SHOW ME THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

Put national and even statewide politics aside momentarily. Let national and regional pundits dissect and analyze why big-scale politics are such a fetid cesspool.

After six years of rooting around Greenville, I cannot call local politics a “fetid cesspool.” Good news or bad news? I dunno. Sometimes I think that the only thing worse than a fetid political cesspool is a party to which no one bothered to come.

When was the last time that we had a really juicy, issue-driven, hotly competitive local campaign for public office in Greenville?

I am not talking about a “Let-me-show-you-that-I’m-more-conservative-than-he-is!” shouting match or a mutual slime-slinger. I am talking about an honest-to-goodness race for mayor, city council, county commission, or school board, in which two equally credible candidates propose essentially different visions of the commonweal – alternative visions that arise from basic philosophical differences as to how political processes should intermesh the private sector’s right to self-determination:

How, and how much, should public policy intervene to break the vicious cycle of poverty, substandard housing, homelessness, illiteracy, unemployment, and another impoverished generation?

How should we define “quality of living”? Green parkways and bicycle paths? Or addressing, not ignoring, the putrid squalor at the city’s epicenter? Which public officials have, and have not, taken United Ministry’s Steve MacDonald’s guided tour of the faces of poverty in Greenville? What would they do with the damning information once they “got it”?

Who proposes to get to the nub of the enormous racial disparities in our community? What of the deplorable public transportation system that provides no reasonable way for poor people to get to their jobs? Who is the last serious Caucasian politician that has taken a bold stand on the racial profiling that is the implicit modus operandi of local law enforcement and public education? Who is the last serious African American politician that has even attempted to capture the imagination and idealism of all our diverse citizenry? Is anyone embarrassed by the lack of socioeconomic and racial, not to mention sexual, diversity in the year-after-year “Top Twenty” or “Top Fifty” influential citizens touted by the local media?

I know. I know. Everyone points to Mayor Max Heller (who was, if you remember back that far, defeated for Congress not on the issues, but on overt anti-Semitism). I guess that even Max, in his ever-vital 80’s, would admit that his mayoralty is ancient history. For us, the issue is whether Max Heller’s visionary, inclusive leadership was a one-time fluke. Or was it an expression of a deeper conscience of the Greenville electorate that has simply been lulled to sleep for lack of anyone to excite it and get its adrenalin flowing?

Let’s not blame the undue influence of the Bob Jones folks over on Wade Hampton or the Religious Right. To the contrary, let their influence be felt. But let it be only half the equation. Where is the loyal opposition? Where are the folks who have so far resigned to the stigma that we are either in “the stupidest or the most backward place in the universe”? Where is the myriad of folks who routinely commend people like me every time we take a bold stand and then return to their pretensions of helplessness or lethargy? Who is willing to blow the lid off a community seeming to forever be stuck between internal fester and terminal complacency?

Where is the loyal opposition?