Master planned developments, marijuana and the rise of demagogues | Dennis Box

The last week has been a fun-filled ride spent listening to a series of public hearings about master planned developments and marijuana.

I attended five days of hearings concerning the development agreements for YarrowBay’s two master planned developments in Black Diamond and there was a pubic hearing Tuesday in Kent City Council Chambers about the moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries and collective grows.

It may not seem there is much in common between the two, but, there is.

I have been covering contentious and, at times, outright hostile meetings for longer than I would like to admit. My entertainment is the roundhouse swings that come in my direction as often as the government officials.

There is an ongoing race to the bottom of the popularity list between government guys, lawyers and journalists.

Most nights I don’t sleep well if I don’t have at least one guy who wants to run over me with a slow-moving cement truck.

What struck me over the last week at the various hearings was language. I spend a lot of time thinking about words and how people use them. The way someone uses language can be a self-disclosing window into an inner world.

For anyone who spent time at the development agreement or the medical marijuana hearings, it is clear there are many folks with genuine concern for what they see in their future. A great deal of the testimony was straight from the heart, real talk from real people on all sides of the issues.

The common theme that jumped out to me is badly written laws breed confusion and fear and they spread like wildfire.

From the fog of fear and confusion comes demagogues and they can be very dangerous to the democratic process.

They feed on the fear and use the confusion of bad laws and poorly conceived public processes to inflate their own image.

If you want to find their motivations, follow the money.

The language of a demagogue rings with apparent clarity until someone pulls one of the cards out of the house and it falls.

When you sit and listen to the hours of emotional testimony and shouting, it can be difficult to find the core of the issue.

What I have seen at the land use and the medical marijuana hearings are epic wrestling matches with bad laws.

The state Growth Management Act may have been conceived with the best intentions, but, it has devolved into a monstrosity. Even God falls asleep trying to figure this code out.

No one beyond land-use lawyers can possibly follow the twists and turns of this law and the attorneys argue about the meaning of every other sentence.

I believe the GMA has forced cities into writing defensive code meant to stand up in court. Cities write zoning laws conceived by lawyers instead of planners. The farther we travel down this road, the more the city planners are pushed to the sidelines, as the attorneys prepare for battle.

I’m in no way criticizing attorneys, their job is to protect their clients. They are forced to walk this road with blind alleys just like everyone else.

The result is the regular guy is cut out of the process and that makes him mad.

Big surprise.

Talk about bad law, a first grader could write better law than the feds and state Legislature have done with marijuana.

We have a federal law stating it is a Schedule 1 narcotic, and we have a state law supposedly allowing a collective grow of marijuana, under conditions no one can quite figure out.

Would everyone please break out the black lights and roach clips.

This is the goofiest mess I have ever seen.

At least first graders can figure out how to be fair and tell the truth.

These law puzzles with missing pieces create the demagogues that come out saying all the right words for all the wrong reasons. They drain the truth out of a discussion and replace it with confusion for their own self gain.

The best defense against this is always being honest with ourselves, and being willing to think on our own, rather than agree with someone because it makes three guys cheer and clap.

Take it from me, the cement trucks arenÕt that hard to dodge … most of the time.

It is my job to write as clearly and fairly as I can. I believe newspapers are essential to the public process. It is a place where all the voices can be heard.

I have been hatching a plan to try live debates on the paper’s website covering a variety of subjects. I think it could be a lot of fun and a way for real dialogue to break through. It’s an idea.

I see demagogues as a danger and bad law as a looming threat, but, in the end regular folks will see through the smoke. If we listen carefully the tinny talk discloses the truth.