At the July 21st Council meeting, Councilor Brown made me an invitation to sit down with her and a ‘moderator’, asking each other questions along with questions from the audience. Below is my public response which I’ve already sent to council:
Councilor Brown,
I am writing to respond to your invitation to sit down, with a moderator and the public, to have a “community conversation”. In the spirit of your delivering that invitation publicly, I have included everyone on Council in this email and will have published it online for the public to review my answer by the time you receive it.
Firstly, I have to say that while I appreciate you reaching out in this way in a conciliatory spirit for the health of the community we share and represent, I’m afraid your unwillingness to extend this spirit earlier on in your tenure when I was trying to sow this relationship with you as colleagues, has allowed its degradation, and with that, a justifiable level of skepticism which I now rightly possess towards it and you. While it is not my fancy to get into the nitty-gritty of relationships in a public way, particularly as public figures, to understand our current position, and because you have made this advance, I’m now forced to share with you and the public what preceded it in order to understand it and answer your invitation. If you’d made this offer in private, I could have explained all of this in private, but…
Whether you or anyone could believe it, where I start from is love and care for my fellow human beings. I like people. I really, really do. I believe they deserve appreciation, respect, consideration and dignity. I consider them my brothers and sisters of God, all of them. Juxtaposing this however (life is a dichotomy) is my intolerance for certain things: bullies, duplicitous assholes, wanton ignorance, selfishness, mean-spiritedness, manipulation and government that doesn’t respond properly to the people and the tenets of proper governing our Constitution provides us. While I rightly accord public servants with the first set of beliefs, if the second set is present, the first set fades to some degree because I place a high value on both being a good person and proper governance. Those that truly know me know that a) I don’t suffer fools gladly, b) have a good and caring heart (it is my Mother’s which, I suspect, yours is yours) and c) am guided by the spirit of my good, kindly, civic-minded, gentlemanly maternal Grandfather. This trio sits at the base of me. This then brings me back to you…
I met you when you were selected for the last Charter Review Commission. You were young and my impression of you was as a kind person who was eager to do a good job and cared about the community. I detected nothing untoward that might compel mistrust. So strong was that first impression that it lasted a good while into our relationship as council colleagues, despite our cooling relations. While I could feel as I did early on, there is always, within the Whitehall government, the matters I take issue with, as I recorded in my blog over several years (that which I entreated you to peruse). The rightful mistrust I feel then shades my view of what goes on in our government. What you do, with whom and how, would always be a part of my observations of your entrance into Whitehall government. Cut then to your entrance onto council via mayoral appointment. Conflicts of interest are such an integral part of my complaints with the Whitehall government. Each of us has a great responsibility to catch and heed them when they arise (as best we are able) and while the mayor had his Charter right to do as he did, (despite the conflict that a legislator now beholding to the Executive branch presents) the fact that your ascent to council was more important to you than heeding conflicts of interest and the public trust was the first instance when I saw your carelessness towards it (through ignorance or naivete of such things, I don’t know. Given your youth and inexperience, while I didn’t like it, I did chalk it up to that).
Because of my goodwill for you, I then sat down with you to explain my POV in Whitehall. I was honest and direct with you as you deserve as a human being and colleague. There was no animus or ulterior motives. My POV is deeply explained in the Whitehall Watchblog I compiled over 9 years by that time. In the 2 ½ hours of time I afforded you at Tee-Jayes, we talked on a number of topics. While you had a right to enter the conversation with some degree of cynicism or pre-conceived judgement of me given who I am in Whitehall politics, my heart and intent was pure and open. While I didn’t want to spoil you with the entirety of my POV, I did want you to be informed enough so as not to approach this new position simply as a naive, wide-eyed naif. I didn’t want you to trust the wrong people or, honestly, get crushed by some of the offal in Whitehall politics and so, strove to warn you (I too was once that wide-eyed optimistic guy). I liked you and believed in you and hoped for the best outcome for you. However, by conversations end, you said or intimated that I was racist (which as you remember pissed me off so badly, I was getting up to leave) and the overall feeling I got from you was not gratitude or appreciation for the spirit of my offerings or the time or effort I’d taken with you but rather disbelief, upset and resentment over the things I shared (difficult though they may be). I had either failed to communicate with you what I know to be true or you simply couldn’t or refused to comprehend what I shared. Either way, that set us on the path we then embarked.
From that moment on then, you seemed to have found like-minded denizens in ‘Team Forward Together’. You had a mission and a vision for yourself as a councilman in the community which you wanted and I believe that you felt that if you’d involved yourself with the scratchy, disgruntled agitator, that would probably put the kibosh on those dreams. So, instead of simply staying neutral as you entered council or in this fight, you chose a side (that now had vested interests in you). Doing so then set you on a course, not independently on the dais next to me but, at natural odds with me based on who you chose to align with (those who’d already damaged the public trust through ignoring conflicts of interest for self-benefit). As time and your relationship with them wore on, either from adopting your denizen’s viewpoint or to defend them as a show of allegiance to them, you started to criticize me at meetings, joining forces with them then through demeaning and endlessly condescending commentary. That which has been going on now for a couple years. Perhaps it gained you points with the team (your group you’d found), but what it also accomplished was to destroy, bit by bit, any chance of a professional, collegial relationship with a colleague who, having been born and raised here, has a strong voice and support in the community. As you did and your star rose among the well-connected on the dais, your popularity and regard among the citizens, fell. The citizens didn’t like what you were doing, this path you’d taken, and so it came out in all their criticism of you. That which seemed to double and treble then your seeming hatred and efforts against me. Ironic then that that criticism which you avoided by not aligning with me for the sake of your dream, you now wound up being the recipient of anyway.
Now we find ourselves in this gambit; whether I should trust you to take you up on your offer (that which sounds so benevolent on its surface) or reject it. I will not comment or argue the points you made in begging this offer, they stand on their own. While I heartily endorse open dialogue, particularly with public officials, this one is rife with political tiger pits given our sour relationship. The good-hearted person I am wants to trust you and your offer but, too much has passed between us, those you’ve aligned with hate me with a white-hot passion (“I never really cared for Mr. Dixon”) and the current climate is not conducive to trust. Couple that then with this; the time to have engendered open honest professional relationships would have been at the beginning (as I set out to do with you), not after the mud and the muck and the derision. You don’t spend years kicking someone and then extend a hand up from the ground you forced them onto. There is too much political blood and gore for such easy second acts. And yet, I do believe in redemption, I do believe in enlightenment, I heartily believe in, and have benefited from second chances, that which we all as children of God deserve.
I still believe in you Devin, I still believe in your capacity for doing the right thing. Whitehall isn’t the end-all be-all, it’s just a place but…a place we can truly make something of or relegate to a wasted nothing. The choice is ours and the result is what we invest into that. My hometown matters to me and always has. That choice has always been yours to make. I wish your good heart had utilized yours to more righteous outcomes, for you and for Whitehall.
Thank you for the offer but, I have to decline. You do you and I’ll do me. When good things are brewing, I hope we, as I independently have in the past, can join together and do, as best as we can independently judge it to be, what’s good and right and best for Whitehall and its governance.
Best,
Jerry
FROM THE DESK OF: Ward 1 Councilor Gerald Dixon 