RFP Press
♦ Three million light years across internet we noticed an editorial weighing in on what’s getting to be known as Downtown Salisbury ONLY’s Visioning Forum. This is where Salisbury special interest groups gathered together to talk about their designs on Rowan County and how to make the county taxpayers fund their sustainable experiments. The editorial mentions an old church in Fredericksburg, VA where the structure appears tranquil and dignified. Then a photographic slide of the surrounding development was portrayed as chaotic and congested, a shining example of what you don’t want a city to look like. (According to the aesthetic and slightly claustrophobic standards of the editorial writer) An anti-vision. Some people might actually prefer a closer-knit structures especially people coming from dense urban areas. But this conflict in values is of little matter. Beauty, utility, and ”suffocation” are in the minds of the beholder.
The editorial went onto state what the forum process is NOT about and that the organizers wanted to accent the positive. Odd considering that the visioning forum was motivated by Mark Lewis’s “disturbing demographic.” To many accenting the positive without the presence of the negative is a good way to negate critical thinking. Often times people claiming to be progressives sidestep critical thinking and the future consequences and costs of projects. Hence you have “build it and they won’t come” flops like ball yards, Fibrant, public bus services carrying only a handful of people all day, and the partially filled Salisbury Service Center. The builders and archtects profit, but the taxpayer loses because the critical part got filtered out. Such are the challenges of half thought out projects looking only at the positives. (Cults, bad corporations, and thin skinned city managers often call for positive thinking only and condemn naysayers) At the Rowan Free Press we give a solid thumbs up for critical thinking.
When the editorial claimed its not about city people telling county people what they ought to do, this seemed erroneous. Obviously to anyone in attendance it was overwhelmingly city people who were recruited through a chamber of commerce press release and Marc Lewis’s email. Of the 200 hundred present likely 94% of them were like-minded Downtown Salisbury ONLY. Add in the way the tables were set up along with how the leaders at each table guided the discussions and you indeed have Downtown Salisbury ONLY steering the forum’s Salisbury-centric’s direction.
We agree with the editorial when they wrote that no outside organization was trying to promote an agenda. Yet, Mr. McMahon was handpicked by Downtown Salisbury Only to steer the vision completely in their direction. Mr. McMahon was thoroughly steeped in Downtown Salisbury’s ONLY talking points about getting along and not fighting–acquiescing to the Downtown Salisbury ONLY’s vision of getting the county to pay for their downtown Salisbury building adventures and city master plans. The whole scene was completely manipulated.
Do we really need to come to some consensus about what we’d like Rowan to be known for? Who really cares about some brand or phase to describe an entire county? The reality is that Salisbury has become an undesirable place for people to live, send their youngsters to school, trot down its dangerous streets, and rub elbows with over a quarter of the population in poverty. The “disturbing demographic” that Mark Lewis wrote about in his email.
To have a fuller understanding of Rowan and Salisbury requires not only what you brag about, but what is driving people to either not come here, live and set up business here or to take part in urban flight.
Driving people through the West Square Historic District with its pretty homes, a large part of Downtown Salisbury ONLY, and taking visitors to lunch downtown will provide them with a positive misperception of Salisbury not unlike a certain print newspaper’s overly positive puff piece approach to writing about the city government’s “accomplishments”. It reminds us of the spin in Orwell’s “1984″ or how cults present their best face to the world and create a closed-information society for their true believers.
There are numerous reasons why a positive only take on the world doesn’t have much currency in successful business planning, successful governments, or in the world of psychotherapy. Realistic thinking with measure of critical thinking and examining what works hauls the freight.
People best see all the qualities in a community and not dismiss and deny the critical or the negative. It is self-defeating to think only positive thoughts.
