REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
By John Tredrea
My favorite thing about this job is the pressure to have no opinions. Not to have an opinion on something that has other people stirred up is a very liberating thing. This opportunity can be habit-forming to a degree that can be bad, I think. I’ve reached the point where I can easily have no opinion on any issue, including those that have very little or nothing to do with Hopewell Valley. And, of course, one must have opinions in a democracy. That’s the price we must pay.
Here at home, I’m supposed to write unbiased stories. One way to increase the chance to succeed at that is to have no opinion on the subject of the story. If you have no opinion, you can’t be biased. That doesn’t mean people won’t think you are unbiased, however. More than once, I’ve been accused of being biased by people on both sides of a bitterly divisive issue. What a relief that was.
It took a long time and thousands of conscious reminders to develop this faculty of indifference. The beauty of it is that, since it’s prerequisite to doing my job the way it needs to be done, I have no choice. To have no choice, but not to care! Only a fool would look that gift horse in the mouth.
One thing this cultivated indifference entails is a recurrent perception that tunnel vision distorts the picture. Time and again, we see individuals or groups of people criticize local governments or the school board or administration over some issue. Some of this criticism is marked by tremendous anger, condescension and sarcasm. I was pondering this while I read a recent story in the New York Times about a nationwide trend of people quitting, at a rapidly increasing rate, jobs with local governments. A simultaneous trend, the story said, is that these jobs are getting harder and harder to refill. "It’s just too political," said one man who gave up being a city manager for another line of work. He said a mouthful that time.
The issues that inspire local opposition to municipal or school district decisions are often very emotional ones. Two recent examples are school busing and holiday celebration guidelines in the schools. Perhaps it seems biased that both examples involve the schools. But a long-since retiree of the Hopewell Valley school board once said to me: "There’s nothing more political than a board of education." I have to agree. (Then there’s what former U.S. Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O’Neill once said: "All politics is local." That seems true, and if it is, our war in Iraq may be utter futility, since by apparent definition you cannot fight someone else’s civil war. But I digress.)
Time and time again, while reading or hearing criticism of the school board, or a local municipal government, I have felt that the speaker or writer was laboring under the certitude that the board or government had little or nothing else of importance on its hands besides the issue that provoked the criticism. That’s tunnel vision. School busing or holiday celebration guidelines may be tremendously important to me or you. And the school board’s decision on such matters may be hard to understand or bitterly offensive. But they have hundreds of other issues on their plates as well all the time. They also have their own lives.
Pompous sarcasm and thinly veiled accusations of double-dealing aren’t going to help anything, it seems to me. But they probably will decrease the credibility of those delivering them and increase the probability that good, competent people are going to pass on the opportunity to serve on local government agencies. It doesn’t make much sense to volunteer to be repeatedly called manipulative, blind and stupid all at the same time, no less. The people on the school board and two of our three local governments get paid nothing for these efforts. Township Committee members get an annual stipend that, for the hours they put in, must translate to far, far below the minimum wage.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are some utter rascals in local government. Why wouldn’t there be? There seems to be a quotient of utter rascals everywhere humans can be found. But unless there is totally incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I believe these local officials are at least entitled to the assumption that they are acting in good faith. After that assumption, common courtesy can only follow, along with the best possible compromise for all parties.
Indeed, extreme courtesy is a brilliant political maneuver a brilliant way to increase the chance of getting what you want, that is. Unless, of course, what you really want is just to badmouth somebody in public. That’s my opinion, anyway. OK, I’ll stop.