Letter to the editor: Raising the heat

To the editor:

“Raising the Heat on the Status Quo.” The Kansas Leadership Center training encourages Kansans to “raise the heat” and warns that without heat communities will not be able to make progress on difficult issues. Justice Matters pushes us as a community to take our best internal values and externalize them into action.

So far this has manifested in calling for treatment for those in crisis, decarceration before pursuing more incarceration, affordable homes for the working poor, and safe educational opportunity for all our children.

The heat that comes from bringing up these challenges may make us feel uncomfortable. Trying to find that productive level of heat is tricky, and at times it may get too hot for some. However, I prefer moments of discomfort over decades of business as usual with regard to the suffering in our community. I was disappointed that both our school board and County Commission chose not to send representatives to the event at the Lied Center where nearly 1,500 peaceful people assembled to ask our civic leaders to make progress on these issues. I am not generally a follower of Missouri politics; however, Sen. Claire McCaskill hit the nail on the head at one of her town hall meetings: “If you can’t go out and be accountable face to face with the people that you work for, then you probably don’t belong in one of these jobs.”