[net-gold] On Being a Radical Transparencist
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 09:34:50 -0400 (EDT)
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Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 10:01:08 -0400
From: Dwight Hines <dwight.hines@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Net-Gold] On Being a Radical Transparencist
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On Being a Radical Transparencist
September 10, 2011
Dwight Hines
Maine
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My name is Dwight Hines and I live
in Peru. Peru, Maine. I am a radical
transparencist. If the government has
information, it should be available
to anyone who wants to see it or make
copies. Contrary to what is being
written in the Falls-Times, I have not
filed a federal lawsuit against the
Fire Department of Dixfield. I also
do not associate with robber barons,
chronic truants, or men who don?t know
a good chaw of tobacco from an aged
cow patty.
.
Nor do I call individuals ?lazy? in
a Northern style. Being from the
South, I use the word ?lazy? in a
different semantic context than people
do in Maine. But, just as ?wicked?
whoopee pies are desirable, full-time
laziness can be a sacred achievement
to be right proud of. There should be
a merit badge for real laziness because
it takes a lot of work. Indeed,
some of the laziest people I know, and
admire, are the busiest. Keeping
busy, keeping moving, are great ways to
avoid the hard work of thinking and
dealing with root causes and not just
scratching surface issues, or earning
brownie points for making the same
mistakes day after day after day.
.
I am not surprised that there has been
such a caterwauling and garment
tearing about my making public records
requests. It is also not surprising
that those who see no value in having
plain, flatland people know what their
hill and mountain government is doing,
are the ones who probably don?t know
how to fish. Not being fishermen,
like you know who said He was, it?s
great fun for them to shoot the
messenger. Or at least let a requester
know public records are a bad idea, out
of the mainstream for sure, it?s like
lifting the kilts of the busier than a
reformed alcoholic missionary in
Lewiston on Saturday night, to try and
figure out how they keep their nether
zones under the kilt warm in the winter.
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I am a radical transparencist.
All government records, with the exception
of how to build nuclear warheads,
should be public. Not just public in an
office or library but public on the
internet so you can download all the
files you desire with no one knowing
you are the snoop and snatch person.
Once you start doing that type of data
gathering, and believe me, it is
mostly data that the government agencies
collect because the people collecting
it don?t have the time to hammer it into
information, or melt it into knowledge,
much less forge it like cold iron into
wisdom. They are too lazy, you see.
.
Some of the problem with transparency
is that some specific groups, like
firefighters, for example. don?t want
you to know how few of them there
are. In Dixfield there are only 4 men
(all men, of course), who are
qualified firefighters. The other
nine members of the department, most of
whom don?t deign to go to training
sessions, even at the fast pace of once
per month, are also mere men. I?m sure
all of these firefighters are just
as busy as the man who sells guaranteed
olympic jumping swamp frogs in
Florida to the Maine tourists who flock
there in the winter, you know who
they are because they walk like they are
in deep snow. The salesman knows
that frog jumping contests are integral
to a southern way of life and that
is why ?laziness? is next to Gramma?s
aged homemade liquor in the list of
desirables for men, old and ancient.
.
What curls my brain about all these
folks who are too busy to have what is
starting to look like a major Southern
Baptist epiphany, one like the flash
that you felt when you were dipped in
ice cold Georgia mountain water in a
historically coldest early spring by
a preacher who was ?touched? by the
Unseen Spirits in the eighth grade,
dropped out of school that very same
week, and started and built his first
church before the odor of his urine
changed. For years after that
mountain spring cleansing the preacher
would comment and chuckle on your
divinely inspired yodeling that is still
echoing, slamming from mountainside to
mountainside, in the North Georgia
mountains.
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So, don?t tell me about the overworked
government employees who don?t have
time to make documents that your taxes
paid for available to you. Available
for you, someone who be unknown to them,
to slowly browse through, looking
for mistakes, or corruption, or just some
ideas to make money, maybe
legitimately. No one is allowed to
ask what you need the statistics or the
reports of the ancient farm journal
issues for, because they might just
steal your idea on buying up all the
good waterland, or make a copy of the
list of people who have no taxes due,
so you know they will have the money
to buy your hand crafted thingamajig
you stole from a passing Passamaquoddy.
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I accept the offer to come to the Fire
Station and watch what the fire
department members do, but I will draw
the line at going home with any
member and changing diapers or
babysitting or mowing the lawn. You have
my word that I?ll kibitz loud and long
about how your laziness is keeping you
from realizing that there are huge school
buildings full of students who
have never lived in a world without
computers and they think, rightfully,
that we are more mind-limited than slow
cold reptiles in our worldly behaviors
and deserve prizes for our laziness in
even simple thinking, simple thinking like
if the local governments and agencies put
all their documents on the web, so anyone
who wants to look at them or make copies
would never bother them working, not
even for 2 seconds, the wild consequences
of putting all those documents on the web
would be a more efficient and far less
lazy way of accomplishing the tasks that
must be finished yesterday. Ah yes, some
of these agencies and local governments
could start requiring that all their
suppliers provide the agency with
electronic copies of the papers so the
papers would be placed directly on
the web.
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And you know, some moonlit night, not
overly bright, but clear enough to see
across the low, always misty back forty,
you just might think of what all
those papers and documents have embedded
in them, what hundreds of little
facts and nameless snippets are waiting
for you to selectively brush them
into a semi-neat pile, give them a
quaint name, like early predictors of
prices of homes in the lower valley
and the impact those prices will have on
students attending college, number of
college dropouts who will start their
own businesses, and overall interest
rates on snowmobiles. Yep, and if you
think simple thoughts and tell them to
the students, simple thoughts, like
build the fire department a webpage that
will allow a student, while she?s
at home or the ballpark with her computer,
to put different colored marks on
a map of Dixfield for our different types
of calls so that over time
firefighters will know where and when
and what kind of calls to Hong Kong
tailor make prevention programs,
prevention programs that will do what a
fire department with 1,233 trained,
experienced firefighters can never do.
Stop a fire before it happens.
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Other related posts:
- » [net-gold] On Being a Radical Transparencist - David P. Dillard
