In the continuing ranks of division over the proposal to build an Atlantic Islands Centre on the Isle of Luing, a comment posted to an earlier story of ours on the issue may have provided the evidence for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records.
The Luing Community Trust – from which the planning application in question has emerged, has evidently just held its AGM – and concluded it in a whirlwind 25 minutes.
This could well be the most efficient organisation on the planet but such a pace suggests a firefighting strategy.
The real issue is neither to have an Atlantic Islands Centre nor not to have an Atlantic Islands Centre.
It is the need, together, to come to a decision that everyone can buy into on what is right for the little island community.
Some communities want and can make sense of new, well resourced and multi-functional village halls that are professionally managed and run as community businesses. Craignish, on the mainland south of Luing and its fellow slate islands, is one such – although it had its own divisions to deal with in the process.
Others, like Furnace on Loch Fyne, whose latest weekend of community events and activities is currently featured (Furnace at play), prefer to keep their embedded traditional buildings in play, in full cognisance of the pros and cons of either decision.
The only right decision is what works for the community. The only wrong decision is what leaves a community bitterly factionalised. It’s not about winners and losers. It’s about finding the decision where everybody wins – and that is always possible, where the will to find it exists.
Ambition is healthy and so is contentment. And apathy is not contentment.
But can the Luing Community Trust please bottle their recipe for a 25 minute AGM. This could be a big seller.
It is a little disapointing when at meetings on luing the atitude is ‘best not to upset people’,
thats the old way. Now look at the mess were in! It is a one sided attitude.
We now have one person with a new way, and we are being walked over, trodden on, disrespected and I believe laughed at .It brings to mind the line in the song, ‘ people come and try to teach us their ways and forgive us for being what we are’.
If we get to down to the ‘nitty gritty’. One man became a director of the ‘Trust’ whose passion was for ‘Geopotics’ (whats that you may ask), it is a made up word, its not in the dictionary. Oh and another thing, since he became a committee member of the History group and the Horticultural society, they too have had a steady decline in commitee members
Their Words… It is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.
That is fine by me. if thats what the want but Don’t ram it down our gullets, we think its a joke.
The Islanders don’t want to be associated with the Scottish Centre for geopoetics. A.K.A. Atlantic Island Centre. I wonder if Kenneth White the Big Chief relizes the disrespect that is being brought upon his organisation.
Their words…
Every creation of the mind is, fundamentally, poetic.
My words…
Im a poet and I didn’t know it.
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