Best Table In The House

Here there’s no such thing as normal, ordinary or consistent.

Where I’ve worked in the past there was always a sense of sameness, a homogenized form of predictability. The people I associated with were of a common class, race and educational background. There were similar values and aspirations. Even religious affiliation fell into a narrow range. Give yourself a week’s experience and you knew what to expect.

That’s not the case if you’re on Mayor McAdams’ staff.

Let me describe my dining plans on Friday March 22^nd and Wednesday March 27^th. On Friday I attended the annual Caesar Chevez Banquet hosted by the Utah Coalition of La Raza. And on Wednesday I attended the “Giant of Our City” dinner hosted by the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce.

These two dinners could not have been less alike. One was held at a popular venue for cage fighting, the other in the ball room of the city’s only five diamond hotel.  At one dinner grace was said in Spanish by the local Catholic Bishop, the other featured an address by an apostle of the LDS church. One dinner had a menu of tortillas and burritos, at the other we feasted on steak and lobster.  

With all these obvious differences, exactly what did these two banquets have in common besides plates and chairs?

Probably two things.

First, the people being honored at both occasions are outstanding humanitarians.

Harris Simmons and Scott Anderson, the two top executives at Zion’s National Bank, are men of vast achievement. They have graced scores of important and worthy causes with their leadership. The celebration in their honor at the Grand America, as deluxe as it was, understated the value of their contribution.

The Caesar Chevez banquet celebrated people of similar worth. Sylvia Garcia Rickard, Barbara Arriola Adams, Rebecca Chavez-Houck and Graciela Italiano-Thomas are also “giants.” These women have excelled as advocates and community organizers for their own Hispanic community.

But what is that “one other thing” the two events had in common?

I would suggest it was a single table where a half dozen people were seated – perhaps the only people who attended both events. That table was our table, the table of Ben McAdams. The table of the Salt Lake County Mayor.

It occurred to me this week that those two dinners were significant of what good democratic government is all about. In a world filled with differences. In a world where we are segregated by distinctions of class, wealth, sex, ideology, religion et al. - there are too few institutions that unite us. Yet, surely, one of those institutions is our common democratic government.

Both these groups, regardless of their differences, and regardless of their shared agnosticism about one another, have the same government, and the same mayor. His table is the place where divergent circles occupy a single place. His person is the hinge by which class and culture are united.  

So, at the second of those two dinners, it was a particular honor to meditate on all this. I may have been in the company of thousands who could easily duplicate my yearly salary in a month, and I may have been sitting far from the stage, but that night it was easy to believe I was at the best table in the house.