I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (Pt.2)

In an earlier post, I wrote about a non-law topic, basically asking why we are predisposed to believe that bigger is better. It also suggested that I would write this one - something that addresses alternatives to that philosophy. At the very least, growth in Sioux Falls must be managed. The failure to do so has consequences that we have been witness to for the decades that I have lived here.

For example, the West Side starts out with a few dozen, then a few hundred, people. But once it hits several thousand, the cruel realization is that it is a pain to get from the West Side to downtown, or anywhere East of the West Side. 12th Street, 41st Street, or up to I-90 or down to I-229 - not a lot of alternatives, and obviously, those roads are especially difficult to navigate from 7-8:45 and again from after school until 5:30. All the traffic moves in a single direction, and we probably cannot build a sufficient number of lanes to ease that congestion.

Solution? Buy up the Country Club, and build a throughway right in the middle of town - a quick route that goes from West to Central, dividing the 3 miles between 12th and 41st basically in half. That was the proposal at the time. Soon, however, the problems became evident. 1) In most populated areas, a thoroughfare 3 miles away from another thoroughfare does not have to be subdivided - those corridors are close enough that a few blocks North or South gets you on one of them. 2) You are tearing up green space in the middle of our city, and a traditional golf course that is convenient and valuable to its members. 3) You are ruining the neighborhood from Kiwanis to Minnesota Avenue along 26th/22nd, or wherever you put that road, traffic zipping by at 40+ mph (regardless of posted limits) as it flows past a number of grade schools. A 5-lane road is much harder to cross than a 3-lane road.

My personal philosophy in all this (admittedly, as someone who then lived very near the VA and Spellerberg Park and had children) was that the number of people living on the West Side does not justify bailing them out of their self-created situation. Sure, the first few people who moved over there believed they might be taking advantage of lower prices, larger lots, open spaces. But everyone who has moved there since the mid-90s has to be aware of the issues related to transportation - it is, in short, your own fault if you choose to live there (and assuming there are alternatives in choosing a location, which there are). I am against building a lake for someone who moves to the desert.

The problem has largely been resolved, because over time and the increase in population, most everything one would need is now available on the West Side of I-29, so there is less need (other than one’s job, if it happens to be located elsewhere). East-siders used to be concerned because all the commerce was in the South, West, and Central - there wasn’t a movie theater or mall, no grocery store of substantial size (no offense to Andy’s!) and the stores consisted of a Pamida and a K-Mart and a Tractor Supply. Now, again, that has changed - the options available on the East Side are equivalent to any other area of town, so long as you’re happy with chain stores and chain restaurants.

In all this unchecked growth, however, is the underlying concern once again. Why are we valuing growth, spreading out in all directions and surrounding ourselves with strip malls, C-stores, Dollar stores, fast food, and an endless supply of banks? Is this the life we envisioned for ourselves? Is this why we chose Sioux Falls?

I think the answer is a resounding “no.” I didn’t move here (a home-grown South Dakotan) so I could eat at an Arby’s instead of a cafe. I moved here because I felt this was the most progressive town in the state, a clean, healthy place to live where neighborhoods still existed, people knew one another, and the arts and culture existed. I’ve lived in larger cities, and found myself staying at home too often - overwhelmed by the options and distance to access those options. Whatever band was playing at the LimeLite was fine with me - I didn’t want to have to choose between 73 different live music venues, or 15 different art openings. If you want to find something to do, you always can in Sioux Falls. Always. But it isn’t so big that you are overwhelmed with the choices to the point where you opt out - at least you shouldn’t.

Much has changed - we are certainly not overwhelmed with live music venues. I generally leave a place when the karaoke starts. But I circle back to the point - there is always something going on, something worthwhile, something curated, something family-friendly, something outdoors, something free. And I want to keep it that way.

This leads to the main point here - it starts with vision. I think this city has done a great job of looking forward, under multiple administrations, and listening to input from a variety of voices. I do believe this has ebbed recently - the imposition of workgroups who are drowned out, or their entire plan substituted at the last minute (and in my view, this is done by people who are not elected officials, but who wield power over elected officials). This invisible hand, or whatever you want to call it, has not done a great service to this community - I believe they are more interested in retaining their own financial interests than any other goal.

We need to elevate that vision. We need to ensure that those who are at the table in crafting that vision represent all segments of the population, all perspectives, all races. More importantly, we need to allow that vision, and those helping to craft the 15-year-plan (or whatever you want to call it) to work unfettered, with only quality of life and equality of opportunity as the guiding lights. And once the “plan” is constructed, it cannot be filtered through any other entity. There is no board of directors for vision who oversee the work of the group. The vision of the group is the vision.

Certainly there can be tweaks to that vision. Some ideas are not practical, or cost too much, or appeal to only a small segment and are therefore not going to rate highly on the priority scale. With vision, though, we must look long-term. It starts with a simple question:

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? What does the future look like, if I could craft the future? What does transportation look like, what does entertainment look like, what does sport look like, what does commerce and food and community and governance look like? We can often find agreement on such things - it is simpler to resolve a long-range issue than it is a pressing emergency (and we live in a society, I’m sure you’ve noticed, where the entire agenda is propelled by the emergency of the day). Potholes! Crime! Traffic! Housing! Racism! Sustainability! Each of these has taken its turn as the news of the day, and politicos scramble to demonstrate that they have a solution and can put our collective minds at ease. Well, it doesn’t work that way…..if you are solving an immediate problem, that’s usually a band-aid, not a solution.

So look to the long term and ask the questions. What would my ideal neighborhood look like? What would be the ideal population of the city and surrounding areas? How many more factories do we want or need? What is the ideal unemployment rate? How highly do we want to value the planet, and our ability to peacefully coexist with it? How many guns in Utopia?

These can lead to wild ideas, many of which are (politically and otherwise) currently impossible. In my ideal world, no one owns a pistol (just read somewhere that for every “justifiable homicide” by a gun in self-defense, there are more than 20 incidents of gun violence imposed on others, and more than 60 suicides with guns). What are alternatives to incarceration? What do we do about drugs, and how does that interact with our underlying notion of freedom of choice (even stupid choices)?

We might not find agreement on everything - I’m sure we won’t. I don’t believe that any person’s wealth should ensure that that person’s great-grandchildren are wealthy. I think it ruins incentive and creates a class system of the have’s and have-not’s that is completely contrary to the principles upon which this country was founded. But I also believe that farms ought to be able to be passed on from generation to generation.

I believe that the earth is paramount - that when choosing between alternatives, we should almost always choose the one that sustains the planet on the long-term over the one that is cheaper and easier in the short term. I believe that if South Dakota became a bastion of clean air, clean water, cover crops that lead to rich soil, the death of drain tile, great schools where we start kids younger than 5 and ensure equality of access and opportunity (with a simultaneous reduction of educational mid-management, a problem created because there is almost no way to “promote” teachers, and instead we should just pay them more to keep teaching), and celebration of diversity, that we are hitting on things that appeal to most everyone. At least everyone who vocalizes ideals instead of impediments, the good of the many rather than the immediate ease of the self.

Universal health care - a fundamental right. If you are sick, you go get help. You do not - ever - stop to think about whether or not you can pay for it, and consider maybe just toughing it out in an ongoing cost-benefit analysis. This requires us all to look outside of ourselves, to the greater good (every time I say “the greater good” I think of the movie Hot Fuzz). That the well-being of others is not only as important as our own, but the truth of how to live one’s life. We have heard for our entire lifetimes about trying to make the world a better place. Some people want to do that with grand gestures, but that’s not how it is done. It is done in tiny steps, consistently applied, that look away from our own selfish interests and toward how we can assist others.

The road to doing this is not simple, or obvious, or (given the existing political climate) even within reach. I get that. Too many scoffers, too many cynics. But we’re not all cynics, and we should all be searching for solutions, and choosing the path that moves us, even in tiny increments, toward that vision.

I want to give you a couple of examples, not perfect examples, of how this might work. We know that there is a problem with gun violence, the availability of guns to those criminally- or homicidally-inclined. The availability of weapons of mass destruction (to me, anything with more than two shots - if you missed after that, the bird wins) is not for the masses. “If we take away those guns, the criminals will be the only ones who have them!” “The only solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” And something about cold, dead fingers. OK, so we don’t agree. But do we agree that people wandering onto schools or synagogues or workplaces and opening fire is a bad idea? So, what do we do about it? I suggest we ban assault weapons, limit capacity of magazines, limit caliber, ban bump stocks, and require that all guns be insured by their owners for liability of their use, even if stolen. Trigger guards. And I know there are counter arguments, about the 2nd Amendment and the right to keep and bear “arms.” I’m not going to dive too far into this, or the underlying justification for it being that there was no national militia and therefore citizen armies were needed. People will say that AKs are “arms.” I get that. Is a bazooka “arms?” Is a nuke? They call them “nuclear arms” after all. Are we proposing that citizens get nuclear weapons, or chemical agents?

I think we all agree we have to draw the line somewhere, but no one is going to let me draw it. That’s the point here - what do you propose? You, the ones who don’t want to limit guns, or whatever. What do you propose? Because in my view, the best way forward is to adopt whatever you say - at least we’re doing something, and if your plan continues to fail, it will be incumbent upon you to either make further proposals or suffer the consequences of knowing that your best efforts are not working. Or you’d have to admit that it is OK with you if people get slaughtered attending a concert in Vegas, that’s just a cost of doing business and freedom.

The second part of this is more South Dakota specific. Hey, we live in a red state. There is almost no state redder. I love it here, even though I’m not crazy about the cozy politics and the ability of one party to dominate - even to the point of silencing any dissent within their own super-majority. I’m not happy when a legislator from a neighboring state is ostracized because of a belief that valuing a person’s choice, along with their family, and doctor, needs to be eliminated because someone, somewhere, might have a transitional surgery or procedure and then later come to regret it. Not sure how many of those folks there are, truly. Maybe a few dozen? Compared to the thousands who will cheerfully tell you that transition surgery is the best thing ever happened to them. So we’re taking away the happiness and choice (and freedom) of people just because we fear a few dozen will make a choice that he or she will come to regret? The needs of the few, indeed.

The reality in South Dakota (voiced over a great period of time by Democrats, both in and out of the legislature) is that they propose forward-thinking ideas, good ideas, strong ideas, only to be shot down by Republicans. And then, lo and behold, a few years later, the Republicans sponsor a bill that does almost exactly what the Democrat bill did before, only this time, it’s “their” idea. And it passes almost without opposition. How absolutely stupid is that? And I’m not talking about the Republicans doing it - I’m talking about the Democrats. They keep proposing these things, knowing they are dead in the water if only because there is a (D) after his or her name on the proposed legislation. Aghast at giving the other side credit, the D’s keep rolling out the same proposals, which fall to the same defeat, over and over, rinse and repeat. What a failed philosophy! On the other hand, if when the idea was first germinated, some enterprising person was to approach a Republican legislator and talk about the value of the idea (or better yet, the person approaches another person who approaches a friendly Republican legislator), rather than the politics of getting it passed, it might well happen. It is about ideas, right? Not credit? Not “we stand for this, they stand for that” and trying to draw stark lines of distinction. So if I have an idea for new or better legislation, am I going to contact my local District 15 Democrat representative to push it at the next session? Nope. I am going to a legislator who might actually have the clout to get something done - which in this state, without any dispute whatsoever, is a Republican legislator. I keep my mouth shut, give them all the praise and credit, and know that the people are the winners when ideas are more important than ideology.

This is not to say that all Democrat ideas are good ideas, or all Republican ideas are bad ideas. I agree with the R’s that there should be a work requirement for public assistance, and that the gap between the income you earn from employment and that which you earn from public benefit should be wide enough to discourage the latter. If a combination of medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance, daycare assistance, heating assistance and other public benefits equals or exceeds employment wages (or is even within 10% of it, or any number that makes a small black-market or off-books job - coupled with public benefits - preferable to employment), that’s a system destined for failure. We might not agree on how to get there - I think a subsistence level is a goal for all, so the only way to create a sufficient gap is to ensure that employment earns significantly more than that. So yes, raise the minimum wage to the level where a full-time job at minimum wage puts you above the poverty line, and at the level of “living wage.” Ensure that companies who employ substantial numbers of people are required to employ them and provide benefits to them so that the population is not subsidizing the bottom line of WalMart to the tune of $3,000-$6,000 per employee (I got that from a Forbes article) per year. Impose a limit on the difference between labor and management salaries. Encourage collective bargaining and unionization of workers to give them some power over management, but not to the point where “union” is synonymous with “four guys standing around leaning on their shovels.”

Just ideas. Just notions. Just proposals. But the world seems quixotically devoid of that right now. Starting with a big picture and a long term plan just makes too much sense as a place to begin.