Our Internal Clock Is About To Strike 12
On this second weekend of November, two questions seem to occupy the minds of many Inland Northwesterners.
1) Should we wait for the last leaves to fall before raking the lawn?
2) Has anyone checked the anti-freeze?
These are useful questions.
Standing in our yards or bent beneath the hoods of our trucks, we all take comfort in thinking we have a sense of knowing when the time is right.
But do Spokane and the Inland Northwest really know when the time is right these days?
I’m not so sure.
Dozens of indicators in both the region’s economy and in our lives suggest many of our most time-honored Inland Northwest assumptions are changing - and fast.
Our economic well-being has long rested on traditions of farming, logging, government, medicine and retail commerce.
Yet the operating assumptions for these major sectors right now are rapidly being rewritten.
Farmers already know in the year 2000 they will have fewer federal dollars and more foreign competition.
The wood products industry faces Canadian imports and tougher environmental laws.
Our region’s largest employer, the government, is tightening the purse strings and shifting costs to local offices and agencies.
The once growing medical industry has changed direction in a dramatic way, with a new emphasis on cost control rather than expanded services.
Spokane’s role as shopping center for the Inland Northwest is now challenged by regional Wal-Mart-Costco-outlet mall look-alikes.
Against this backdrop, I sense a citizenry still living in a false comfort zone and clinging to a consensus view that all we need to do is tinker with what we have always known.
Witness the Spokane “no” votes on the Pacific Science Center, Valley incorporation, and now, city-county consolidation.
The message has been clear.
Just leave things the same and all will be well.
This predisposition to conserve what has gone before has its upside.
It is one reason why we have wonderful old neighborhoods in Spokane.
It is the reason family farming has survived on the Palouse.
It is why the Lilac Festival is big and Coeur d’Alene’s City Beach is preserved.
But I don’t know if any of us can afford to live by this time-honored code of “waiting until the time is right” before making a significant change.
Recently, I heard author David McCullough describe some key differences between American life of 200 years ago and today.
One of these differences, he said, was the relationship we had to time and information.
Two centuries ago, before the advent of the telephone, the computer modem and 24-hour news channels, events were defined on the backs of a horse-powered transportation system.
When John Adams, our second president, died on July 4, 1826, news of his death took six days to reach Washington, D.C.
Contrast this to events of a few days ago.
When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel more than 7,000 miles from Spokane, that news arrived here minutes after the shots rang out.
This shrinkage of the distance between time and events profoundly changes the patterns and histories of our lives.
Consider if it had taken six days for Colin Powell to learn about Rabin’s death. The general might have decided over the weekend that he should run for president.
But of course, Powell did know what had happened. And that knowledge about an instantly changed world led him quickly to change his decision.
That’s the point.
We all live in a time when the distance between seeing the writing on the wall and the need to act upon the message has shrunk.
In our lives and in the lives of the communities where we live, we must find efficient ways to speed up our ability to make the right choices in a shorter time frame.
We know when to rake the leaves or change the anti-freeze. The forces of nature remain constant and familiar.
The rest of the world doesn’t work on that schedule anymore.
Today, we must look for ways to figure out when the time is right to put our retirement money in an international growth fund or when the time is right to support a bond issue that puts a computer in every student’s hands.
This is the choice.
Either we learn to speed up our ability to seize the moment, or face the prospect of watching the moment flash past and be left wondering what happened to the good life and good place we remember.
, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday.