Stockholm Syndrome And History’s Down Escalator

I am always surprised at the number of public administrators these days who appear to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where hostages begin to defend their captors.

Ask these individuals a question about a level of service or upkeep and they note how stretched they are for resources.  But when attempts are made to rally the electorate to motivate elected officials to provide the funding necessary to do the job right, these individuals almost always begin back peddling if not diving under the table.

There is definitely the impression that retribution is alive and well among civil servants and not just politicians, undermining more than a hundred years of civil service reform.

This behavior also enables elected officials and pundit enablers to gridlock measures popular with the general public.

In the electorate we are under the impression that administrators openly and passionately advocate within government for resources and services sufficient to do right by the public and publicly owned property and that the merits of these discussions find their way to elected officials where they are further examined and and help to create insight and inform decisions.

I fear that isn’t the way it is working in practice these days.  Public administrators seem far more willing to push back on the electorate with excuses about why things can’t be done properly than they are to advocate for what they need to get the job done.

Even if they aren’t silenced within agencies, in my experience they can be subject to interference and even threats by elected officials.

By-products of this dilemma are not only gridlock and less passionate advocates within agencies but a passive CYA culture when it comes to holding the line in the face of special interests or the now ubiquitous absence of strategic thinking.

In contravention of one of the 8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees public administrators who are passionately outspoken about their jobs today are often suppressed into silence for fear that they will be accused of rocking the boat or draw retribution from and even “scalp-hunting” from elected officials while those who are inept are given safe haven.

The result is that lobbyists and special interests have free reign over what was meant to be in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” while in the words of Hardin Tibbs month before last, both administrators and elected bodies in “democratic governments seem increasingly populist rather than strategic, and wait for electoral pressure before risking policy initiatives.”

Tibbs, a business consultant, eloquently blogged six months ago that we stand at the convergence of two major historical tendencies where “ascending upsides and descending downsides meet, converging in a fleeting moment of equal power, which pushes open the door of possibility to its widest extent.”

He continues that “Now is when our mere attitudes about the future can make a decisive difference.  Here is a tipping point in time where we can jump from the down escalator of history onto the up one.”

Tibbs argues that “Now the main risk is getting caught in the downdraft of pessimism, for here is an opening of maximum creativity.”

“The ideas we debate now will crystallize into the template of the era to come – the transmodern civilization being born.”

In my opinion, we need passionate public administrators, not just politicians, to be a part of that debate.

Openness–The Road Less Traveled By

Probably because the word “tolerance” has a condescending ring to it, various research studies conducted over the last three or more decades which are designed to identify what makes a community attractive to talented people and thus economically vibrant shifted instead to using the term “openness.”

Durham, North Carolina, where I live, has been scientifically documented to be 2.3 times more open than the benchmark for communities in this state or across the nation.  The value of openness also surfaced as a key element in the community's personality as distilled a few years ago from a series of balanced focus groups and scientific surveys of the opinions of both residents and non-residents.

Maybe it was because I was new and people sought to influence my initial perceptions, but in the few weeks after I moved here in 1989 to jumpstart Durham's official community marketing agency or destination marketing organization, a position from which I have now been retired for two years, I had several encounters that shed some light on the struggles of the previous decades that most likely shaped the value Durham places on openness.

In one experience, a high-level state tourism official in Raleigh told me that Durham had always been a “black town.”  In another encounter I quickly terminated a recently-hired employee when I overheard him tell a Raleigh-based state association meeting planner that downtown Durham was just for Blacks.  Neither person meant their reference in a good way.

On another occasion, a prominent physician took me on a tour during lunch and pointed to a now-defunct shopping mall as “Durham's real downtown,” explaining that it “had to be built” because downtown Durham had been surrendered to Blacks.

I also heard firsthand about the family experiences of two friends who are nearly a decade younger than I am and who entered high school at the time of desegregation of the Durham public schools.  Both were raised in homes less than a quarter mile apart located not far from where I live today.

One friend’s family elected to send their high school aged children to the nearby recently desegregated high school where the student population is predominantly African-American. They went on to graduate with honors and have lived and worked in Durham to this day.

The other friend’s family, also Caucasian, elected instead to buy a second home in South Durham in which they lived one week each month so their high school-age children could attend a school where the students were predominantly white.  They went on to graduate with honors and also live and work in Durham to this day.

The descendants of both families celebrate the openness of Durham today.  Their stories along with two books I highly recommend gave me insight into how Durham's openness evolved.

One book entitled The Best of Enemies is the true story of how a man and a woman living in Durham, he the head of the Ku Klux Klan and she an African-American activist, worked together to desegregate schools here. The other is entitled The Provincials by Eli Evans which includes the true story of his father Mutt Evans a Jewish six-term Mayor of Durham during the 1950s and early 1960s who was also head of United Dollar Stores and who took the seats out of the store’s lunch counter so that standing Whites and Blacks alike could be served together while, at the same time, defeating a law and a judicial order intended to segregate them.

Jazz saxophonist performing and recording star Branford Marsalis eloquently articulated Durham's openness when, during an interview on The State of Things, a program on WUNC public radio, he described why he moved here:

"Durham is everything I ever wanted in a City. It's fair…You can find everything… people who are wealthy, people who are not wealthy, blue collar workers, white collar workers, farmers. They are all hanging out together. You go in the grocery store and you see people talking. It's not like the farmers on one corner and the lawyers are in one corner. In Durham, you don't have those stringent class lines."

 

While it is clear that Durham chose “openness” when “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” it is also evident that many communities and a high percentage of all Americans are still conflicted if not, contrary.  It is often quoted that in 1940, only 18% of Americans received some sort of government benefit compared to 49% of households today who benefit in some way from nearly two-thirds of all federal spending, as one essayist did on Christmas Eve.

Those who quote these statistics seem to fail to grasp, though, that from the 1930s to the 1950s government programs were purposely designed to primarily benefit only White people.  It is interesting that such a large portion of the population only became concerned about how many people were benefiting when, as a result of the Civil Rights movement, legislation was passed to grant those same benefits to all Americans, regardless of race or class.

Understanding when that shift in opinion began to occur reveals a lot about the rationale behind today's polarized public discourse. Just sayin…