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by Dr. Carl Mumpower
Op-Ed
Asheville Citizen-Times
May 27, 2007
Scott Peck, author of
the best selling personal growth narrative of our time, The Road Less Traveled, also penned a lesser known work, People of the Lie. With typical Peck candor, he offered a
spiritually guided challenge to our culture’s evolving ability to manipulate,
ignore, and otherwise abuse the truth to personal or social agenda. It was his contention that whatever is
practiced is improved, and that we are cultivating an immense crop of highly
skilled liars pretending to be something more virtuous.
During a recent
Asheville City Council hearing on steep slope ordinances, the truth was spun
with the subtleness of a Maytag with a lopsided load of wet towels. Asheville has yet to have anything close to a
house slide on one of our hills, but advocates for this ordinance successfully
used safety as a shield for their more authentic agenda – to protect
views.That the slope property in
question did not belong to the city or the view protectors did not seem to
matter. The majority found ways to
justify controlling other people’s property to please their special interest –
being able to look up at Asheville’s hills and see green trees versus
housing. One can understand the agenda,
but disagree with manufacturing dangers and taking other people’s property
rights without fair compensation as proper method. Scott Peck would call those actions lying and
stealing.
Asheville’s water and
airport assets are two other areas where spin is about to carry the day. In both cases city, county and state leaders
are finding ways to justify treating Asheville differently than other cities
and surrender or take assets that city forefathers had the wisdom to
create. In the name of olive branches,
regionalism, and artificial alliances that have little to do with good
government, the public is being manipulated into believing that Asheville is
somehow unique when it really isn’t. Mr.
Peck would see it as lying – my grandfather would have called it turning chicken
manure into chicken salad. Dinner will
be served soon.
Then there is our drug
problem. We can invent ordinances to
control the release of ceremonial birds, make property owners responsible for
the nonsense of their tenants, and find 10,000 ways to otherwise regulate and
control the behavior of honest citizens.
But when it comes to stopping people from dealing crack cocaine openly
in our public housing developments and other vulnerable neighborhoods, we
lament our impotence. To a man and woman
we have a City Council speaking to the importance of effective law enforcement,
yet their stated budget priorities fall toward greenways, mass transit, and
socialistic housing programs. Curtailing
our open air drug market requires the equation of accountability includes
adequate resources for our police.
Failure to provide those resources insures a continuing vicious cycle of
paralysis, failure and crocodile tears by our leaders and growing harm for our
children and communities. You can guess
how Mr. Peck would define the spin of spending money on everything but the real
thing.
City leaders are trying
to convince us that making local elections partisan is about making city
government more effective when centralizing power is the more authentic
agenda. It doesn’t matter that third
party/independent candidates will have to swim through a burning moat of
petitions to get on the ballot. The
eventual outcome will be homogenized representation that continues to tout
social diversity as they detour around the concept by eliminating diversity of
ideas and political perspective in their own body. The best liars begin by lying to themselves.
It would be cowardly to
ignore the spin surrounding racial justice in our community. We have been so busy playing the game of
political correctness and perpetuating attitudes of social victimization that
we have ignored a cultural deterioration in the black community that is doing
great harm to our children and their tomorrows.
Hip hop nonsense that trains men to be perpetual little boys and girls
to be one dimensional sex toys offer no bridge to an adult future of hope and
possibilities. The outcome – generations
of black Americans who are being left off the bus of the American dream. People of all colors have found a hundred
ways to accept this tragedy and lie ourselves into complacency.
Anticipating the parade
of lies that precedes all regressing cultures, Scott Peck sought to warn us
that our future does not rest safely in the hands of those with the talent to
seduce, deceive, and manipulate us to their ends. He knew that which is truly good cannot be
protected by a bodyguard of lies. We
will always have people of this persuasion.
It is up to you and me if they are granted immunity, allowed to perfect
their craft, or successfully recruit the rest of us to join them…
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