At least three seats will be open on the Haines Borough Assembly this fall, and with luck, some old-timers will throw in their hats.
I’m not hoping for Biden-old and certainly not Trump-crazy, but generally the best candidates for local leadership are people who have been around this town 20 or 40 years and have paid attention. Retirees of moderate opinions with some time on their hands are ideal.
Don’t get me wrong. I like young people. Their optimism and energy and particularly their children reinvigorate our world. Young people are our town’s heart and muscle. But older people are – or should be – our brains.
Indigenous tribes are led by councils of elders for good reason. Older folks have been around the block a time or two. Surviving into a sixth or seventh decade usually reflects a degree of judgment, and judgment is required for leadership. Older people have earned what younger people don’t know and can’t buy – experience.
As importantly, older people tend to be more tolerant of imperfection. Idealistic young folks expect our institutions to be well-oiled machines. I held such beliefs once myself. As we grow, we learn the adult world is not wholly different than the chaos of youth. We trade in our fantasies about the way the world should be for sometimes awkward arrangements and hobbled-together systems that get the job done.
That’s life and that’s where government, by its very nature, lives.
Governing is much closely akin to horseshoes than it is to brain surgery or even making a cup of coffee. We toss a shoe as close to the pin as we can get, then we toss another shoe. There are no perfect solutions and few final ones.
Further, good government – the kind that moves towns and states and nations ahead despite vast differences between opinions and citizens – operates on compromise, on acceptance by leaders that they may be dead wrong and that jerk sitting beside them might just be right.
That’s humility, and it usually only comes to people who have made a fair number of mistakes in their lives. Accumulating mistakes takes some time. Acceptance of one’s fallibility takes decades.
Older people appreciate that dysfunction is endemic to people and to systems of order. They are not daunted by dysfunction and this is critically important because governments – like families – must endure disorder and navigate it. Crises are unavoidable. It’s how we respond to crises that determines our destiny, both as individuals and as communities.
In one episode of The Simpsons, the granddad character is approached by some horror and replies dismissively, “I’ve coughed up scarier things than that.”
In addition, many older people, and particularly ones who enjoyed the Alaska oil boom, have wealth generated from Alaska’s resources. Residents who are comfortable today because of tourism or fishing or a cushy job in an office building carry a certain obligation to return a share of that to the whole, so that another generation might have a similar opportunity.
Expecting young people who are busy making a living and raising families – or busy trying to make enough money to buy land or a house in Haines – to also do the hard work of government is unrealistic and frankly, unfair.
Finally, those who are financially independent also are obliged to serve government because they are untouchable. Anyone earning an income in Haines owes debts or favors or expectations to other people who live here. Those encumbrances place an extra burden on working public representatives when prudence requires them to make unpopular decisions.
Ours is a youth-centered culture, but there places in it where older people are best-suited. We want a little bit of gray hair on our surgeons and our pilots. We should want a little on our leaders, as well, and we need those folks to step up.