Forward, Four
(National Edition)
By Matt Crawford, RVC4
In my October column I made a veiled allusion to something JFK said at his first birthday party as President. I was gladdened to see that couple of you looked it up. The quotation is, “When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were.”
When I wrote that, I didn’t know the half of it. And it would be optimistic to suppose I know the full extent of the problems now. The root and support of the problems is the pervasive culture of secrecy, which is imposed on pain of expulsion for Acts Inimical. One of the most inexplicable instances I’ve encountered yet was when a committee chair refused to provide some data that they had available because it belonged to another committee! Someone did step in and override that chair, so it was only a temporary obstacle, but it does speak to existing AMC culture.
Another thing that speaks loudly, albeit unclearly, is the number of resignations there have been in less than three years’ time: a Chair, two First Vice Chairs, two Ombudsmen, one Advocate, and we may as well mention an Executive Director. I can’t connect all of those dots, but I can’t call them all fully independent events, either.
One of the first things I encountered upon joining the AMC, and this is in the open record, was an attempt to take annual budget authority away from appointed officers and committees and leave it all in the hands of staff. For the most part, the appointed officers are among the sharpest and best-informed people we have on the AMC. In the previous term, several of them objected strenuously to being shut out of their defined roles as budgetary officers. One was removed, another was bullied and nearly removed. The proposed change was justified as a “housekeeping” codification of the existing practice, which was not in conformance with existing ASIEs. There seemed to be a bias against hard-working appointees on the AMC. Without psychic powers I can only guess at motivations.
In March, when the dues were increased, the amount of the monthly per-member stipend to local groups was removed from the ASIEs. I could see no reason practical or nefarious for doing so, nor could I see the validity of any argument made against my motion to restore the stipend amount to the text at the September 2024 meeting. It passed solely by the votes of eight RVCs. At the next meeting, a motion was made to charter a task force to study, among other things, the elimination of RVCs as voting members of the AMC. I cannot assert any causality.
I have seen one of my colleagues willing to go to the figurative gallows because, although exculpatory evidence was known and available to him and his accuser, that evidence was in a confidential forum and he would not break trust without authorization.
All this national drama is distracting from the regional and local group concerns which ought to have the higher priority. Until this settles down, I’ll just work twice as much. This month I’m writing two columns, one for local issues and one for national. You can find both on the web at https://crawdad.neocities.org/RVC4/ .