[Originally published in The Voluntaryist, article by Paotie Dawson]
Last spring, the city of Manitou Springs became embroiled in a controversial and ultimately failed zero tolerance policy that targeted anyone and everyone for the pettiest of offenses. How you walked and what you did on the sidewalks in the downtown district became the business of everyone, from the police to city politicians. Today, the politicization of everything in Manitou Springs continues with no end in sight.
In talking with long-time residents and natives of the city, they wish for a return to a time when folks helped one another, weren’t so politicized with just about everything, and in general, were a kinder, nicer people. Frankly, after living in Manitou Springs for nearly a decade, I can easily visualize such a time and people in the city.
But today, politics has overtaken much of the city’s core and is rotting its soul. Any and every imagined and real problem is now cause for politicization, especially in favor of city bureaucrats who are more akin to high priestesses in a governmental religion. An example: the failed parking enforcement program in Manitou Springs. Each time the city changes parking policies, it directly acknowledges previous policies have failed; rather than scrap the program, the city continues to tinker, tinker, and tinker with the program with little to show for results. City employees, meanwhile, have been given generous parking benefits with prime parking spaces behind City Hall. Tourists are expected to park in dirty, dark and seedy parking lots, and if not, they can choose to gamble in the downtown district with parking enforcement officers, parking kiosks that sometimes work, and worse.
Rather than encourage neighbors to work together and collaborate independently of the municipal government, city officials want neighbors to hate one another and to turn on each other so that any of the city’s authority boards can play the role of arbitrary referee, picking winners and losers based on politics. This is best summarized as politics over people, a hallmark of the previously mentioned failed zero tolerance policy in which politicians sacrificed rational fact-finding in favor of catering to the loudest complainers, especially those who wanted the city to resolve their complaints.
Part of the problem can be directly traced to the city’s bureaucrats and politicians who favor solutions that benefit the city’s bureaucracy vs solving “community” problems. A community problem could be a street overrun with rocks and debris following a heavy rainstorm; folks get together to sweep the street, remove rocks, and get to know one another. This is a great way for neighbors to help neighbors and creates a healthy sense of community. But when the city government gets involved, it becomes less about neighbors and community, and more about complacency in the form of bureaucracy.
If the government does it, then nobody needs to do anything, right? If there are rocks and dirt on a street after a heavy rainstorm, the city has employees who clean the streets, right? Right! So do nothing! This is a tragic mistake too many folks today make. A healthy sense of a community does not start with bureaucracy but neighbors engaging neighbors, as with folks helping clean up their street. Another real-world example came in the form of a small groups of residents last summer who got together and walked the downtown district at night, acting as impartial observers and informal safety advocates. The current city administration abhors the very concept of neighbors helping neighbors, preferring politics that help politicians.
Manitou Springs is destroying its soul for the sake of politicizing everything. No longer do city officials and leaders encourage neighbors to work with neighbors to solve problems independent of government. No longer do city officials and leaders want to minimize the harms on people used to fund and legitimize their political solutions, as with the failed zero tolerance policy. But worse: city officials and politicians seem to have no desire to facilitate a community in which folks could leave their front doors unlocked without a care in the world, assured that their neighbors would keep a watchful eye if and when necessary.
Such a world is only a pipe dream if one obeys the bureaucrats. Neighbors helping neighbors. That’s how it used to be done in Manitou Springs, and it how it should be once again. Folks don’t need permission or oversight from local bureaucrats to solve local problems. More importantly, community is not government and their bureaucrats, never has been, and never will be.
It’s time for Manitou Springs to revive its beautiful soul with a kinder, gentler sense of community — without the bureaucrats.
[Great local example of how politics causes antagonism among men than the peaceful cooperation it pretends to; and also how we forget to help one another, and even ourselves, when it’s assumed the government is taking care of things. I always thought politics was especially unneeded in Manitou. Thanks, Paotie. ~The Voluntaryist]