Sunrise With Schubert

For years, I’ve been paid for answering questions from municipal officials in our state about urban planning. They vary, those questions. Some are easy to answer. Some will break your heart.

In either case, the people who ask them are some of the finest people who walk our planet. They represent the main contact that the average person has with that nebulous entity called “government.” They are underpaid, underfinanced, under appreciated and, as a former president put it, misunderestimated. They still get up and go to work for us each day, in whatever city they call home.

Some of their homes are in vibrantly developing areas. Others resemble the photograph of bombed out Berlin at the end of World War Two. In either case, the condition rests more in providence than in planning.

As the “Good Book” says, “Rain falls on the just and the unjust.” In like manner, good fortune falls on the deserving and the undeserving. A less adored source, one Karl Marx, opined that capitalism carries its own seeds of destruction. If so. the vibrant communities of today could be the traffic-clogged slums of tomorrow, bereft of money to pay upkeep on the streets and utility systems that their growth required.

As the song goes, “it’s a lesson too late for the learning.”

If a genie could offer me one wish with which to empower my scarce remaining professional time, it would be to have the imagination to think of how the once healthy farming communities in our state could be revitalized. No one has even come close yet, but they try. For a million gazillion dollars, a dandy consultant will fly in tell us, “You need to ‘empower’ those folks in the Delta.”

What does that mean? Roughly? Diddly squat.

Or, we could bus down a load of design students from our major university and, during the rare instances that their faces left their cell phones, those kids will draw pictures of kids riding bikes and waving. Then they will state the answer, “You need to create a ‘sense of place’ and ‘they’ will come.”

What does that mean? Not a goldarned thing, maybe even less. It’s one of those phrases that can mean whatever the speaker wishes.

Then we could fly down an “eco-devo” consultant from near Walmart headquarters and she or he would tell elected officials how to make quality businesses locate in their town. After all, she or he made it work up there. Single handedly.

Oh, don’t forget, chambers of commerce are big on “public-private partnerships.”

What does that mean?

Well, it’s when the taxpayers drop a lot of money in making an “iffy” business work and then stand weeping, like the Jewish psalmist, by the “Rivers of Babylon” when the developer skips town leaving the city with its debt and no business.

So, Smarty Pants, you might ask. Do you know the answer?

No. No I don’t. But I do know that the answer, whatever it might be, has not been stated, or even imagined, yet. If it were, however, it would be so daring and politically impossible that it would never reach the discussion phase under our current national mood. That would be even more true if its citizens included descendants of American slaves.

Maybe we start with the words of one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

What? Urban planning as love? Who ever heard of such a thing, even on St. Valentine’s Day?

Just thinking.