Looking for
a resolution

As yet another seemingly leaderless year draws to a close, it’s worth a moment of our revelry to reflect on how much real leadership actually means.

Operating behind a maze of shell corporations, Hillsboro Community Hospital and Westview Manor are facing challenges that St. Luke Hospital has managed to avoid precisely because visionary community leaders dared to take on conventional wisdom in the 1960s and draft new legislation to allow St. Luke to operate as a public hospital district.

Too often these days, our future is being decided by people who belittle others’ intelligence, celebrate their own ignorance, pander to those who listen only to simplistic slogans, refuse to take any but the easiest or most popular way out, and fear criticism that inevitably accompanies new ideas.

If we had suffered under that kind of leadership in the past, Bown-Corby and Hill School would piles of rubble, there would be no reservoir or dike around town, and the historic Santa Fe depot would be a decaying firetrap instead of an award-winning library.

Today, our leaders are too enamored with ruffling feathers for the sake of ruffling them or saluting political correctness and “with-it” causes to become real leaders.

What’s happened with economic development and redistricting in this county are cruel jokes just waiting for someone to take them on. Who will dare to try to establish a county-wide chamber of commerce or challenge the islands and donut holes in our new commissioner districts? The answer will tell whether 2019 differs from 2018.

— ERIC MEYER