Alaska needs leaders who will get off the fence
- Larry Persily
- Jan 14
- 3 min read
By Larry Persily
More than 60 years ago, when I was in eighth grade, I was playing outfield in the annual softball game between the seventh and eighth graders of Luella Elementary School on Chicago’s Far South Side. Not exactly the World Series but it was important to us, or as important as anything can be when you’re 12 years old.
I wasn’t that good at softball, but I remember it was late in the game and the coach was giving everyone some playing time. That included me.
We played in the school yard — all asphalt, no grass, painted white squares in lieu of real bases — with the outfield surrounded by a chain-link fence. It wasn’t very high, no barbed wire in 1964, and you could easily climb the fence if you were wearing your Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers with the blue star on the ankle.
I think about that fence as I think about Alaska.
One inning late in the game, a batter drove a hit past me in the outfield. I ran to catch up with the rolling ball, thinking I would make a perfect throw into the infield to hold the runner. The ball came to a stop at the bottom of the fence — and so did I.
As I ran into the fence, the top of my shoe got caught in the bottom of the steel webbing. The ends of those chain links would not let go. No matter how much I stretched my body and my arms — I was already 6-foot in eighth grade — I could not reach the ball.
I struggled, but I was trapped.
The runner rounded the bases as another outfield ran over to retrieve the ball that I couldn’t reach. I was embarrassed, humiliated, shamed that I had blown my chance at doing something well.
I think of the state’s political leadership as that fence, holding Alaska back from pulling off a winning play. We know what we need to do to make the state a better place to live and work and raise families, but the solutions are out of reach because of politics. As individuals, we can stretch only so much — the answer is leadership to free our foot from the fence.
Real leadership would tell Alaskans the truth about state finances, the urgency for new revenues to pay for what we need, and the choices of what we can’t afford any longer.
Better leadership would not stand behind the Permanent Fund dividend as if it were a fence to protect them in their next election campaign.
Elected officials and unelected leaders in business and community groups should be talking with Alaskans about what it will cost to ensure quality schools, child care, roads and rural services, examining why people leave the state and why not enough move here. And what the state can do to help employers fill the job vacancies that are holding back commerce and community.
Smart leadership would create openings in the fences of political animosity and Alaska stubbornness, not use the fence as a dividing line for campaign ads.
It’s an election year for governor and the Legislature. Which means it’s a chance to elect people who will help pull our foot out from under the fence and get Alaska back into the game. Sitting on the fence is not an answer.
• Larry Persily is the publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel, which first published this column.
