Anyone interested in city politics or the course of civic debate in Lansing should read this piece on governing.com. It refers to a New York town, but has haunting similarities to what I see happening in Lansing.
The primary thrust is about the workplace and handling the problem of “learned helplessness.” Still, I think some points apply to Lansing’s civic culture, especially this line: “I learned from early interviews with residents that the biggest barrier to success wasn’t high taxes or closed factories. It was attitudes. Residents didn’t believe that they and their leaders could turn the city around.”
I’ve written here, and in the pages of the LSJ, about the Lansing 1958 mind-set. The people who caught in this world are not anti-Lansing; they just can’t seem to see any other way of doing things than what they know from past endeavors. What worked for Lansing before should work now, is one way to put it.
It won’t, though, and one of the challenges for those of us pushing in new directions is to think of ways, individual and collective, to convince our more-reluctant neighbors to try something new.
Step one is reminding people that they can have an impact, if they want one. Active citizenship is hard, time-consuming work; it’s easier to decry the state of affairs as bad and something outside of one’s control.
Such self-imposed helplessness does more damage to Lansing than any of us are willing to admit.
