Pacific is a geographical area populated by isolated groups and
individuals, and whose community infrastructure has decayed and been dismantled.
In the same way, families become dismantled and drift apart as new generations grow up without
shared experiences. If you want an example of a government/community combination that exists within the confines of Pacific, consider Alpac Elementary School. That community of instructors, parents and youngsters has a common, constructive, positive focus that binds it together and is sustainable — the education of children. The population served by the school, and involved with it, is distinct from and much more numerous than the public servants at the school.
For the City of Pacific, the leading adhesive that has been holding a few people
together the past several months is the myth that Pacific is a community with a
functional government that an evil man has destroyed. This group is
characterized by the same trait that sometimes keeps couples together—couples
who aren’t so much in love with each other as they are in love with the idea of
being in love. That’s not enough.
Individuals who want to recall Mayor Cy Sun have the bit in their teeth and believe that,
with the removal of this "evil man," things will “return to normal.” They are so
much in love with the idea of a city that they have conveniently ignored reality – that the voters in the City of Pacific elected Cy Sun because they were dissatisfied. And they were dissatisfied because the city has been poorly run and has abused its powers and estranged itself from the
population it served for at least 10 years, and that once this current issue of the evil leader is
resolved, the estrangement will continue.
A government without a community will lose its way and
decay. That is its nature. Until this disparate population has something in
common to bind it together with a positive, sustaining focus, it too will drift and its bonds will decay.
The
past is not necessarily a guarantee of the future, but it is a pretty good
indicator. And Pacific’s distant and recent pasts are characterized by turmoil,
scandal, power grabs, incompetence, in-breeding, corruption, abuses and insolence. Without community to
keep it in check, Pacific’s city government simply awaits the rise of another
buffoon or charlatan lacking a vision that is shared by the population served. It
was the absence of community which allowed Pacific to come to the precipice. The
evidence for this is right there, for any reasonable person to observe.
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