Attention given to West scandal should be balanced with other news
In Editor Steve Smith’s Sunday column he criticizes business, education and religious leaders for remaining silent about Mayor West’s moral failures. I am very grateful that he calls community leaders to step up and provide moral leadership, but his criticism of silence simply is not accurate. In many venues and to a wide cross-section of people, members of the groups targeted in the column have expressed their disgust with Mayor West’s behavior. I have been a part of these expressions.
As an educator in a Christian institution, it would be shameful for me to dismiss the mayor’s actions simply as mistakes or bad choices, as if he’d missed a couple questions on a test. What he did was very wrong.
He has admitted it. It is, as Smith indicates, outrageous. But it should not be assumed by Smith or anyone else that the only expressions of criticism are the ones covered by the media. This assumption depreciates the powerful voices with which we express ourselves person to person. And it also fails to recognize the direct, stern communication that a number of us have had with the mayor.
The Spokesman has done our community a service with this extensive investigation, and I commend it. A newspaper is at its best when it brings truth to light, as The Spokesman-Review has done here. But for those of us whose jobs take us around the country, it feels as if excessive attention has been given to this story. Outside of Eastern Washington it is difficult to have a conversation that doesn’t focus on the worst of our community, although the S-R should be blamed far less than the mayor for this stain.
We need to protect and support our city. High moral ground and a robust economy benefit every citizen, and we must battle threats to both. I’m sure Smith feels he is doing just that in giving leadership to the coverage.
But in my judgment, the S-R could have executed its moral responsibility to expose a terrible situation in a more proportionate way. We need to remember that other things are happening in the world and great things are happening in Spokane. Moreover, to call community leaders timid for using measured and lower profile strategies is unfair. In some respects, the S-R taking two years to bring forward its findings could also be called timid. But debating whether the S-R or community leaders should be using their bullhorns differently diverts our energy, energy that should be used to demand moral leadership from those whom we elect and appoint.
I consider Jim West a friend, but if I accept the claim that his private life is nobody’s business but his own, then I also accept the claim that integrity (wholeness) doesn’t matter. And that is outrageous.