Solutions vs Answers: A Perspective on a 'Relationship of Engagement', First Half

Years ago, the US made decisions that went something like this:

Regarding crime: Harsher sentences, more cops, more jails.

Regarding drug use: Harsher sentences, more foreign-based DEA interdiction, more cops, more jails.

The result? The highest percentage of incarcerated population in the world.

So to me, they've been prioritizing 'answers' rather than 'solutions'.

The 'solution' to a 'crime problem' involves addressing whatever it is that propagates the crime. (I'm not going to get into what these 'contributing factors' might be, because that veers the conversation markedly.)

An 'answer' is to lock people up, separate them from the population...live with the entrenched repeat-offender situation...and the habitually-criminal neighbourhoods and communities, the fractured families, the endemic poverty...

The 'solution' to the 'drug problem' involves addressing whatever it is that promotes the drug use.

An 'answer' is to lock people up, separate them from the population...live with the entrenched repeat-offender situation...and the habitually-criminal neighbourhoods and communities, the fractured families, the endemic poverty...

Closer to Life for most of us, the 'solution' to an 'obesity problem', one that has attached to it related health risks such as Type 2 Diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and cancer, is to address eating habits, activity levels, the general default setting of how people live their lives.

The 'answer' to an 'obesity' problem' is... I don't know; more faux regulations? Protracted hemming and hawing, the dissemination of misinformation? (There is no 'solution' if the Major Players are set to lose anything; they simply won't allow it.)

The 'solution' to a 'personal financial crisis' is to educate people at a young age as to the realities of living in a free-market, materialistic democracy, giving them enough of an opportunity to garner perspective to allow them to make pragmatic, mature Life decisions.

The 'answer'? Again, I don't know, due to the fact that the Major Players have too much at stake and really don't want to see our validation-through-acquisition, debt-centric world change one iota.

What I'm proposing in trying to eventually create an increased 'relationship of engagement' between residents and their Councillors, is to manifest a sea-change in how we view local governance. But this sea-change isn't really 'about' politics. The good that we'd -eventually- witness in how municipal government operates would merely be a wonderful end-result.

Which is why rules and regulations and proscribed terms of acceptable behaviour on the parts of our elected officials are, not putting too fine a point on it, a misdirect. Perhaps not entirely useless, but addressing the entirely wrong side of the equation.

Does anyone really believe that much of the stuff that people complain about when discussing their local government would transpire if the playing field looked entirely different? Because the kind of 'accountability' I'm basing my philosophy on is not what the average politician (such as Larry Di Ianni, his latest push found here) broadcasts. While these sorts of measures are all fine and good, they really only address trying to prevent blatant behavioural transgressions (how's that for a mild pejorative term?) that so many politicians are ultimately prone to.

Imagine an entirely different paradigm within which the amount of contact, the degree of engagement between citizen and Councillor created an entirely new process. One that would find the kind of complaints I've been hearing throughout the city about Councillors be rarities, not commonplace occurrences. One that would see ongoing communication -a genuine back-and-forth dialogue- take place over the entire term. One where actual, authentic 'accountability' would be in place.

(As I continue to mine this strange territory associated with an increased 'relationship of engagement', I'm really curious as to whether politicians in general grasp what 'accountability' is. Or if maybe they have their own bespoke definition...one that seemingly means a kindasorta patronizing indulgence of the masses. Sorry; I just dripped sarcasm all over myself...)

(Next up: How all this applies to local governance and a 'relationship of engagement')