Friday, January 20, 2006

Fixing UUism: Move the UUA headquarters to St. Louis

by Chutney

As much as I love Boston, it's pretentious and has an unacknowledged inferiority complex toward NYC and DC. These things have an effect on the life of our Association, however subtle. And that it's in Beacon Hill rubs this blue collar boy the wrong way. Moving HQ to a central location would make HQ more accessible, less Brahmin-ized, less political, and more down to earth. The Association's center of gravity would move out of New England to, you know, the rest of the country. Plus, St. Louis is just cheaper to do business in. (And I prefer Mark Twain and T.S. Eliot over Emerson and Thoreau any day.)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

When we split into two countries, doesn't Missouri go with the red states? :-)

Joel Monka said...

This is a brilliant concept, but the aim is slightly off. Ths city you want is Indianapolis- the transportation and communication crossroads. And the lower cost of living would stretch their salaries!

Steven Rowe said...

well joel sorta made my comment, moving the UUA HQ sounds good,
but I dunno about an exact location: certainly Indiana or Ohio has a more historical U and U than St. Louis.... if that's important enough....

steven r

This Girl Remembers said...

Oh, I don't know, why stop so far east? How about the West coast, for a while? I wonder how the nature of the UUA would change if that happened. Boston is far away from here, in more than just geography.

Of course, I do realize that that suggestion negates half of your original intent - namely, locating it in the central part of the country. So maybe it's just selfishness on this California girl's part. :)

Anonymous said...

The "center of the country" is only central geographi8cally. Plane fare is not predicated on distance, but on how many planes go there. For instance, I live near San Francisco. Getting from here to New York by jet costs about a quarter of what it costs to get from here to Denver. I haven't priced the rest of the Midwest, because I've never wanted to go there. But only a "hub" city would be cheap by airplane.
No other city has the history of Boston. There were lots of thing to see in Boston. There was lobster to eat. What does the midwest have?

Robin Edgar said...

Since U*UIsm is well on its way to becoming a laughing stock amongst religions perhaps it should go all the way and move the UUA headquarters to St. Louis du Ha! Ha! right here in La Belle Province where the licence plates say - Je me souviens. . . ;-)

Anonymous said...

Heck, let's follow in American tradition--or Mormon tradition, for that matter--and go build our very own capitol city somewhere.

Lake Woebegon, perhaps... where we can teach the Indians to dance while we're at it.

I can't think of any action that would be more likely to feed and enhance any and all tendencies towards centralism rather than maintaining and feeding decentralized, congregational polity. Probably even more than making Sinkford into UUPope Bill I.

If you want to "move" HQ, then it ought to be by literally decentralizing, and dispersing HQ. Send one department to each district. Plan for a substantially bigger IT support group to allow the nonstop telecommunications it'd need.