The fable writer Aesop is credited in his story The Four Oxen and the Lion with the phrase, “United we stand, and divided we fall.” That maxim has been a staple for organization of dissident groups for hundreds of years and is at the cornerstone of the foundation of the United States. After all, the Great American Experiment is about self-determination of government and progress through unity of separate states that choose to band together.
Today for Saint Louis and our economy, perhaps we should also look to Benjamin Franklin, who upon learning of King George’s decree to hang the Continental Congress as separatists: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
What is Saint Louis today? We are a metro area divided into well over a hundred quasi-independent political organizations. Over the last sixty years, our importance to the national and international economies has dwindled, and our once proud city has lost key industries and prominence. This is especially true in how geography has made our strategic location at the center of the US less important, or at least less utilized by fractioned leadership. We have lost major companies, our prominent airline hub status, and our draw in attracting new jobs to the region.
Still, we retain our self-identity. When a person from Chesterfield is out of town and asked by a New Yorker where he’s from, he says Saint Louis. People who live in Richmond Heights put Saint Louis as their home address for their letters. More than just identifying ourselves through the Cardinals, Rams, and Blues, we identify ourselves through our charming individualism best seen in our collective love of the food on the Hill, summers in Forest Park, and our proud history of the Olympics and World’s Fair in 1904. And most identifiably, we all share affinity towards the Gateway Arch, the single largest piece of pure sculpture in the world and our international symbol of accomplishment through discovery and self-determination.
When I was in college (Miami University), I had a class on Political Geography. The majority of the class focused on international boundary issues, the origination of wars for seaports and oil lines, and how natural geography can define a nation’s evolution. Imagine my surprise one day when the Professor began the first hour of the class on Saint Louis. My Professor was a big fan of Saint Louis, especially the Museum of Transportation and our former streetcars. However, his class was anything but complimentary as he went head-on into the City/County Divide. Opening our regional fragmentation to the class, people were amazed to learn of the 90+ individual fiefdoms in Saint Louis County that consider themselves independent cities, and even more so when we discussed how Saint Louis City was not in Saint Louis County. People were dumbfounded at this separation. After calling out Saint Louis’ downturn over the last sixty years, we spent the next hour on Indianapolis, how that city unified with its county, and how their metro area has thrived ever since, including new jobs, population growth, public services, and the intangible identity they now have as citizens of Indianapolis. Fair to say: lesson learned.
Today, we are on the threshold of new innovations that can truly bring us all into the new future. The redevelopment of Downtown, the potential to be the primary trade hub of China in the central US, and investment in new companies & technologies (as well as our universities) mean great things for us. These are part of incredible opportunities that can mean significant changes in the quality of all of our lives through opportunities we often do not recognize and more yet unrealizable.
However, people still are stubborn in their ways. This includes all of us:
- The City resident who loathes suburbanism and looks in scorn and disdain at people west of 170.
- The South County family who only comes to the City for Cardinal games and quickly leaves for the unfounded fear of being carjacked.
- The Urban Poor who have been ignored by our collective wealth but still look in disdain at any forward-looking progress out of distrust.
- The near hundred mayors, city attorneys, and other small city public officials, let alone the near-thousand councilmen, who are scared of joining with other cities for fear of losing their part-time job titles.
- The suburban young who only want to come to the City to party before running back to live in anonymity in an apartment surrounded by redundancy without social entertainment options, save TGI Fridays.
- All of us as separate citizens who grab for whatever extra share of tax revenue we can get, whether from fighting with our neighbors over a strip mall development with a big box retailer or from bickering over which other city’s residents steal from us and demanding change in the non-unified police forces.
- TWO SEPARATE CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICTS
And these are just the softest issues. When considering education, crime, and employment, we must all work together to find cohesive, competent, and pragmatic solutions to these issues if we are to ever see real change. By unifying, we would first eliminate redundancies and provide for more proper allocations of capital to the biggest issues we face. Moreso, by identifying ourselves for what we all truly are, Saint Louisains, we can only then continue to progress, and to do so with the strength of numbers and collective identity.
The issue of City/County Merger is all about Cooperation. We have become stagnant in our separatism, and unless we choose to unite and engage the world economy together in the new reality of the 21st Century, we shall fall behind. We must invest in our unity and band together, or else certainly we will fall into obsolescence.
I vote Yes for merger.
