This thread is a subtweet to a City Council Member from another city and a former candidate for Mpls City Council. It’s about the difference between healthy skepticism and unhealthy cynicism. 1/11
I think there’s a spectrum of trust for elected leaders. Like many spectra, when you get to one extreme or the other, it starts getting more toxic and destructive, and the extremes kind of reinforce each other. 2/11
On the one extreme, I don’t think hero worship is a healthy attitude towards elected leaders: they’re the best people, they’re going to make the best decisions, they have better judgment than the rest of us, we just need to back them up, no matter what. 3/11
But the other extreme is no more constructive: they’re all liars, they’re all the same, this is all a farce, it’s a pander, it’s pretend, it’s BS, no commitment they make matters. 4/11
(And yeah, cynicism is a marketable, if dangerous, commodity. I wonder how much $ those tweets about someone else’s city raised for that other-city Council Member?) 5/11
In my view, neither view is supported by reality. Electeds are people, and are good and flawed and courageous and cowardly and smart and dumb and progressive and reactionary and everything else that people are. 6/11
But more importantly, both extremes offer the same advice to people: stop trying. Stop working with government to make things better. Because either the electeds are so smart and good that they don’t need you to help, or they’re so rotten it will never work. 7/11
In the powerful middle of this spectrum is healthy skepticism. It says: take electeds at their word today, and HOLD them to it tomorrow. Celebrate the win even as we know we’re far from done. 8/11
It says: they’re saying this to us now, but what happens when others start advocating for the opposite of what we want (which they absolutely will, and loudly)? The electeds might cave! We need to stay on them. 9/11
It says: we didn’t GET HERE because of the electeds alone. We got here because of an organized, powerful push from the community. We won’t get where we want to go next without that push continuing, building, ramping up. 10/11
It says: electeds are neither angels nor demons because neither exist. They are people. We can move them. Let’s go do the work to make that happen.
So yeah, get out of here with your cynicism – or hero worship! Neither is compatible with doing what we need to do. 11/11
So yeah, get out of here with your cynicism – or hero worship! Neither is compatible with doing what we need to do. 11/11
