Please note…
The series, “13 Things You Can do to Kill Your Community,”
is a set of satirical open letters by
Doug Griffiths
which appeared as individual weekly contributions to
The Wainwright EDGE
during the spring and summer of 2005.
The series is not intended to be taken as instruction
for actually harming your community; rather its critical aim is to
increase awareness of everyday things we may not
recognize as being detrimental to our community.
13 Things You Can Do to Kill Your Community
by Doug Griffiths, MLA Battle River - Wainwright
Be Short-Sighted
The tenth way that you can ensure your community is not successful and ultimately dies can be summed up with ‘be short-sighted.’
What I mean by this is that you must confine your thoughts to local issues, local ideas and local problems. As one wise man once said to me, “Be one of those people that are is scared to get out of sight of the water tower.” Don’t look outside your community for new ideas or emerging trends.
I have a friend in business who makes his money by using other people’s ideas. He travels to small towns in the US that compare to small towns in this province and identifies businesses that are growing and booming within small towns there but are not located in small towns here. He then opens up a similar business and… he has yet to have one fail on him. He tells me all of the time that people can learn from failure, but it is more pleasant to learn from success.
I have seen a lot of successful communities that have built themselves up with creative, unique ideas, but I have also seen a lot of communities that have ’borrowed’ others’ successful strategies. The most interesting thing I have seen, however, is when communities actually exchange ideas and find ways to work together so that both (or many) communities grow. Communities that seek out ideas, that explore options and find partners that venture beyond the sight of the water tower often find an entire new world of opportunities upon which they can capitalize. They find the future.
Communities that fail often stay short-sighted, never looking for new opportunities and ideas. Members of the community who help this along often label others’ ideas as foreign, eccentric or too crazy to work in their town. They don’t like new ideas because they are new and have never been tried before. Voltaire once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results every time.” That is often what small, unsuccessful towns do. They use the same people with the same ideas over and over (chasing away anything new), each time expecting that the result to the community will be different.
The world is becoming more global and is full of solutions, ideas and opportunities if you want to find them. But, if failure of your community is what you are after, don’t think about that idea any more. You are best to stay within sight of the water tower. Keep your ideas within reach of the water tower as well. For that matter, label all others’ ideas that are from outside as foreign and unworkable. That will ensure nothing new ever comes up, and your community will die doing what it has always done.
