Feb 6

Written by:
2/6/2012 1:54 PM 

Driving south past the new Taco Bellito at the old Sound Foods the other day I should have been watching the cross traffic but instead wondered what if the average islander knew the dollar cost of doing our roads. For that matter, I wondered as I passed Helen Puz’s place with its car hanging half out of the garage, if the average islander knew the cost of state trooper pensions. Better I should keep my mind on the road, but forty odd years living on Vashon had closed in on me. What if our schools taught Island living?

Following our tax dollars off island then to Olympia and back would be one thing all right, if a kind of damage control.  But think of the exhilaration of building an economy to replace K2 and the commute -- the exhilaration of leapfrogging the bedroom and arts community back to earth. Let youth re-connect us with living. Go, Pirates.

Instead of fussing at the County’s grip on land use and the state’s accommodation of income tax paranoia connect with Island living. It’s touchable, conceivable, inspirational:  island carbon balance, aquifer and littoral husbandry, returning arable land to use, large scale composting, solar heat, high bandwidth intra-island communication, zero trash off-haul, a bowling alley, school curricula that teach all that. Hey, just a minute.

The state education department finds out. Funds cut off until curriculum normalized. Panic? Have faith. Big showdown as seniors, challenged, blow away test after test picked at random. Their work in Forest Ecology 101 had taken them beyond the state level in mathematics. They know why one-hundredth in decimal form has one zero while one hundred in decimal form has two.  Have faith in living.

Us adults have had our chance. No past insult has caused so much damage as the commute. Cars have allowed us to live here but work stateside. Commuting destroys families. Money soon makes the cut and the lower cut disappears under a veneer of art. The result is a Vashon so fractured that it is incapable of concerted, informed response to social decay or to the economic stress of rising ferry costs during recession. And damaged, yes. No teen skate park or social center in the core village. No bowling alley. Art everywhere, but a drug-based underculture barely out of sight. What passes for concert is a Community Council divided and weakened by too much attention to County matters. Yet nothing is changing. Could it be that Vashon is trapped in a mass hysteria over the decay of Made In America, over the decay of Land of the Free?

The hysteria feeds on the daily news of horrors committed by the military and Homeland Security and on theft committed by the financial sector, news that we can do nothing about --- that we tell each other with straight face we can do nothing about. Here’s some news, Vashon: we can do with Vashon anything we decide to do. If we opt for teaching island living to our kids, then Vashon will grow whole. A whole Vashon can meet the loss of America with heads held high.