The last couple of decades has seen a breakdown of the social and economic factors that gave rise to Sunnyside’s emergence in the 1900s, that spurred the city’s growth through the 70s as it became the retail center of the Lower Yakima Valley, and that encouraged businesses to locate close to each other in a central downtown core. Having allowed the hidebound hand of public bureaucracy to inhibit market forces, Sunnyside has been unable to adjust to changes in local and global trends.

Many of our community’s most contentious divisions can be traced to Sunnyside’s unusually pronounced age distribution. The problem is the lack of a middle (the relative paucity of residents between 30 and 60) that creates an abyss between generations. People who belong to those middlemost age brackets play an important role in:

1. facilitating the natural flow of power as each year another batch of senior citizens retire from active participation in the economy.
2. managing the shifting mores created by the evolution and emergence of new worldviews.
3. brokering knowledge between generations.
4. modulating the most extreme expressions from opposing worldviews.

Certainly the voices of older adults must be heard to ensure that the economic and health needs of Sunnyside’s seniors are best met. However, when power coagulates in the population’s uppermost age brackets, local institutions become subsumed by the elderly’s most salient concerns. When this happens, adaptive coping strategies that deal with these concerns invariably seep into the city’s motivations and behaviors.

Because of the inordinate influence Sunnyside’s older population segments weld, the cultural worldview of that minority dominates city operations. You can hear their anxieties echo from the city administration and see their coping mechanisms mirrored in the bureaucracy’s polarized view of the community. In fact, many of Sunnyside’s public organizations react to reputational threats with the same defense strategies that individuals use to assuage existential fears: splitting the population to idealize those who uphold the values prescribed by their cultural worldview and to devalue those with alternative worldviews. The latter groups can be assigned blame for general social and economic failures - external conflict being preferable to the consequences of self-examination. These kinds of socially structured defenses ultimately lead to absurd dysfunctional behavior as the need to placate a minority of the population supersedes rationality and renders the city blind to the only people with the knowledge, skills, and resources to overcome its problems.

When symptoms masquerade as problems, aspiring problem-solvers often become problem-creators. In Sunnyside’s case, often what looks like cultural conflicts are actually generational misunderstandings, what looks like community divisions caused by language barriers are often the result of an aging population segment coping with the terrors of their own mortality, what looks like systemic racism is in reality a natural bureaucratic response to perceived reputational threats. Not understanding these issues has led the city down paths that elicit many more problems:

• Seeking solutions through antiquated eyes blinds us to the realities of today.
• Assigning blame to voices we do not comprehend makes us deaf to those with the knowledge, experience, and resolve to lead the city forward.
• Withdrawing inside bureaucratic defenses intended to deflect reputational threats further diminishes the reputation of the city as a whole.

It is impossible to restore Sunnyside’s retail prominence by removing factors that led to its downturn - we cannot blowup the I-82 freeway, block access to the internet, or reverse demographic changes. We must look at what exists now, implement modern business practices that respond to contemporary society, and incorporate current technology to make something new that helps Sunnyside’s entrepreneurs of today.