Keynote address at Key Peninsula Citizens of the Year dinner—March 2005
Larry Seaquist was the keynote speaker at the recent Key Peninsula Citizens of the Year dinner. We asked him to say more about his call for the community to take the lead in planning its future.
“Awesome” is the first word that comes to mind when I look back over the newspaper summary of the accomplishments of each of the standout citizens celebrated at the Key Peninsula citizen of the year dinner. These talented and energetic volunteers furnish much of the glue that makes KP a community, not just an address.
Awesome also are the challenges threatening that well-being. In nearly every American community one can see some variation of what we might think of as a triple car wreck. In this chain-reaction pile-up several things are going wrong at once. Traditional jobs and local businesses are disappearing, our education system is struggling to deliver people able to prosper in the new economy, and our systems for assuring our personal and environmental health are failing.
With government budgets in trouble, local communities can’t count on government “air bags” to cushion the hard times. In any event, the problem is more serious than money. Our economy, our education systems, and our health care mechanisms are all interconnected. You can’t fix one without fixing all three. But in Olympia and Washington, DC, officials have them partitioned off- jobs in one department, education in another, health in a third. Only at the grass roots level of the community do all three come together.
The implication? If our communities are to continue to thrive they are going to have to unravel the triple car wreck for themselves. How to do that? Or better, Who to do that? In Key Peninsula, just as in other communities around the world, the answer is the Good Citizen, the volunteer who mobilizes people from all across the community-including the youth-to think through these problems together.
To be sure, these are complicated issues. Different people will have different opinions about what the problems are, to say nothing of different remedies. But I have found working with community leaders around the world—even in countries in the middle of a civil war—that all sides will agree on a handful of “must do” first steps. Acting on these urgent “opportunities to excel” can be an important step to assuring that a community thrives for the long term. I look forward to seeing this kind of strategic citizenry in action in the Key Peninsula community.
A former US Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist, Larry Seaquist works on and writes about conflict prevention and peacebuilding campaigns.