| By Bob Weaver
The Minnora Community Center is a great success story. The community
people who
had the vision, devoting thousands of volunteer hours to the
project, should
be commended. It has been a wonderful service for southern Calhoun,
heavily
supported by dozens of groups, county government, businesses and
individuals.
Just consider the Center has medical services from Minnie Hamilton
Health Care
Center, a quickly expanding senior citizens nutrition program from the
Calhoun
County Committee On Aging and the ambulance sub-station from Calhoun
EMS.
Sheriff Allen Parsons has brought law enforcement to the area with a
sub-station
manned by a Deputy Ron Bandy and there is a computer training center
for displaced
Kellwood workers, not to forget a new barber and beauty shop, library,
recreation and
entertainment and dozens of new ideas on the burner.
It is frustrating to watch the personality battles push the Center to
the brink of
collapse, where everyone loses, most importantly the citizens of
Washington and Lee
Districts. If the Center falls apart, efforts to re-invent it will not
occur for many
years.
The members of the Minnora Community Center board and its dissenting
personalities
should enter a conflict resolution or mediation program to settle
their differences,
immediately. The dissent has afflicted board meetings for two years,
often ending in
shouting matches and threats of lawsuits.
This kind of action is necessary when dissenting parties are unable to
move ahead
and professionally fulfill their obligations as volunteers, certain
they are doing the
right thing. Many of the current shakers and movers have invested time
and energy,
often beyond the call of duty. It is difficult for them to see the
larger picture - the
survival of this worthwhile project.
If settling their differences is not an option, maybe they should step
aside and allow
some new faces to manage the center. Hopefully, some citizens would
come
forward.
Southern Calhoun native and writer Jed Purdy, whose family ruffled
community
feathers with their beliefs against school consolidation, said in his
book "For Common
Things," relating to public life:
"It begins with the recognition that, contrary to the fantasy of the
moment, public life
and public institutions can never be obsolete. Our private lives - our
work, our
families, our circles of friends - are pervasively affected by things
that can never be
private: law and political institutions, economics and culture. "
"We ignore these essentially public matters at the risk of
misunderstanding our own
well-being. And that misunderstanding invites us to neglect public
concerns in ways
that impoverish the public realm and, in time, erode the underpinnings
of good private
lives..."
"We might conclude that public life continues to matter, not because
it changes us
fundamentally, but because it is our only way of contending with tasks
that we may
never complete but cannot permit ourselves to neglect..."
In this affray, we are hopeful reason and public good rises above the
defects of our
characters and our private wars.
| 
