Waynesboro: No I in team

First off, Waynesboro progressives are interesting progressives. I count as key members of the progressive base several people who I know (from having looked ‘em up online!) give money regularly to not only Emmett Hanger but also Steve Landes and Bob Goodlatte when they’re running for re-election.

That’s an indication of how far to the extreme right the right is here in Waynesboro. Those over in the middle look like pinko commie liberals in comparison.

So our tent is big. Had to get that out there for starters.

The big question – one I haven’t been able to get my hands around since I outed myself as a politically interested person two years ago when I declared and ran for City Council – what do we stand for?

(The sound you hear right now is crickets chirping.)

Um … er …

(More chirping.)

Some of us just don’t like that guy Frank Lucente. Me, the political analyst in the room, says Lucente, the would-be mayor come July 1, deserves a lot of credit. For a guy who couldn’t win an election back home in West Virginia to save his life, has things figured out here in Waynesboro. Tear up on camera when necessary, and when isn’t it necessary to tear up on camera (?), wave the Wayne Theatre bloody shirt around whenever there’s heat on something, related or not, preferably not, and just repeat the word taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, ad nauseam, and you can win elections here.

Pretty sad, isn’t it?

I’ll tell you how he does it. Our side doesn’t have a backbone.

I’m not saying there that we don’t have guts. We’ve got plenty of guts. We’re still trying to rebuild the Wayne Theatre despite 10 years of butting our heads up against its brick. We’re still trying to redo our downtown with the City Council pulling the rug out from under us and everybody from the outside looking in (read: Charlottesville, Staunton, Richmond!) telling us that we’re wasting our time.

Guts, we got. A backbone, we lack.

It’s all about that question that I posed above – what we do stand for?

Our lack of a spine makes us rubbery. The Wayne comes up in a hotly contested election – what do we do? We try to change the subject. And we hope like hell that it doesn’t come up so that we don’t have to change the subject.

We’d love to talk about how we want to support our schools more than the current power structure seems to want to allow. But we don’t – because that sounds like the kind of thing that liberals who want to raise your taxes will say.

Two years ago Jeremy Taylor and I went down swinging in support of a plan to actually accomplish long-needed improvements to our stormwater system and to build that West End fire station that people in that part of town feel like was promised to them in the 1980s annexation.

Neither have happened, and I doubt that they will happen anytime soon, as long as the do-nothings are in charge, anyway.

So we showed some backbone there and got our butts handed to us. Then we shrank back from saying anything substantive in 2010 and got our butts handed to us again.

How do we get this thing turned around, then, you’re asking?

I throw it right back at you – what do we stand for?

The do-nothings are if nothing else unified around a core message. We’re not going to raise your taxes. They don’t squabble, at least in public, over the particulars of this project or that initiative. Partly because they don’t have many of the latter, and when it comes to the former, if a project doesn’t get done, like Lucente’s push for new emergency traffic signals, it’s just more fodder for the fire that he tries to keep lit for the populace that government is at its core incompetent.

Our side needs to develop a similar discipline. We’ve got a lot of good people doing a lot of good things. The group leading the effort to renovate the Wayne, for example. The people who keep the Waynesboro Heritage Museum up and running and have it looking so nice and new and fresh. So many young entrepreneurs downtown who are trying to forge a creative class in spite of the hassles of doing so with a City Hall that doesn’t seem to be aware that it’s not the 1950s anymore.

An observer new to the Waynesboro scene recently observed to me that the problem for our side isn’t that we don’t have a critical mass of people to form an action team that could start to getting things accomplished, but it’s that we have so many people with blinders on fighting to do the one thing that they want done who can’t see the forest for the trees.

The term that was coined for me on this was egocentric altruists – basically the idea being that we have a lot of people here who want to do the right thing, but only their right thing. Which is understandable in part because of what we’re facing politically. The do-nothings in City Hall have done their best to dismantle everything that we’d built up in the 2000s, to the point where we’ve all been reduced to fighting for whatever we can get in terms of the scraps left on the big table.

The way I see it, we can go from here in one of two directions on this. We can continue fighting amongst ourselves for the scraps, or we fight the other guys for control of the kitchen.

We’ve got plenty of people with the guts to give this a whirl. Want to be part of the backbone?