Editorial
Don’t blame Dan Coffey for tiny vision
We don’t blame Dan Coffey or any other City Council member for throwing out the Anchorage Long Range Transportation Plan. True, this was an audacious act. It contradicted a mandate determined by a public process that lasted for years. But assigning blame to leaders is a polarizing, adversarial attitude which we disavow. This newspaper stands for another way of responding to moral and social injustice.
The brazen acts of our politicians serve us perfectly. They reveal the state of our culture and the level of our consciousness, and this ought to be a challenge to build a culture which expresses our truest and highest nature. From where can this culture arise?
A tiny vision dominates society, one which satisfies the craving for security and privacy, for smooth highways that connect corporate businesses with luxurious homes. Those who are either more sensitive or less privileged pay a heavy price for this one-sided approach. We don’t hear from them, because they are felled by meaninglessness. The humble ones, living in basements, shoveling snow. The tormented ones, injecting or imbibing drugs. The lost ones, staring at television screens. And the rest of us, brainwashed by prosperity.
An alternative vision is supplied by groups like the Anchorage Citizens’ Coalition, which support human- scale and pedestrian-friendly development. In surveys and studies, the public has demonstrated that they want a walkable city, viable public transportation, and diverse, mixed-use town centers. These concepts are important, but they are still just a fragment of what fulfilled human nature in cities could look like.
The greatest danger is having a vision that’s too small. There is a great dream that was cherished by humanity for thousands of years, but was abandoned during the genocides and dictatorships of the twentieth century. We have succumbed to materialism; the drive for security, money, glory, and sensation is dominant; and America has no soul.
We need a vision of a city that takes account of the full range of human potential. Rich in opportunities that meet our inner needs, it would be a city that teaches, entertains, and heals each of us to life, with intersections of ideas, thoroughfares of active love--a diverse, beautiful, challenging city which could be accomplished simply by the force of our own integrity.
It doesn’t matter if that city exists now. What is important is that there is a pattern of if it laid up for any person who wishes to contemplate it, and so beholding it, constitute himself its citizen (See page 10).
Do not blame our adversaries. Rather, fall down before them and ask their forgiveness. We are exactly the same as the one who stands before us, and maybe we are ourselves the most guilty party. However mad this may seem, it is true. For if we ourselves were clear enough, maybe there would be no callousness or brutality among our brothers and sisters. (See page 12).
Politicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats cannot be reformed by force. The response to lifelessness in society is the courage to express our inner life actively, in public situations. The response to political scuffling is active love.