OK, so lately I have been getting ever so slightly peeved when I am around other seemingly "progressive" types, if that's really a type of person at all. I have been frustrated because I couldn't figure out exactly why I have been getting annoyed. I mean, we're all on the same side, right? I would find myself reading an e-mail and getting agitated to the point that I just wanted to delete the e-mail, and pretend it had never popped into my box. It finally dawned on me. It's a syndrome I am going to entitle "liberal bureaucrat syndrome." This is when people, rather than trying to support an idea with activities like actually doing something become involved by making suggestions of things for you to do. Or, the most irritating habit to me, people making extended critiques of all things done by others in the past, from a safe and distant vantage point. I realized that it's not so much people bossing each other around that annoys me (although I'm still not crazy about that), it's having to hear an endless stream of chatter from people who are either not creative enough or too scared to do something for themselves or are too lazy to even try. I recently heard it described as the insertion of middle management into an activist movement, which is really dead on. A politically incorrect way to say it may be "too many chiefs and not enough indians." I read some punk rock lyrics recently that went something like: ideas flow from deeds, not the former from the latter. I totally agree. Personality and charisma based movements are over, and we sure don't need any more bureaucrats, self promoters or ego freaks. OK, so I'm done complaining now. Back to the struggle.
Since I spend about 75% of my work time either in or thinking about New Orleans but live in Austin, I am often asked to compare the two places. I spent the last five years of my life as a highly visible, highly vocal booster of New Orleans, so many people I meet are surprised when they hear that we have settled, at least for the near term, in Austin. For Cassie and me, the decision to stay in Austin was pretty easy. We didn't have any assets to protect in New Orleans. Our house was pretty thoroughly destroyed so there was no hurry to come back. We also wanted to find some degree of stability for our son; New Orleans is a dynamic place right now and since he had already spent about a fourth of his life in evacuation/gypsy mode, we decided we would try to give him a rest. So we arbitrarily chose Austin off the map. It was a reasonably short drive away from New Orleans. It was the only really progressive city in Texas. Much like New Orleans, it's a blue island in a sea of...
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