hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2431.txt

Episode: 2431
Title: HPR2431: Information Underground: Local Control
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2431/hpr2431.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:54:57

---

This is HBR episode 2,431 entitled Information Underground, local control and in part of the series Information Underground.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 41 minutes long and carry an explicit flag.
The summary is DeepGeek, Klaatu and Lost in Drunks that are on about local participation and responsibility.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello everyone and welcome to Information Underground.
I am Lost in Drunks and with me we have Klaatu.
Hello everybody.
And DeepGeek.
Hey hello everyone.
Today I want to talk about a particular subject that has been on my mind lately
and essentially I'm calling this one local control and it's about local government.
I have a little speech prepared so I get everything out in a more coherent fashion because I tend to ramble
and I'll just race through this and then we'll start chatting about it.
Sounds good to me.
Recently I took a class offered by the Sholo Arizona Police Department entitled Citizens Academy.
The class met every Wednesday night at 6 p.m. and went until 10 p.m.
The class ran from the end of June to the beginning of September.
All told it was 11 weeks totaling 44 classroom hours.
This class was free of charge and opened to all members of the public.
This year Citizens Academy averaged nearly 40 students.
The SLPD has been offering the class to the public every summer since the mid 1990s,
which I'd say qualifies as a serious long-term commitment to educating the community about what they do.
And that's exactly what Citizens Academy is all about.
What does your local police department and indeed local justice system do on a regular basis?
Why do they do what they do?
What are their challenges and goals?
Where do they succeed and where do they fail?
Many of these questions were answered in that class, at least to some degree.
The Sholo Police Department is and has been for a long time devoted to the idea of including
the general public into their process.
For example, they have sponsored and supported a program called Senior Patrol.
Now, many police departments across the USA have similar programs, but in short,
it's an auxiliary unit of usually retired people who drive around town in specially marked cars,
watching neighborhoods, calling in reports, and even acting as emergency responders on occasion.
They receive specialized training in police procedures,
can confidently use the radios and other equipment,
and are in all ways seen by the SLPD as valuable adjuncts to the department.
They are not a joke, nor some sort of activity to keep senior citizens occupied.
The SLPD credits Senior Patrol with a massive reduction in burglary and other related crimes in
the city of Sholo and treats this team accordingly.
Now, what makes all this work?
How is the SLPD been able to garner such support with the general public that it serves?
When so many other police departments across the country and indeed the world
have failed to do so, occasionally with tragic results.
Part of the answer may be the endemic culture of this area.
Sholo is in Navajo County, Arizona, USA.
It is hundreds of miles from the Mexican border,
so we don't have those particular pressures to deal with.
But this was, and to some degree, still is, the Old West.
Law and order are not just words here.
There is a romanticism with the old pioneer spirit,
and I would say naturally so, just considering their history.
Ending with that explanation, though, is myopic.
And it's begging for generalizations, misunderstandings, and stereotyping.
The SLPD is an active part of the larger law enforcement environment of Arizona and the country
itself. Yet it's root power lies in local control.
The officers live here.
They know the environment, they know local customs,
and the area's various cultural pressures.
They receive funding and support from the local city and county governments,
and actively seek ways to share control and shape policy with them.
The class began with a history lesson of the local police departments,
so we would have some context.
But the next class was not about the police.
It was about the United States Constitution.
How do they function under that?
How is their power to investigate, arrest, or use force,
codified, or supported under the Constitution?
These are not idle questions.
And the SLPD policies are constructed with them in mind.
Myself, I see all of this as a positive example of a small,
but growing community that recognizes that it's power stems from its citizens,
and that power is something to be used only on their behalf.
Small town, small government, small law enforcement department,
a community successfully policing itself without undue pressures from outside
or above that is to say the state or federal governments.
Is it perfect? No, of course not.
They're chronically underfunded and often take handouts in the form of state
or federal grants.
That lack of outside pressure could very easily change someday.
By and large, though, macro control by large outside bureaucracies
is looked at with suspicion by the locals here.
In an age when the federal government is looked to for the solution
to many problems close at hand, including social problems like drug abuse,
discrimination, and lack of opportunity,
I find this sort of approach to be quite refreshing.
And that is my little speech.
I think local everything is super important.
I've come around to thinking about, yeah, like the need for, you know,
for instance, law and order and stuff.
And just how poorly that suffers or how greatly that suffers
in something so huge like the United States of America,
where there are these laws being created and enforced
by people who don't even live within spitting distance.
I mean, they just are just so far away.
And the mind boggles like how can they possibly understand the needs
of this local community way over there on the East Coast or whatever.
So I think the fact that you guys have a local program
that's being so active in educating the public is amazing, like astonishing.
Well, what I think is astonishing is the use of the retired community
as an auxiliary because it just makes so much sense.
I mean, first of all, a lot of people still have many good years
in front of them when they retire.
And doing something for the community would really mesh well for them.
And they have found a way to mobilize people.
And that's in a way that's useful to the whole city.
I'm just very impressed with it.
That part of it is not just something that Sholo does.
But back when I lived in Connecticut a long time ago,
back in the early 90s was the last time I lived there.
The local police department had a senior patrol as well at that time.
Yet that police department, the Waterbury Police Department,
Waterbury Connecticut at that time, I haven't been there in a long time.
Things may have changed radically.
But at that time, they did not enjoy a lot of support from the general public.
And there was a great deal of suspicion of the local police department
and the local government in general.
There'd been a lot of corruption, there'd been a lot of scandal.
There had been budget problems.
There'd been all sorts of little things.
Well, that's a little really.
But things that had chipped away at people's confidence in the local government.
To the point where the state had to step in and to a degree,
federal funding and the rest comes in.
And now you've got the federal government coming in with federal oversight.
I mean, one of the mayors of Waterbury Connecticut
ended up getting, um, two of them ended up getting arrested on federal charge.
One was federal charges.
One was on child molestation of all things.
Really, really terrible situation.
And the police suffered under that.
The police had a very poor reputation in the community.
It's like night and day, that place, that time compared to this place and this time.
You know, this community is small.
It's even smaller than Waterbury.
But this community is very supportive of it's not just its law enforcement,
though, also local government in general.
We had one of the speakers during this class.
One of the speakers was a district attorney
who, a prosecuting attorney who came in.
He was late to the class because he's in the middle of a murder trial.
That he's, that he was pushing and he couldn't talk about it at the time.
But coming in from that time, I mean, this guy probably got into work at six o'clock
to get ready for the trial, worked all day,
and then came to teach this class at night.
That's a dedication to the community, you know?
I'm not saying, per se, that this,
I'm not really talking about this class, though.
And I really want to get that across.
That what I'm really talking about is a small community
that's looking out for itself.
And if there's a problem in the community,
there is redress in the community,
or at least the very beginnings of it in the community.
I think that is the greatest strength of any society.
I think it begins right here at the,
not, we talk grassroots that turn gets thrown around to the point where it's almost meaningless.
But at the local level, right where people live, their neighborhoods, their homes,
their communities, their law enforcement departments.
These people are beholden to the community.
And if the community doesn't hold them to that,
that's where you start having problems.
You start having tragedies based on these things,
at least that's my opinion.
Yeah, well, I think that's the key right there,
is that in order to have some semblance of what we all call freedom,
there has to be participation.
And you see that in all kinds of communities,
like no matter what you're involved in.
And I mean, you see it in open source software,
because if you want open things,
then you have to, in some way, engage with that project,
or otherwise, sort of the fact that it's open becomes meaningless,
because you're not taking advantage of that openness.
Even here on Hacker Public Radio,
like way back in the days of episode 60 and 70,
what are we up to now, 2,200 something.
But way back then, in the episodes of 60 and 70, 80,
like if someone didn't throw in an episode,
Enigma would email me and say, hey, we need an episode by tomorrow.
You know, and I would record something.
And so I kind of started feeling like it was like,
hey, guys, if you don't contribute,
then you're going to get another class 2 episode.
You know, I mean, it was like this kind of sort of blackmail.
Like, you want to hear this voice again,
or do you want to send in an episode?
And it just goes the same way with local society.
Like, if you don't contribute to the way that your society works,
then it all becomes almost oppressive just inherently,
because you have no say in it,
because you have opted not to have a say in how life happens.
I found the same thing applies in my labor union,
because I am forever of people saying,
oh, the union does nothing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I happened to have been one of the better ones, I believe.
And I actually go to quarterly meetings
where the executive board just reports what they've been doing,
who they've been seeing, and do the financial reports.
And I immerse myself in what's going on.
And I drive, you know, across to another state to do that.
Wow, I'm a really guy from New York there,
often, except for the business reps who have to be there.
And, you know, it's a funny thing.
I mean, I was actually, people don't understand.
First of all, they're working for their membership.
So they report what they're doing to their membership.
The president, we don't work for the president.
The president works for us.
And I went and found out that my old meat wrapper
was actually involved with a lawsuit with her current employer
at the time, you know, because they report that she appeared
looking for help from them.
And I was like, I was like texting her in the diner afterwards
because you're driving out in New Jersey,
you stop for diner food and cheap gasoline.
And she was like, how'd you know?
How'd you know?
I said, I go to the meetings.
See, I find the labor union thing especially interesting,
because my stepdad was a teamster.
And he was a union steward in his shop.
And very often, he would get these dictates coming down
from the teamsters that he had either no input in
or didn't really even care about because it was just more crack
coming from another bureaucracy, another layer of bureaucracy
that was above them.
And the only time anyone ever cared was when there were generally
because there were either labor problems or generally
there was some kind of pay question.
You know, are we going to get a pay cut or a pay raise
or whatever happened to be?
And they would go out on strike, of course,
because an affiliated union or something else
was having problems.
And the teamsters went out on strike as well.
But it all seemed so completely opaque.
You know, it did not seem participatory in any way.
Now, part of that was probably because he wasn't all that active.
You know, he was there doing his bit.
But he didn't, you know, he was working 15, 16 hours a day.
He couldn't go to these things on top of everything else.
And he may not have been the best choice as a steward.
I don't know. That's a long time ago.
And I was not directly involved.
I was watching it from the outside.
But I can tell you that that never felt participatory looking at it.
It always looked completely opaque.
Well, yeah. And that's what I'm saying.
Transparency becomes a null point, a moot point
if nobody's looking in.
And I think that a lot of times that happens.
Like, people are like, oh, we're completely accessible.
We have all of our records up online.
You can look.
But nobody's looking.
And so it becomes like this, this pointless exercise of,
well, if anyone cares,
we are actually being totally transparent here.
But nobody cares.
And then those, I imagine,
the same people who don't actually care to participate
are also probably the people, you know,
among the people who complain about how things go.
They often all the people who complain about how things go.
I always hear people who've worked union all their life,
which means they've always had the union wage.
They've always had somebody, you know,
trying to stick up for them if they could.
Those sometimes that just can't be done.
And they say, oh, the union sucks.
They take eight dollars a week from us.
You know, me while you're getting that back in spades
at the end of the game, if you're a full-timer.
And maybe in pitching and moaning it
about the slightly little eight dollars a week.
And you go, I just look at this and go,
did you ever work non-union?
You know, and it's just a telling question.
Speaking of software projects, free software projects.
It hasn't the Debian project been accused of
this kind of opacity in the past
that people feel like they either can't participate
or there's the old gray wall
where all the gray beards aren't letting anybody in
or all these other things.
I'm singling out the Debian project
possibly through faulty memory.
And I don't mean to malign anybody who's over there
or even the project itself.
I actually love Debian.
But I think I've heard of that before
in our own community, in other words, it's happening here.
I think part of that is because it's difficult.
I really do think it's very difficult.
We, as people coming into some place to participate,
a lot of times I think we jump the gun.
We think, well, I'm here now.
So listen to every word that I have to say.
Forgetting that there are people who have been there
for 20 years before us.
Who, yes, in the hierarchy,
they do have more influence.
So I might have a great idea for something
about Debian or Fedora or whatever.
But I'm the new guy.
And I think a lot of us lose perspective there.
It's just like, well, you said you were an open project
and I'm trying to participate and you're not letting me.
It's like, well, we're not letting you
because we can't be sure that you're going to be around
in 10 years to live with the changes that you are proposing.
So that seems discouraging now.
Now, well, this open project has just closed the door on my face
and now I don't feel so good about it anymore.
So I think there is a sort of a realism,
kind of a little bit of a reality check
that a lot of us have to do when we seek to contribute
to something and we feel like we're not getting
all the attention that we feel we should.
And it's just because, yeah,
we're not the most important thing about that project yet.
But in the real world, I think the more common problem
is that we don't really know necessarily where to go.
Like, if I want to participate in my local government,
what is the entry point?
And I don't feel like most communities get that out very well.
It's like, hey, you should come to this mythical town hall meeting.
You know, we see those on TV.
I remember doing extra work.
There would always be an obligatory town hall meeting
that you were called, you know, to be an extra floor.
And the mayor would stand up and talk
and then some person with a line would say,
you know, and it was like this very sort of classical 1950s scene
that I think TV still thinks actually happens in communities.
But like, if you asked me where to go in Pittsburgh
to actually make my feelings known when I was living there,
I wouldn't have known where to go.
I don't know how to do that.
And I think a lot of people are just like, well, vote.
Vote. That's your voice.
Just vote.
You know, it's like, well, that's not really my voice.
That's two different options coming my way
that I'm being asked to respond to.
But I want to put this forward.
How do you do that?
I don't think most Americans know.
Yeah, it's hard.
You have to.
And I think these points apply to a corporate work situation too.
You have to learn the lay of the land.
And you have to learn what's going on and where to show up
and who the right people to talk in front of are.
And that's something that comes from experience.
I mean, my town is certainly in that Pittsburgh.
But I mean, I actually have to drive by town hole every day.
And I see the town hole meetings going on in there.
And unfortunately, I don't participate in those
like I do with my union stuff.
But I mean, here it's visible.
Here you can see it.
You know, I think actually, Clat 2,
you have two points and they're both really good ones.
OK, first off, I agree that people often will jump
into a new community or some sort of structure.
We'll put it that way that they want to participate in.
But they tend to bring a lot of ego along with it.
Because the motivating factor very often
for getting involved in these things
is an idea they have or an enthusiasm
for a particular aspect of development
or something else that's going on in that structure.
In this case, I might be talking about the police department
or I might be talking about the local government
or I might be talking about a software thing.
I think there are some parallels here.
Because we're talking of ultimately,
we're talking about people.
I think there is a very strong argument
to be made for mentoring in those situations.
Someone comes in, they have something to say.
They have something they really, really want to do.
As both you guys have pointed out,
they don't know the lay of the land necessarily.
So they might be talking either to the wrong people
or they're talking way out of turn
to the point where they're adding to the noise
not to the signal.
OK, that happens all the time.
Secondly, I think that a good example
in the software community is you'll have someone
who comes in, they're young and no one trusts them
because they don't really know them.
They don't have a track record.
But they're young, they're sharp,
and they have really good ideas.
And you're right, they do get discouraged.
There is a barrier to entry.
They're simply because people don't know
that they're going to be around.
They don't know that these guys are going to continue
to be an active part of this community.
And I think mentoring is where that comes in.
Someone comes in and says,
I got this great idea.
I think this is really good.
And then maybe a great beard,
someone who has been there a long time
can take that person under a wing
and say, look, I like your ideas.
I think they're really good.
But how can we future prove this?
How can we make this something
that's either going to stand the test of time
or can be rolled back if it's not working?
How do we do this?
And work with these people.
You know, I see that sort of participation
with the quote-unquote general public
where the rank and file people in a project
very equivalent to what the Sholo Police Department
has been doing, opening themselves up
and saying, look, this is what we do.
We want you to know what we do
because the more people out there who know what we do,
the fewer problems we run into.
They said that over and over.
You know, we are doing this mostly for selfish reasons.
We want the community to understand what we're doing
so that they, you know, more people are out there
and they understand where we're coming from
and that we're not just causing problems out there
because we're arrogant and we're carrying a gun.
And they got that information across quickly
right off the bat, but also very thoroughly.
Again, you know, we're not seeing every police officer
and they could hire and ask next week if they wanted to.
You know, that does happen occasionally
although they're very, very careful about who they hire.
But my point here, I guess, in that area is just
you need an invitation to participation
from the people in charge of these things.
You know, I, for an open community can really be open.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely spot on.
The mentorship idea.
It's almost, it's mentorship slash gatekeeper.
Almost in a weird way because there's someone there.
There's a help desk, there's a triage, whatever.
To bring people in to make sure, hey, don't worry,
you are actually welcome here.
But hey, hey, hey, Tiger, slow down.
Let's talk about your ideas.
Let's have you go home and write down your ideas
in a way that people can understand
and come up with some action items and all that, you know,
kind of think it out and almost give the person homework.
You know, and I think eight times out of 10,
that person will never come back
and yet also never feel that they were snubbed.
You know, it's like, oh my gosh, this is hard work.
I do have to think about this.
This isn't as simple as I thought it was, you know,
and that kind of gets rid of not the riff raff,
but just the people who are just here to unload on you.
And then the other people who do come in
and get their homework done.
And yes, I have thought about this.
I have thought about long-term ramifications, whatever.
They get in and now you know that they're serious
about contributing.
I think there's a lot of value there.
You know, the mentorship idea reminds me,
there used to be this thing called core.
It was community of retired executives or something.
And they used to advertise on TV
and sit down with people who wanted to start businesses
and work through the business plans with them.
And I just, you know, throwing out there that,
you know, to shame that people who are willing
to be mentors in this situation
aren't in a visible organization.
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
In different communities that availability
to the people either in power or with the knowledge
or connections of that community, that varies.
Obviously, that varies from community to community.
And some communities don't see any value in that whatsoever.
Or it's not even on the radar.
While others, you know, they recognize that,
you know, much more openly.
I wanted to address Clattu's second point,
which I think is extremely good, extremely good.
And that's the knowledge of how do I participate?
Where do I go to participate?
You know, that stuff is often very hard to find.
Citizens Academy that I participated in.
I saw that on a flyer that had been tacked up,
not even a flyer, was a poster printed on regular paper
that was tacked up on a community bulletin board
and a bank, right?
And it just caught my eye.
If I had missed that, I would have walked by it
without any knowledge that this thing even existed, right?
And how long did I say this thing has been around
since the 90s?
This is not something that is brand new
that they just didn't get the word out on.
As well-established as this is,
it's still almost completely unknown in the community, you know?
This sort of stuff needs to be announced far and wide.
I'm of the opinion.
When I was leaving the final class,
it struck me that every single part
of the local government should have a program just like it.
We had one night with a prosecuting attorney.
I would love to have an entire class dedicated
to the judicial system, the local one, not federal,
not the Supreme Court or anything like that.
How do they do this in our community, you know?
Because if they arrest me for a crime,
I'm gonna be in a courtroom in this county.
So it's going, it truly is my peers,
the people that live right here
that are gonna be judging me, you know?
I wanna know about that stuff.
I wanna know how all of that works,
but there's no way to know.
Because they don't, and it's not like this is, you know,
this is secret information.
It may as well be because it's impossible to find.
Or it's so layered under very, very dense terminology
that the average person simply,
it's inaccessible to the average person.
I would like to know how they do local contracts
to rebuild the roads.
I would like to hear when they make the order
to go plow the streets in the middle of winter,
who's making that call?
Who's picking the call up to dispatch these guys?
I wanna know all of that stuff
because it's my local community.
And yet all of that stuff seems to happen magically, you know,
like the fairies did it.
I have no idea how it happens.
And that needs to change.
If we really wanna be a participatory government,
if we want this community, the civilization to survive,
we need to be involved in it.
We have to be part of it, or it is magic, you know?
Very, very, very quickly, it all becomes something
that just happens.
It happens the way earthquakes happen,
the way the rain happens, it just happens.
And there's no explanation for it.
It very quickly falls into this mentality
that we are completely powerless.
And it all, it happens to us, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, this is the tragedy, I think,
of modern technology because I know, for instance,
that Hugh Hefner died yesterday.
Hugh Hefner, I don't care about at all.
I couldn't care less about this person.
He made a magazine that I find despicable,
and he was rich, and I just, I never needed to know
that he died.
I take exception to this.
Okay, but personally, I didn't need to know that he died.
I wasn't looking for him.
I wasn't looking for the fact that he died.
And yet somehow, just by being a human being on this planet,
I heard that he died, you know?
So something so insignificant is that
manages to make its way into my brain
within the day that it happens.
But something that actually affects me,
like how does my road work get done?
When there's a land slip on the mountain side
by where I live, how does that get reinforced?
Like all that kind of stuff,
where do I go to talk to someone about that?
I don't know, I can't even find
if I'm looking for it, it's such a maze.
So like, why are we using technology to, again,
just propagate like the most ridiculous, like,
pop culture or just random complaints
from some person in whatever country
that I don't even, don't even need to know.
But stuff that actually matters to me,
I cannot find when I'm looking for it.
And it's weird, I mean, how much of this,
how much of this has to do with people just being oblivious
in some weird, general way?
I mean, I mean, because we've seemed to flesh out that
if you don't try to participate,
you're going to have these feelings of them being opaque.
But yet, like I said, I drive by city hall.
I mean, theoretically, if I had just moved into this town,
I could bang on the door physically
and talk to somebody behind it, you know,
and ask a question.
And guess what there?
You know, so I mean, how much of this is just being
oblivious and as opposed to the normal stuff
that attracts people to celebrities?
I mean, as novelist William Gibson said in I do,
some people are famous just for being famous.
Well, putting aside for a moment,
putting aside the question of celebrity,
there is still a major problem with the dissemination
of what should be easily accessible information.
It's not secret, it's just no one thinks to publish it.
Or if they do, it's buried under noise
and you cannot find it, no matter how many searches
you do online.
In example, in this class,
we had a highway patrol officer come in
and do a whole class about what they do on the major highways.
And one of the highways that they patrol
actually runs through the center of Cholo
when it gets into the city limits,
the name of the road is the Duce of clubs,
as opposed to Main Street.
And there's a whole story behind that.
But I have a problem with one particular stop light
on the Duce of clubs that I always have trouble with, right?
And I feel that during certain parts of the day,
they have a yellow light on this thing that is so short.
There's no way you cannot break the law
if you're trying to get through this thing.
I've had times when that light is green,
when I enter the intersection
and it's red by the time I get out, you know?
By the time I make my turn,
that yellow light is just vanished, right?
It's too short, that's my complaint.
So I said to the guy,
who do I complain to about getting that changed?
And he said, well, those are the guys that have the trucks
and they go out and they fix the roads,
but they're also in charge of a lot of other things
having to do with the highways.
He said, well, that's them.
And I was like, well, who do I complain?
How do I make a complaint?
He had no idea.
This is the guy who's job depends on this stuff
and even he doesn't know.
This is not secret information.
We're not talking about department of defense stuff.
This is just how do we rectify this problem
in our community and nobody has an answer?
Yeah, you do have a name before to go.
You could fearically do a white pages search,
come up with something to at least
hang a secretary's door.
No, no, my point is just that someone whose job
is about this doesn't even have that knowledge.
Okay, that's not common knowledge.
And yet I pass through that thing almost every day.
And there's also the thing that you're making valid point
deep geek about, yes, you could go to town hall,
knock on the door and see, hey, what's going on?
What can I do to get involved?
That's a totally valid way to get started.
But I do think that in some areas,
you almost, you kind of have to know to look for it.
Like if Lawson Bronx had sat down one day and said,
gee, I really want to take a class
on the local police department.
That would be one thing.
He didn't even know to look for it though.
So I think there is a certain level of stuff out there
that would matter to us that we don't even know
to look for, and yet much, much less
can be find it if we look for it.
And yet there is stuff out there right now online
that would teach me all kinds of nonsense
that I never needed to know and never even wanted to know.
You know, I got a bit that I don't even
know if there's a town newspaper anymore.
I grew up in a small town called Merrick.
And we actually had a publication called Merrick Life.
And I don't even know if we have local actual news
paper.
Think about that for a second.
It's not even that I don't know where this stuff is.
I'll have to look in the paper.
You don't even know if it's being advertised anywhere.
If there's the forum for that announcements
to even be made, you know, despite the fact
that I went to this police department thing,
hey, I don't know when the next town hall meeting might be.
I don't even know where the frickin' town hall is in this town.
It's crazy.
I don't know where it is.
But I'll take bets that you'll find out within 48 hours.
That's something I can find out the moment I stop recording.
OK, that's something I could find out easily.
It's not hard.
I could get the address and I could go there.
That's not my point.
OK, the actual knowledge of this thing
is not my point.
The knowledge is that it is so buried under noise, you know.
And when their next meeting is going to be an actively
participating in it, it's not something
that comes to us automatically.
The way knowledge of Hugh Hefner's death does.
That stuff gets blared.
Blare.
You have to actually work hard to avoid that sort of thing.
You know, it's not just that.
It's also buried underneath a layer of apathy
that's very hard to understand.
I mean, I work in the supermarket industry.
And my last supermarket after I worked there for decades
went under.
And the last meeting, the last meeting before they went under,
I had one other person come with me finally
to a union meeting.
And I was just amazed, you know.
I feel like that apathy, I think it's
a chicken and egg type of scenario,
because I'm not convinced that the apathy
is responsible for the non-participation
as much as I wonder sometimes if way
that we have successfully buried the knowledge
of how you can possibly make a difference
in your local community has just created
such a feeling of impotence among all the people
within that community.
It's just like, why should I try?
I mean, really.
Like, why should I try to contribute to this community?
I have no idea how to do it.
I don't have confidence that I'm going to matter.
And I think I like to think that if we made it more obvious
to people and inviting for people to be like,
hey, this is your community, let's get together
and figure this stuff out.
And I'm talking on the five block radius level.
I'm talking about local, local communities.
Figure stuff out, assemble teams.
I think that would make a difference.
So I could be wrong.
Like within a city's ward.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, because I lived in a city for a while
that had like five wards.
And that was where you started.
Yeah.
I only found that out later.
But I mean, you know.
Actually, I'm very glad that Klaatu brought that up
because there was an article that I read today
that I'm going to link to in the show notes event.
I'm going to have some show notes anyway with this.
It's an article on a site called splinternews.com.
And I'll have the link.
And the name of the article is welcome
to an American city where the government barely exists.
And the long and short of it is that this is a small,
if you want to call it, ward within the city of Detroit.
And as we know, Detroit's many problems.
Those have been in the news quite a bit for years now.
And in this small community,
they have begun to rebuild it themselves
without city government participation,
without federal government participation.
They have worked very, very hard and are still
there a long way from being where they want to be.
They put up their own street lights
when the power company came and ripped all the street lights out.
They ripped them all out because the city owed so much money.
And then instead of just turning them off,
they took them all back because apparently,
there's a rental cost even associated
with having the street light there.
They came and ripped them all down, took them all down.
So you had these black as midnight streets
in the gutted urban environment.
And that was unacceptable to people.
So they started putting up their own street lights.
They're rebuilding their community centers.
They're making affordable housing all themselves.
And to me, that's almost a sterling example
of what I'm talking about.
But it's that level of participation.
It isn't, I'm gonna get elected
and I'm gonna go to Washington, right?
Because I think we've all seen
what that really means to the average person.
It doesn't mean very much at all,
at least in my experience.
Okay.
That tells us goodbye, Mr. Chips.
I just believe if you don't participate in your,
you know, again, I hate to use the term grassroots
because it's almost meaningless.
But if you don't participate at the local level,
then you don't really have any idea
what's going on right outside your door.
Forget about Washington and all the fat cats on either side
of the political fence.
That's really, really not at all what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about what's happening in your own town,
what's happening in your own street.
Those are the things that really matter to you
because what happens there is gonna hit you first.
If the road is bad, you're gonna know it
the very next day when you gotta leave the house.
If your water is contaminated,
you're gonna know it the very next day.
You're gonna know as soon as it happens,
this stuff is local, it's immediate
and it's vital that we participate in that.
But that participation isn't all on us.
The government, your local government,
has to be transparent.
They have to invite you in.
Apathy plays a part of it, but as Clant 2 points out,
I think a good portion of that apathy comes
from people feeling like they can't make a difference.
That nothing that they can do is gonna change anything.
But when a government comes forward and says,
or an aspect of the government,
in the case of the police department,
comes forward and says, look, this is what we do.
And we want you to be a part of it.
We want you to know what we're doing.
We don't want it to be a secret.
Come and join us, be part of this.
When that happens, I think all the changes
and that as corny as it sounds, the dream,
the American dream, that's where it begins.
You know, not just the American dreams though,
but I mean, also, I don't know if you guys
know anything about Cuba,
but Cuba is not based on a party system.
It has one party, but they have a local level
that elects people up to the next office.
And people rise from the local community
to the community that governs the whole island.
So I don't think it's just the American dream.
I think it's probably something
endemic to humans in general.
Well, that may be true, but of course,
I'm talking from a very particular point of view
as my opening speech illustrates
that I'm coming from small town America.
And a lot of the things that we see happening
in the federal government that we all,
all of us see as a major problem, bureaucracy,
complete indifference to the suffering of people
on a local level or across seas.
I think a lot of these problems stem from the fact
that we feel we cannot make a change.
I mean, we had an election for president
that was highly, highly politicized
and very charged on both sides.
And many people feel that they went out,
they participated by voting and nothing changed.
They didn't get the outcome they wanted
and they feel like things got worse.
Many people feel that way.
And I'm of the opinion that who cares
what the federal government is gonna do, right?
That's Mount Olympus, okay?
That's what the gods are about
because there's no way the average person
is gonna make a difference there.
I don't care what your vote is.
There's no way that's gonna happen.
What can happen happens here?
So what they're choosing to do in Washington,
we have a say in here because if they make a choice
that we don't like here,
at least the way the United States is structured,
we have a say in whether or not we wanna implement that.
And we might be powerless, but we can do something about it.
We can have a say locally in a lot of these things,
but only if we participate.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at HackerPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network
that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
then click on our contributing
to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound
and the Infonomicom Computer Club.
And it's part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
If you have comments on today's show,
please email the host directly,
leave a comment on the website
or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise status,
today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution, ShareLite, 3.0 license.
hou.com