By Dave Berns
If you truly want political change in Washington and Carson City, if you sincerely seek a presidential candidate who will transform this country’s attitudes and policies, it’s time you take a major step. It’s not about casting a vote in November. It’s actually much simpler, but requires a leap of fearlessness that many in this region, in this country, just won’t—or can’t— take.
It’s time for us to reconnect, re-engage. We have to overcome the fear of reaching out to strangers—to acknowledge the greeting from the guy entering the post office, wait for the woman at the four-way stop sign who actually has the right of way. We should slow down for the young kids playing on our neighborhood streets, and when a neighbor reminds us that we are driving too fast, we shouldn’t reflexively toss out the F-bomb. It’s time to quash our baser reflexes and insecurities if we want to live in a healthier country.
We know what we have to do to reconnect, but it requires the willingness to be the first or often more importantly the second person on our block, in the mall, at work, to take the leap.
Writer, thinker and urban consultant Rich Harwood suggests you should knock on your neighbor’s door and ask for a cup of sugar, whether or not you need one. It’s not about the sugar; it’s about building that connection, getting to know the person whose name you don’t. It’s about developing a relationship that could lead to a friendship, or at the very least a greater sense of connection to the street where you live.
I’m writing this piece on a computer, listening to an iPod, periodically checking my PDA for messages. All are solitary pursuits that separate me from immediate human contact. It’s the challenge of the computer-chip age, breaking away from the isolation that it grants each of us. It’s healthy for creativity and productivity, but our human relationships are increasingly frayed, and that translates into an inability for many of us to relate to others.
Toss in the newness of our neighborhoods, the mobility of so many who have moved here from elsewhere, and we have ready-made excuses to ignore each other. And yet we complain that our schools aren’t up to speed, that our politicians don’t listen, that we don’t know our neighbors.
Most of us have chosen to live in communities where we’re linked by roads and sidewalks and sewers and cable TV and stores and restaurants and police and fire departments. We live together; yet, somehow we don’t. You want change? Take that first step.
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The sad saga of Jim and Dawn Gibbons has revealed an equally sad truth about this state’s journalism community.
Reporters in Carson City, Reno and Las Vegas knew for months that the couple had separated, and Dawn Gibbons was living in the governor’s mansion. State legislators privately spoke of how the governor was required to give notice before he visited the mansion so his estranged wife could leave.
There was rumbling, legislators privately say, about a dispute at the couple’s Reno-area home, where the two argued in their driveway over a piece of furniture, an episode that one state legislator says saw Dawn Gibbons ask that a state trooper prevent the governor from removing the furniture.
There’s been talk for months that Jim Gibbons has being seeing a woman who worked for him as a political fundraiser.
Tie in the sliming of Wynn cocktail waitress Chrissy Mazzeo by Gibbons’ political operatives after a pre-election day episode at a Las Vegas restaurant, and rumors of similar episodes involving the family-values Republican, and you can’t help but wonder—where were the state’s political reporters?
You can argue that a governor’s family should be off-limits when it comes to news coverage. Fair enough. But candidates routinely trot out their children and spouses as political props for campaign mailings, TV commercials and rallies, only to argue that they’re private figures once in office.
In New York or California, states with a vibrant, aggressive journalism culture, reporters would not have sat on these stories. That’s not always healthy, but it’s a reflection of a competitive news environment where the reader, viewer and listener has a right to know what’s going on at city hall and in the statehouse.
Oh, and where’s the uproar over the governor’s push to have a judge seal documents tied to the divorce proceedings? Could there be details in those filings about the FBI’s investigation into the governor’s financial relationship with a Reno-area software manufacturer? Could there be details about what actually happened that night between Gibbons and Mazzeo? Does the public have a right to know? Do reporters care?
Sadly, the bottom line is the bottom line: Newspapers and broadcast news outlets are public trusts granted valuable licenses and tax breaks, which generate profit margins that casino operators envy. And yet, in a state where gambling, prostitution, public drinking and a multitude of other “vices” are legal, this states journalism community suddenly grew shy.
As a reader, viewer and listener, you can’t help but wonder what else they’re not reporting from Carson City. Or as one state legislator said: “Fourth-graders in Carson City knew what was going on in the mansion. Why wasn’t it being reported?”
Dave Berns is the host and senior producer of KNPR’s State of Nevada. It airs Monday through Friday from 9 to 11 a.m. with a replay from 7 to 9 p.m. on News 88.9, KNPR-FM.