When I tell people I’m president of my condominium association, they often reply, “I’m so sorry for you.”
Whether they get their impression of condo politics by way of personal experience or reputation, many folks I know imagine leadership in a condo association as a thankless, unpaid position with many responsibilities and little power.
In six days the contestants in a novel and contentious race for the White House will cross the finish line, and after 10 years of acting as board president I can’t help noticing the similarities between the office of the President of the 50 “United” States and the elected leaders of my condo association which represents 51 owners.
Some condo board presidents I’ve talked to — those who looked at the job of president of the association through the eyes of reality — did not want to be burdened with that responsibility but accepted the job, perhaps out of a sense of duty.
Gorge Washington sent a letter to General Henry Knox, dated April 1789, in which he expressed his reluctance to become president. In that letter, Washington wrote, “I can assure you that my movements to the chair of Government [aka President] will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares to quit a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties.”
I resonate with the feelings expressed by our first President. Ten years ago, I had retired from serving as a pastor for 30 years, having paid the price of responsible leadership. I had to admit, however, that I was the logical choice, so I accepted the job.
Our country’s form of government is a republic, not a direct democracy. In a condo association, the owners likewise vote for board members to whom they delegate the job of making policy. In the case of my condo building, the board hires a manager who does most of the work of implementing board decisions.
Our federal government employs 268,947 civilians and 2.25 million military personnel. Our management company employs just a few people, including a part-time maintenance man, and board members wind up doing a lot more of the hands-on work than do Danny Davis or Emmanuel “Chris” Welch, but structurally we are largely the same.
What is missing in the analogy is that my condo association has no independent supreme court to arbitrate disputes. And that’s where the manure can really hits the rotary oscillator.
We had a dispute recently in my building regarding a decision the board made and with which about a third of the owners disagreed. Of the 25% of the owners who showed up at the all-building meeting — direct democracy — a significant cohort were adamantly opposed to the board’s decision while those with no opinion silently waited for some light to appear along with the emotional heat.
We all recognize that the volume of noise in a room does not always equate to the number of those who favor a proposal.
There’s a story about a janitor who was cleaning the church one night and discovered that the pastor had already placed his sermon on the pulpit. He decided to read it and halfway through he saw a handwritten note in the margin, “Argument weak here, so pound the pulpit with fist.”
So it goes with pastors, politicians and condo owners. When you can’t summon up much light, there’s always the option of substituting heat for the absence of illumination, and it seems to me that many voters as well as some condo owners cannot discern the difference.
At the condo all-building meeting the weakest argument was what I will call “slippery slope” reasoning, i.e. if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile. In the board’s opinion, the decision they made to make an exception to a rule was a one-time decision. They gave an inch and only an inch. That’s it.
In our national politics the use of the slippery slope fallacy is evident. For example, “If we let them take our assault rifles, they will try to take our 30-30 rifles and our 12-gauge shotguns.”
Motivating the slippery slope logical fallacy is a lack of trust, and trust can be eroded by unethical behavior by the board (or federal government) or the owners (or the electorate) or both.
The strength as well as weakness of democracy is that it gives power to the people, and my experience indicates that the people sometimes are swayed by emotional heat while at other times it turns out that they are wise and discerning.
Tom Holmes is a Forest Park resident who writes a column for the Forest Park Review, a Growing Community Media publication.
