A Conversation with the Ridgeview Community

To the people of Ridgeview, I have been asked by Jason Jett to address your community. The first thing I would like to say is that I would like to extend to you an early Happy New Year!

I truly hope that this will be a blessed upcoming year 2011 and it is my hope that the people of the Ridgeview community will have a positive and prosperous upcoming year. I know that most of us are going to struggle in this economy, but we must understand that we are the majority and there are many others that are in this boat with us and if we work together and strive towards excellence, then we will be in a better position in the future from which to obtain a better quality of life.

Quality of life is not about material possessions. It is about having a comfortable and secure environment from which to live life. This includes your home, your work, your business, and your relationship with others. I myself include a spiritual relationship with the God, but to those who feel threatened by such aspirations, I do not wish to harm you. I only express my love for God to show how I seek inner peace and contentment. That does not mean that I have inner peace and contentment, but I am striving for it, and this is the way that I can tolerate the imperfections and injustices that take place in this human world.

What we're seeing on the local level is what Catherine Austin Fitts termed "the Race to the Bottom." We are not striving for excellence in this community. We are striving to be cheap. Our local officials want to turn this into a retirement community where retirees can live on the cheap at the average person's expense. The average person will be turned into a servant in such a culture for the people that they would like to bring to the area termed "active retirees." I just don't understand why they think affluent 50 and 60-year-olds would want to come to an area where the local government refuses to invest in its infrastructure and it's people. Local officials continue to focus on the areas that are already doing well. Do they not know that these people who take a look at this area will eventually venture into the abandoned parts of town? What will those people think then.

I liked what I heard one lady say at that last City Council meeting. She stated, "We need to take care of our own first. Why are we worried about a marketing initiative, when so much of our area is not marketable?"

I agree with much of this. As the expression goes, "you can't put lipstick on a pig." I do agree that we do need to reach out and utilize the Internet as a way to make connections. I do believe that we need to network with other communities throughout the United States and beyond. But, I also think that we have to start resolving some of the issues that we face on the local front when it comes to the less privileged areas of Hickory.

A community is a body and the body is only as healthy as all of its parts. If your brain is functional, but your heart isn't, then you will die. The same goes vice versa. If you have cancer in one of your extremities, but you fail to take care of it, then eventually that cancer will spread throughout the body and you will die. What am I getting at? You have to take care of problems or eventually they will devastate you.

I don't believe that we strive for excellence in this community. I believe that we have individuals who strive for excellence, but the community as an entity does not strive for excellence. As an individual, the failure to aspire to be the best that you can be rests upon you and you alone. If you don't care about your performance as a human being, then the problem lies with you. As a community, we have to trust our leaders to take us in the direction towards excellence. I honestly have not seen this from our leaders. I have seen a least common denominator attitude; that the average people of this community should accept and do with less (it's better than nuthin"), while those who have relationships with our local leaders are taken care of. Do you think I like to say this? I hate to say this. It hurts to say this.

I truly do believe that the City Council has an us versus them attitude. That is the reason why they don't communicate well with others. They don't trust the people of this community. They think they know what is best and that everyone else is stupid or ignorant of the facts. Well, we wouldn't be ignorant to the facts, if they wouldn't always be trying to hide information. And that information belongs to the people of this community. If they received a report card on their ability to work well with others, they would receive a failing grade. Again, it hurts to say this about those who we depend on to be the leaders of this community.

The bottom line is that as average people living in this community, we are going to have to learn to operate in the system as it exists today. Eventually, we are going to have to persevere and endure the direction in which our local government is headed. If they insist that they remain obstacles to growth, then we will have to find a way to progress around them. That is what plants do. That is what any living organism has to do. It has to adapt to its environment.

With this understanding, we can waste our energy bemoaning the injustices that have taken place or we can look at the capabilities we have and the positive energy that we can create and we can move forward.

A fact that was brought to me today, that I really hadn't thought about was that the neighborhood associations on the South side of the tracks and in the Highland area are a lot more active than the neighborhood associations in the more affluent sections of Hickory. Why is this? It is because those neighborhoods (areas) have had to fight to get things done in the neighborhoods where they reside, while the more affluent neighborhoods have had the issues that they deal with proactively giftwrapped to them by the decision-makers with the City of Hickory. Have you noticed this?

I really believe that the local neighborhoods need to empower themselves more. If you feel disenfranchised, then why empower the people who have disenfranchised you? The best thing to do would be to operate your local neighborhood association outside of the realm and the power of City Hall. The City of Hickory does not own your local neighborhood association.

What am I getting at? We need Ridgeview to show the way for the regular folks in this community. I know that there are a lot of selfless wonderful people that do excellent community service in Ridgeview. Those are some of the best leaders in Hickory and most people don't have a clue of the contributions that these people have made to Hickory. We need Hickory to know these examples and the challenging circumstances they have faced and successes they have had. Most of the people in Hickory only hear about the bad things that have happened in the Ridgeview area. It is time people learn about the good things that have taken place in your community.

One thing that this pools issue has done is to apparently galvanize your community. It has given your community a focal point in which to express grievances about injustices that have taken place in the relationship between the City of Hickory and the Ridgeview community. But, like Billy Sudderth has espoused, this is not just about the swimming pools. This is about equity in governance.

Bravo! as it should be. This can't be just about the pools. This needs to be about the duplicity when it comes to city finances, development, and vision. Your community needs to learn that you may lose battles, but in the end it isn't about the battles, it's about the big picture. The Ridgeview community needs to figure out its goals and priorities and set forth a plan of action to implement and achieve those objectives.

When I addressed the Council, I pointed to the fact that only 77 people voted in the Ridgeview precinct on city election day in 2009. I have since been told that some people voted early at the Highland precinct. But even if you doubled the number, it means that Ridgeview was not fairly represented in the last citywide election and that lies fully in the Ridgeview community's hands. No one got out the vote. There was no energy for that election. And as Harry Hipps states, "if you keep doing what your doing, then you're going to get what you've got."

I know that we may not agree on all the issues. I cannot pretend to understand the plight of the African-American community. But, I do know that the people of Hickory are going to have to come together in the end, if we are to start making positive progress towards the future. We have not been doing that in this community. All over Hickory, the people have allowed themselves to look to others to show them the path to success. As individuals, in the end, it is our responsibility to empower ourselves. If we as individuals operate from a position of strength and success, then we can help others.

There are too many people that don't understand that if somebody else has success, then it doesn't mean that I am a failure. If someone else obtains wealth, then they aren't taking for me. It's not a zero-sum game folks. What we want to do in this community is start to grow the pie. We want everyone to have more. If my neighbor is successful financially, then that helps me. We want our environment to improve. We don't need to settle old scores. We don't need to settle any scores. What we need to do is look to strengthen our position in life. That takes focus and not allowing yourself to get derailed by needless issues, emotions, and egos. Things aren't always going to go your way. Life is always more failure than success, but many times those failures eventually lead to successes.

Myself and many other people in this community want to help strengthen the less affluent areas in Hickory. I need your help and I need your ideas and I need to understand your issues. I need people from the less affluent areas of Hickory to show up to every City Council meeting, not just the ones that effect their personal issues of interest. The City Council needs your presence. Let them know you are there and hanging on their every word.

Let's communicate and figure out how to get the average, regular folks in this community to participate in taking this community into a positive direction. I have laid out the Objectives of the Hickory Hound and we will look forward to learning about the Objectives of the Ridgeview Community and the Objectives of Citizens for Equity in Government and how we can work together to achieve some of our mutual goals.

Goodnight and God bless,
James Thomas Shell