Dec 31

Written by:
12/31/2011 6:17 PM 

For some time I've been a monotonous commenter on news about the VMICC also, lately, about the All-Island Forum. It's put that way because the whole time I'd been telling both outfits how they should operate. This December 6th something snapped and I collected my advice in a last advisory. It bounced, and here is the epilog:

Once upon a time there was an island within easy reach of the mainland having berries, chickens, and trees. The trees went into houses, a town, and ships leaving more berries and about the same number of chickens. After the war Bill Kirschner developed a fiber glass dog cage that looked like a ski and founded K2 (mountain, brothers). Forty successful years as a Company Island ended in 2006 when K2 left. The current owner of The Dirt Yard had been a mechanic at K2. He knew engines. I once drove into The Dirt Yard with my ’94 Mercury. He sniffed and said, you have a head gasket leak. With the exception of a few survivors like him the old K2 work force commuted or left, and so predominantly Vashon became a bedroom. Three years after the departure a “K2” fault-line in Vashon society broke loose, with Tom Bangasser facing off against Vashon’s Council. It was like in nuclear fission the parts total less than the whole: for the next year or so the Council was unable to function. And even when Tom Bangasser was forced to yield up his position on the front burner, Council attendance lagged. Blame fell on the by-laws, on not representing the public. A competing Forum was founded that replaced the bylaws with Collaboration. Meanwhile the United States sagged ever closer to financial and social chaos. Even as ferry fares curved upwards and the health insurance industry conscripted the Clinic, neither Council nor Forum sounded the alarm. Even as Vashon storefronts shuttered and meth labs opened neither Council nor Forum initiated a full court press toward a local economy. Even as the burgeoning police attacks on the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered force, neither Council nor Forum hit the whoa button.

On December 6, 2011 an event in a California prison got to me and wouldn’t follow hundreds of like stories into my sequester sack. I had to do something. I would try to resolve the Council/Forum stasis. So I painted a long-standing dream of a town meeting hall and sent it out to 29 respected people. Of the 11 responses 5 were favorable. The dream notion was that it was not possible to have a representative body.  Instead, enable wide open, arm’s length interchange, then que sera, sera. Encouraged, I approached the Psccu, a lawyer, an acoustic designer, and an architect, using as hand-out two paragraphs from the painted dream. About then I realized I should seek out the many island groups that would be using “A Council House”. For that a better hand-out was needed. Well, I’d barely addressed the keyboard when a wave of impatience made me include what I felt to be the only way possible to fund it. Impatience, yes, because I knew I was writing my final pitch re the matter councilium. The trifold brochure resulted. The response has been dramatic. Nine copies of the draft went out: four people did not want their names to appear, and five did not respond. Only two of the four responses explained their decision. So I’ll have to guess which of the folds of that brochure was the sticker: it was the dual currency.

The end of the painted dream is paradoxical in that Vashon does not desperately need a council. What it desperately does need is a dual currency. It shouldn’t take a naïve, overeducated, silver-spooned Eastern snob to realize that.

It’s no mystery why better than I have failed and continue to fail to prepare us for the end of the dollar as a useful medium of exchange. That’s because any step toward that is a step back from personal electronics, an arts palace, pickup trucks bearing the Cadillac medallion, and soft lights in the Olde Hardware Store.

Tom Herring