It's not difficult, and notoriously easy in politics, for people to find themselves at odds with each other. Often enough, and if tempering care is not taken, the result looks like a fight. Detached and abstracted settings, like the world or the country, enable polarizing interactions, making them caricatures, but they can also attenuate the consequences of discord. After all, who cares what you think of people who live in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Montana? You'll never have to see or interact with them.
The stakes are higher when we encounter disputes with our friends or neighbors. We have to live with each other, and in many cases, we have underlying relationships to preserve, despite the areas of disagreement. And it may be fair to say that in many respects, the issues aren't really any less exalted, either. The difference between communism and capitalism as a socioeconomic framework sounds much more consequential than the difference between whether or not boats and RVs are permitted in front yards. But at some level, it's all a matter of the balance of one person's "footprint" against the territory of another person.
The tension comes down to two things. One is to what extent anyone has to accommodate others, and the other is the style of the interaction to figure it out. We in Biscayne Park can sometimes make terrible messes in both regards.
As is not uncommon among people, we lapse into polarization regarding the issues. Some interactions come out looking like stark divergences between some people who only want whatever they want for themselves personally, and other people who want their preferences to control others' prerogatives. At its worst, the boats/RVs fight was portrayed as a battle. On one side were those who wanted any vehicles they wanted, displayed and stored however they wanted them, and the rest of the neighborhood be damned. On the other side were those who were portrayed as wanting a ruthless sense of order that, at the extreme, could have been characterized as the absence of boats and RVs in BP: if you want one, tough. I'm told some here articulated the latter position. And sadly, some members of the Commission were amused to egg on the combatants. The same extreme divergence has existed in the past regarding the permitted colors for dwellings, and whether or not people should be allowed to have metal roofs. Similar arguments could be made about whether dogs should be permitted outside, or whether so-called "holiday" decorations should be displayed. And it's all about the same thing: conflicting interests, territoriality, and primitive competitiveness. We'll leave most of that for another time, when there's lots of wine involved.
Once conflicting themes are reduced to their caricaturish essentials, it then becomes possible to argue them as if one position was completely disconnected from the other, as if there was no overlap, as if one fundamentally threatened the legitimacy of the other, as if there was no common ground. It's not hard to see whence the smirks, the catcalls, the ad hominem challenges, and the vital self-defense maneuvers come. If they sound nasty, they look even worse. "This is a free country, supposedly. I'm entitled to my life and the activities that are vitally important in it. I'll have my boat or RV if I want it, whether I use it or not. That's my business, not yours. If you're trying to take away my only pleasure in life, then you're trying to take away my life. I won't have it. I'll fight you. I'll sue you." "This is a quaint but struggling neighborhood. All we have, and the reason we live here, is our charm and our style. That boat or RV of yours is destroying the whole ambiance of the neighborhood. The whole place looks like a dump. You're stealing from me, by depressing the value of my property, my homestead. You can take yourself and your boat/RV, and go live in Hialeah."
There are two groups of people who are at a disadvantage in debates like this. One is the partisans themselves. They want what they want, and all they can see is the threat to their interests. The other is the neighbors whom they elect to represent them. These people are susceptible to the synergistic forces of the desire to represent and the wish that their constituents not be angry at them, unless the representatives are by nature reasonable, self-confident, and broad-thinking.
There is one group of people who have almost no disadvantages when it comes to our Codes, and balancing the interests of the individual against the interests of the neighborhood as a whole: the Boards, and particularly the Code Review Committee. This is a sober, business-like, knowledgeable group of people, many of whom have special knowledge and/or experience in relevant and related fields, and who set out deliberately to strike exactly the balance in question. They look for and at the big picture, and they are not beholden to anyone. Individual and conflicted interests among these neighbors are identified and confronted in the group. And these are people who generally maintain respect for each other, so meetings do not end with sniping and rumblings. This is the group of people who can save us from the baser and more self-serving manifestations of our impulses. They are the buffer, everybody's "out."
I wish we could discuss our issues without becoming polarized. It would be constructive if our conversations were about the issues, instead of each other, and if there was an assumption that the interests of everyone, individual residents and the neighborhood as a whole, should be entertained. Clearly, this would require compromise. But if we can't do that, then we should make dedicated use of our Boards to do it for us. And using independent advisory groups or people is nothing new. Governments do it, private enterprises do it, people with marriage and family problems do it.
The problem for us is that we now have a maladaptive dynamic in the Village. We have people who are more devoted to fighting with each other, or against vague enemies, than they are to maintaining and advancing the interests of the Village. If we can't stop it, then we have to circumvent it. Our Boards may be our salvation.
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