If one more person says to me 'Jill, the perfect is the enemy of the good' when condemning my pursuit of a 'model' animal shelter I'm going to bust a gut. The thing about Voltaire - who is credited with the original version of that overused and stupid phrase - is that he also wrote that 'man' would be free at the moment he insists upon it - try that on for size if you're currently sitting in the back of a container being sold as a sex slave in Thailand for American and German tourists. Voltaire also noted that 'it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong' (my fave Voltaire quip). And while Voltaire was a writer of the era of 'enlightenment', he was critical of democracy because he saw it as 'propagating the idiocy of the masses'. In other words, take your pick dear reader from the many populist sayings of Mr V. He is the intellectual version of Rumi. Good luck with that.
Personally I think the weak is the enemy of the good. I don't mean weak people, though it is often the weak minded in government who opt for the timid approach in order to achieve consensus which they regard as automatically good. Is this sounding remarkably like the health care debate? Yes, it freakin' is. Obama's obsession with getting a cross party vote on important reforms (whether strategic to prove the point that Republicans will always vote no to progress no matter how many olive branches he extends, or a true reflection of his bi-partisan desires) is leading to the weak solution - not the good.
I'm not saying my pursuit, my passion, my obsession for the 'best' animal shelter we can build is in the same realm as my being able to afford health care again (I was a Kaiser member for 20 years until my monthly premium meant I paid my mortgage or my health care), but the pattern is the same. Of government being unwilling to stop a freight train even when there is a baby carriage on the tracks. Perhaps the baby carriage is empty, they hope. "We've gone too far to stop now." "If we stop now it'll cost us even more later on." Or the classic "Just get the damn thing built" in the words of a former Council member who said in a meeting she was quoting the Mayor.
I am a perfectionist actually. It's a troubling condition which means that I can't go and work in my office unless I have cleared the table in the dining room which inevitably means I have to clean the shelves in my office before I can file the papers on my dining room table, and if I am at the computer in my office all I can think about it the fact that I wasn't able to make my bed because I had put some of the papers to file on my bed in piles, and so was unable to move papers that are on my desk in the office to the table in the dining room because it is already covered with paper. If my computer desk has extra stuff on it, I can't sit down to type.
All that aside - my pursuit of the best animal shelter is not the enemy. Not the enemy of the good, not the enemy of progress, not the enemy full stop. The problem is the expediency and the dissembling half truths that government insists on churning out in order to keep on schedule and get the damn thing built.
"It will be better than what we have" some of these people who sit on City Council crow. That aint a real high bar to cross. And while looking directly at me one council member emitted a sort of snide but entirely false recitation of how many sites had been turned down (by me I think she means) while omitting that her closest ally on Council, the Mayor, had written in an email - that mistakenly got forwarded to me - that he was never going to allow the animal shelter to be built on what would have been the best site because it didn't fit his plan for the Gilman Street corridor - an Auto Row, generating those beautiful revenues from sales taxes to fund his perfect vision of Berkeley. He got his way - no animal shelter. Instead a two acre schoolbus maintenance yard was built which generates no income at all for the city but at least provides the school district employees a great place to eat across the street at Picante.
Berkeley. You gotta love a city that pretends to care. A city that is currently trying to diminish the power of citizens commissions because after all - like Monsieur Voltaire they think most of us are just the idiot masses....
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