My guess is that bringing a gun to a city council meeting, aiming for the mayor and killing six people in the process will not help further this man's cause with the Kirkwood, Missouri City Council. Although, what ever his beefs were, whether they were related to taxes, property or services, are probably moot now.
Anyone who has been to a city council (or neighborhood, or county board, etc.) meeting knows that it is usually part plodding procedure, part innocuous discussion, and sometimes -- or usually, depending on what city you are a part of -- part passionate (and sometimes cracked) rants. This raises two issues for me, as a parson interested in good governance. First, how do we identify the sensible kernel in the crazy diatribe and incorporate that into our discussion? Because, if we skim away the off-putting rhetoric, I think we will usually find that the concern is reasonable. Second, how do we better listen to city residents so that they don't have to fly off the handle to feel like their concern is being heard? Because often I think the people who hit the roof often feel like the city/county/neighborhood is ignoring them and their problems.
It is not clear what issue this man in Kirkwood, Missouri had with the city council. And it is not clear that any kind of placating rhetoric would have deterred this unfortunate event. He had been barred for the council meetings for disruptive activity, according to the Associated Press. Of course this is an extreme case but listening to "the crazies" (as I affectionately call them) can help the city/neighborhood/county move beyond plodding procedure to pioneering discussions and possibly innovative solutions. In this case perhaps there should have been a discussion about mental health services (perhaps just for this man or perhaps mental health is overlooked in the city) but in other cases the discussion may be different.
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3 comments:
Good topic. I will say that it's not just at city council that "the crazy" can disrupt discussion -- I'm on an email list for my neighborhood where some posters beat the same drums, over and over, and act extremely cranky towards each other. It doesn't exactly encourage other people to jump into the fray.
Of course, the worst example of this particular kind of crazy is probably Andrew Kehoe.
What's really disturbing about the Kirkwood case is that reactions to the shootings seem to be coalescing along racial lines. Before having read the story, I have to admit, I assumed the shooter was a middle-aged white man.
I don't know which is harder to deal with: a case where a goodly portion of the community is saying, "He's nuts, but he's got a good point," and the other half is blinking in disbelief, or a case where pretty much everyone has agreed to a decision except one holdout. I suspect the former.
It's not simply that reactions to the shootings 'coalesce along racial lines,' it's that the underlying problem is fundamentally racial.
This was not just some cracked nut. This was a man who had a long-standing conflict with the (nearly all white) city of Kirkwood dating back to its annexation of Meacham Park, what was essentially its black shantytown and its TIF'ing a big chunk of the neighborhood without sharing the wealth in the form of services (and displacing a number of residents for a WalMart--yay, eminent domain!). Thornton was involved in a 7 year long legal battle to get a zoning variance that would allow him to park the truck he used for his construction business at his home, after months of being ticketed by police for parking in a residential zone. When he couldn't get on public meeting agendas, he spoke out in the public comment periods, and since the city council didn't want to hear it, they had him removed.
Thornton's ultimate response was not morally justifiable on any level. But let's understand the context before we make flip comments about mental health care or condemn the black community for saying it's more complicated than good vs. evil.
Lisa,
I understand your point (having read a bit more about the case after I made my comment). My question would be, if one extreme is dismissing Thornton as a "cracked nut" or "evil" and the other extreme is arguing that he was justified in his actions because the city council had treated him and his community so badly, where is the proper middle ground? Erring too far on one side (as you seem to think Kate and I have done) trivializes the genuine complaints of the Meacham Park community; does erring too far on the other side trivialize the fact that several people, including Thornton himself, are dead or seriously wounded? I worry that to fail to find some sort of middle ground or "understand the context" on both sides only leads to further alienation one way or the other.
My first instinct is to say, "I don't care how put upon you feel, or how put upon your community has been historically, if you open fire without being in danger of your own life, you are deserving of no one's sympathy or aid." But I'm white and have never had to argue with local government; would this, then, be my biases at work?
I would also like to hear your comments on Kate's original question: how do you incorporate the obviously angry and alienated into city decisions? Especially if the problem is "fundamentally racial." I would imagine the difficulty will be even greater for Kirkwood now than it was before the shooting.
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