The Secret Cornell

When changing things is a forgone conclusion; you get stopped before you can start.

My attempts to change the fraudulent New York State Agricultural District Form and Notice are going nowhere — that’s because there’s nowhere to go.

The most interesting aspect of New York’s rural policies is not the lack of public participation; but how this is accomplished.

Progress is derailed by broken promises, and communication is halted by mirror-like interfaces that merely stare back at those who attempt to use them.

Public participation is only categorical form filling with no place for your questions; and politicians gauge your satisfaction with no concern for your reasons.

Every telephone menu is filled with drawn-out explanations of why you don’t need to, and shouldn’t, try to speak to anyone; and persisting eventually leads to – A barely intelligible voice; always ending with:

“leave a message . . . leave a message . . . leave a message . . . Like standing on the shore of a featureless and uncaring sea: talking to the waves — and never a reply to break the monotony of empty expectations.

I have already spent hours and days in the well-worn paths of participatory door knocking.

I have caught a few by surprise; but they always recover and send me on to the appropriate dead end.

Every open door leads to a closed one.

Every source of help or adjudication is unwilling, unable, or uninterested.

Their lack of response is an uncaring that results from caring more for everything else. An uncaring that finds no use for us as anything but disposable. We are living in the second generation of “the greater good”: a presumptuous importance that allows any act to be excused.

Just as in Tompkins County’s “progressive” planning vision; there is no place for rural values and communities in our city-centric future — unplanned differences are not allowed.

The journey of rural public participation goes nowhere — it starts at the end of the line — leaving us waiting for a train that was derailed fifty years ago.