Good Intention by Citizens and Government!

When you sit on a 15 member citizen's committee to work with a federal agency, you can expect trouble of all sorts. But when committee members are empowered with the ability to represent themselves rather than their organization labels, the good intention of the members and their ability to cooperate based on mutual trust enable our group to effectively cooperate to make the day informational rather than adversarial.

Kudos go to the US Bureau of Land Management on creating an environment where people feel comfortable asking and answering tough questions. Personal integrity of the committee members to be themselves and ask their questions from the point of view of really wishing to hear the answer allowed the string of presenters to feel comfortable with the process.

There are solomons in every community that will represent people well when allowed to work in their mutual best interests - well beyond the politicized judicial system. Perhaps reforming government by allowing citizens to debate issues and decide strategy and the public servants willing to play in the fair process - everybody wins. This committee has no political labels - every voice is respected and the job is attacked rather than the people doing the jobs.

Government empowering people to decide the function of government. Awesome concept! Let we the people streamline the functions of government by operating a real local budget - and telling congress what agencies to eliminate - keep only agencies where the jurisdiction level rises to national need. Bottoms up rather than top down. Give it 3 years and you would see the meriken malaise disappear.

And congress of course will now budget cut the rural schools act that allowed this to happen. But at least they got it right once. Thanks Jay and Jake, Becky - Cary, E.Lynn and many others - at least we seem to be functional at this point in time. It also helps to have more good projects than funding available.

My anarchist self says the whole thing should just go away. But the practical scientist says that we can not elimate government entirely. But really - there is so much superfluous government these days, with disinformation to boot, that we could spend the next decade reeducating everyone and not lose any productive work. But not with government skuls.