Hello! Take a minute to read a beautiful piece of writing.
500 signatures is an important threshold for a civics exercise requesting a $600 million dollar funded Texas state agency to consider an obscure Texas county in their allotment for subsidizing broadband speed and coverage. It inspired Pat Ledbetter, distinguished professor from North Central Texas College, to write a powerful, engaging and beautiful letter about American citizens working together. Take a minute and read this insightful short article, maybe you’ll be as awestruck as I was:
From Pat Ledbetter:
No matter what our differences might be on other issues, I think we can almost all agree that internet and cell phone service is essential to our quality of life. Everything from shopping to education and health care now depends on connectivity. We all want our local businesses to prosper, and that depends on their ability to access such services. Fortunately, the federal pandemic relief funds and the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill have finally provided ample support to expand the access we all need— access that could be as transformational to the modern era as the Rural Electrification Administration was in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Texas has already set up a Broadband Development Office to oversee the distribution of about $600 million in funding for this process. What we need now is the kind of civic engagement that made the REA so effective in the mid-twentieth century. When the enabling legislation passed for the REA, only about 5% of rural families had electricity; within less than two decades over 95% had it. That happened, not because of politicians and bureaucrats, but because the people themselves demanded it and became engaged in making it a reality.
Unfortunately, the history of public funding for private enterprises has another, less uplifting, side. Without active civic engagement, companies like Verizon and ATT (entities likely to receive government funds to expand services) have a track record of taking our tax money, building the infrastructure, and then overcharging for the services. Taxpayers end up paying twice—once to provide the investment capital and then to actually get the services. I’m not blaming the companies here; after all, their goal is to return high profits for their investors. The responsibility to hold them accountable rests with the people themselves. We have to demand that they deliver on their public commitments—that means pressuring our elected officials to prioritize the public’s needs over those of the corporations that pay for their campaigns.
The first step is to become engaged at the local level to ensure that our county receives its fair share of this expanded funding. A petition to make certain that our local officials and state representatives hear our voices is currently circulating at connectcookecounty.com. If you want to engage across party lines to make this happen, just go online and sign the petition. It is completely nonpartisan, simply because this is not a partisan issue. This is an exercise in civic engagement necessary to make a democratic system work and to maintain public faith in the system that has made America great.
Tragically, the partisan divide has become so severe in this country that almost half of Americans now believe we are on the brink of another civil war. The way past the current impasse is for ordinary folks to find common ground on issues like this that can bring us together for the greater good. Hopefully, we can relearn how to fight for each other instead of being constantly pitted against each other.