||| FROM ROBERT AUSTIN |||
My wife and I bought our home here in 1998, and we’ve long come to enjoy the charms of living in a small community, with all the unexpected but welcome conversations at the market, post office, etc. It sure feels good to have so many friends, even those we’re not especially close to, but with whom we’ve shared this splendid community with for so many years. Our granddaughter is just heading off to college, after coming up through the public and Salmonberry schools.
Though it can seem that we’ve all managed to move to Utopia, at times conflicts do in fact arise here, disagreements about how things should be organized, how they should be managed. We’ve seen this happen the past year over funding and management of our Orcas Fire and Rescue system, for example, as well as Eastsound Water Users Association’s Board.
As I’ve been somewhat involved in the latter kerfuffle, I would like to make some observations about the social context within which this particular conflict has taken place. In a nutshell, the conflict has in part come down to who one’s friends are, rather than the positions they’ve taken, or the issues they’ve had, that perhaps a previous board tried to bury and pretend didn’t exist.
Maybe a board member or manager have been occasional drinking buddies with you at the local tavern, or maybe they gave you a raise and some unexpected goodies in your current employment position. Maybe even their family has a name on the island due to decades of residence here, and feel entitled to extra creds for that reason.
So it might be natural for you to want to defend their position, whatever it is, because you’re friends with them. I get that, we’re all rather tribal creatures at root, but the fact of the matter is, sometimes our friends are mistaken, however sincere their opinions might seem. We probably all have things that we’ve done in the past that we’d like to explain away: maybe someone told me it was OK to do it; perhaps a longtime board member told me it was forgiven and forgotten, before someone else blew the whistle and the conflict arose. Sometimes those who know they committed such errors are the most indignant with their denials and alternative explanations of what the documented facts have demonstrated.
The current fiasco at Eastsound Water Users Association does seem to fit this explanatory template, and the current recall campaign, originally just for four current Board members who promulgate alternative, often indignant explanations of what the actual documented facts mean, may end up preserving a status quo that allowed and forgave a general manager who felt entitled to manipulate our finances in his favor because, well, he deserved it… and some former (and one present) Board member who were accustomed to calling all the shots without issues like this ever entering public discussion. They likely considered most of what has emerged into the light as “confidential” information, and never intended for much of it to be published. We would never know about these issues if whistle-blowers had not come forward with their information.
So which is more important to you: justice in the larger sense, adherence to written rules and legal norms, or defending your friend, no matter what? Would you apply a similarly lenient standard to those who are not your friends, or indeed, those whom you dislike?
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