[This commentary was published in the 11feb26 edition of The Union.]

George Rebane

That we are a badly divided community gives rise to a steady stream of good-hearted folks hereabouts calling for local residents to come together, to unify.  These attempts at unification go beyond the boilerplate calls with which we are all familiar.  Some groups actually hold events, forums, workshops to which opposing sides are invited to talk about and find solutions to their differences.  A recent example of this is Terry McAteer’s 13jan26 ‘The Community Forum is your local unifying connection’ wherein he reports on “a once-a-month public meeting (that) was birthed to present local issues with a meaningful, one-hour focus on a single topic” held at the Sierra College Nevada County campus.

Ed Sylvester, a forum founder, notes that “In these days of divisiveness, we intend the Community Forums to be a unifying experience for our community.”  To this Mr McAteer adds, “An informed and involved community has always been a hallmark of Nevada County and Community Forums are one more tool in our community-unifying toolbox.”

In spite of these sincere efforts to bring us together, the fact of the matter is that with the passing years we have grown more apart, and continue to do so at an ever-increasing pace.  Culturally and politically, we were a fairly cohesive conservative community before the influx of liberals, mostly from our big urban centers soiled by years under progressive administration.  Today this beat goes unabated with conservatives exiting to maintain the county’s population and decrease the state’s.

So what I would like to see in all this talk of unification is that we should be able to devise and tune our attempts at community unification by finally defining a generally accepted performance metric by which to evaluate our efforts.  This would be a useful task for our county’s amply paid “analysts” at the Rood Center.  (I would even volunteer to help them.)

From my perch none of these calls for, and organized efforts at unification have worked.  Nor do they have any future chance of working.  Recall the principle that you can control ONLY that which you can measure.  We cannot hope to nudge the two sides toward each other if we don’t know what works and what doesn’t.