of being so blinded.  Even those activists, after all, who were pressed into recruitment may eventually struggle with the knowledge that they were more culpable in the crime than the rest.

In part, it will be the realization that the problems that were identified for ballot solutions are not the core problems at all, they are only the effects of the actual problems.  This is not because no one knows what they are.  It is because the coalition must play ball with, or in some like-manner rub shoulders with, the ones who actually caused the problems, and who have no intention of ever solving them.  

So, the additional harm to citizens is that the real problems with real solutions are further removed from the light of discovery by another crest in the prevailing narrative, and the problem continues to sink to a depth where solutions cannot be fathomed. Continue reading →