Knowledge Is Power

For about a year some of us have been trying to talk the City Council in Healdsburg into an ordinance that would require the gathering of information on the impact on the community of any large new property development. The big business majority on the council has dug in its heels, rejecting information. For a while this attitude baffled me. But then I noticed that Republicans on a national level were opposed to a health insurance exchange (a place where coverages and costs of different health insurance plans could be easily compared).

What it boils down to is this. The Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for ordinary citizens to compare one health plan to another; they want to make it difficult for ordinary people to gather facts about the impacts of a new property development. The less information available, the easier it will be to control the outcome.

Knowledge isn't always power. Just before the start of the second war against Iraq, many of us knew from UN reports that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but we couldn't stop the carnage. Sometimes, though, knowledge helps. The Republicans understand that. That's why they systematically block attempts to gather facts.