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
Don’t Take Risks
If you are deliberately trying to kill your community, you must ensure many factors work in tandem.
If all of the factors come together, you can ensure that new people don’t locate to your community, that existing members leave, that new businesses don’t start and existing ones fail, and so on, and that your community will die. Be careful, however, that you don’t accidentally do something that could lead to success when failure is your ultimate goal. That leads me into the twelfth item on the list of thirteen ways to kill your community: Don’t take risks or plan big, you may accidentally succeed.
I know this one may be a hard one to believe, but trust me, it is true. You see, taking big risks and working on big ideas can lead to failure, and wonderfully large failure at that, but it doesn’t usually happen. Some communities have taken big risks and worked on big ideas and have had marvellous failures that have devastated their communities. They are usually communities that chase down, and sometimes catch, big factories or plants that help their community… until the big businesses leave or shut down, and then failure ensues because the community put all of its eggs in one basket. Believe it or not, those cases are not that common.
Every great and wonderful invention, every discovery, every idea, every change in the course of human history, whether global or local, originated in and by somebody who was ready to take a risk. If no one took a risk, took a chance even though they could fail or be ridiculed, nothing would ever change. It would be status quo all the way to the end of time. Dreamers and believers, visionaries and revolutionaries are the ones who change the world in which we live, and though they are often ridiculed and resented (because everyone hates change until they get used to it), they persevere and make things, more often than not, better.
So, by taking risks and by thinking big (not necessarily about a big factory, but new big-picture ideas) you are likely to face resistance. You are also likely to cause a chain reaction that will lead to success and that will change your community and its direction forever. The risk may be in building a new subdivision, it may be in building a spec-home, it may be in securing good water, it may be in spending money on beautification, or it may be simply taking a risk on something that the community and its citizens desperately need. Whatever the case, if you take on such a risk with the expectation that it will fail and that your community will fail as a result, chances are it won’t work. Odds are that the risk will be a success and your community will also be a success.
If you intend to make your community fail you should stick with the status quo. Stick with activities that have no risk (and therefore no payout), because thinking big and taking risks usually just leads, in a big way, to success…
