Public LifeA collection of 11 posts

Public life is where our largest promises meet the institutions, decisions and human beings expected to carry them. Essays, commentary and satire on politics, governance and culture, from Åland outward, with particular attention to the distance between what societies say they value and what they make possible.

Everyone Can Wait

I have spent the week complying with deadlines, that quaint arrangement in which a date arrives and something is expected to be finished. Public writing had to take a back seat. Having finally resurfaced, I turned to the Sustainability Council’s anniversary minutes and discovered an altogether more accommodating relationship with unfinished business. In the party games of public participation, everybody can be involved without necessarily being allowed to interfere with anything. After ten years, the interesting question is what membership enables people to change, beyond their afternoon plans.

The Right Kind of Different

A century ago, Åland’s future was settled through a promise: that peace could protect difference, and that power could be bound by obligations. People have built lives inside that promise. We still do. Its worth is measured in the language our children can live in, the rights we can rely on, and the dignity of being heard by those who govern us. In Eetu Isto’s The Attack, Finland defends her law book against an empire. The artwork accompanying this essay asks what happens when she finds herself on the other side of the struggle. From Helsinki to Mariehamn, we know what it means to ask power to keep its word. We must carry that knowledge with us when the power is ours.

Everyone Can Agree

Ten years of planning the future. Three weeks—and counting—to put one afternoon on the record. Following Minna Hellström’s criticism on Ålands Radio, a little protokoll bingo opens onto a larger question about power, institutional comfort and what happens to criticism after everyone has been thanked for contributing. The paperwork has done its ten thousand steps. Power has not left its chair. What, precisely, is being sustained?

Same As It Ever Was

I went looking for the history of ÅHS and found a repertory company. Think Ålandic Blackadder, with more organisational charts and a remarkably durable cast. Doctors become politicians. Journalists become board members. Each decade brings a change of wardrobe and a cunning plan to resolve the difficulties created by the previous cunning plan. Hippocrates and Montesquieu are summoned to an argument neither lived long enough to regret attending. The lawyers get repeat business. The rest of us get another premiere. Somewhere beneath it all lies a question we have been reorganising for thirty years: how do you get an institution full of people who know better to work better together?

Everyone Can Advise

I may be the only person on Åland untroubled by the missing job advertisement. Why make strangers audition for an occupied chair? What interests me is the resources attached to it, the council assembled to bless it, and the difference between being allowed to do something and exercising good judgment. The recruitment theatre was cancelled. The coronation appears to have gone ahead.

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