I do not know when it began, but I was working in Littler Rock Arkansas's Model Cities program when I first recognized I had a serious case of Acronym-Allergy. Acronyms make me itch and sneeze. Thus when I was staff for two citizen committees (one, housing; the other infrastructure) covering the two target neighborhoods in Little Rock I refused to voice acronyms in this acronym infested world.
I erroneously thought that long-term I would win the battle. Aware that personal computers could not be many years or decades off, I was convinced they would obviate the need for acronyms. It might always be faster to type “EPA”, but the computer would seamlessly change that to “Environmental Protection Agency”, and when we spoke we would use the full term for the sake of clarity. I could not have been more wrong, but that sad truth is almost irrelevant to this story.
I worked weekly with my committees over the year I was in Little Rock, never wavering in my refusal to use acronyms. Others on the staff, did use them, of course. The one heard most frequently was “HUD”—rhyming with “mud.” I could not completely shelter the members of my committees from this abandonment of the English language because there were occasional full-up community meetings in which the hud-word was uttered. All anybody ever heard from me, however, was “The Department of Housing and Urban Development”. This can be a mouthful, I admit, but I believe it rolled off my tongue as if it were a line of poetry or a song lyric.
Over the course of the year, each committee and its staff person developed a chapter for the plan in which we would ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies for millions of dollars to give Little Rock and our target neighborhoods a grand leap toward eliminating urban problems which, in my domains, included deteriorated housing, flood hazards, water and sewer inadequacies, street and traffic problems. My committees and I felt pretty good about what we were proposing, and we knew we would likely get the necessary money because the War on Poverty had made Model Cities its poster children. If we did our work well, our proposal would be met with the rubber-stamp, “APPROVED”, at federal agencies—including the lead agency, The Department of Housing and Urban Development. We did do our work well!
After much work, we came to the final meeting of the year. The combined membership of all committees from both neighborhoods assembled at a local school to vote on the whole package that we were to send off to the federal government: Little Rock's Model Cities Plan. There were a few sticking points. I don't remember what they were, but they were nothing that threatened to doom the plan. They did threaten to drag out the meeting until the wee hours of the morning. To the rescue came Mr. Liggens, a star member of one of my committees. Believing there had been enough debate, he rose to speak the powerful few words that brought the plan quickly to a vote and won its final approval.
I have special reason to remember those words; they not only warm my heart but also give me a life lesson in humility:
“We have talked long enough,” said Mr. Liggens,
“It is time to vote to send this plan off to Mr. Hud--or whatever his name is!”
(c) from date of posting, by Bob Komives, Fort Collins
That star members are powerful everywhere.
ReplyDelete