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Not just a translation but some different content too!
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Photo © 2000 Brent Finley
USPA Elections 2000
- Do the 'write' thing! - We in the sport of skydiving are fortunate to have an organization such as USPA to represent us. Say what you will about the organization and its bad points, but it has given our sport a certain degree of "respectability" in the eyes of those "powers" who could do us in.
By proving their ability to self-police the sport, USPA has been there to argue convincingly on our behalf with government agencies as well as law-making bodies, ensuring that each of us has a place to skydive, and a place to do it reasonably affordably. We may feel we get an "okay" deal for our money from the USPA each time we remit those renewal dues but, perhaps, we could be getting more.
However, like most long-standing organizations; those with rich histories going back decades, the USPA is beginning to get stale, beginning to develop the disease of bureaucracy. Most people think of a large, lumbering organization when they think of a bureaucracy; but the small organization can fall into that trap just as readily.
While USPA maintains a small staff to perform a mountain of tasks, they maintain a rather large, unpaid leadership quotient. In some respects, this would be a good thing, but in USPA's case, it is probably the opposite, since many of those leaders serve both the organization, and thus its membership, second to their own personal interests.
With the vast majority of our USPA leadership involved in the business end of skydiving, their first priority, naturally, is to protect those business interests they have worked so hard to cultivate. The result is a leadership which offers little controversy, and even less representation of the vast majority of those members who only partake of this sport for sheer
enjoyment.
When the interests of one segment of the membership take an across-the-board prominence in any organization, that organization, while perhaps remaining effective, becomes stale. New ideas are slow to achieve acceptance, and many are quashed at the outset simply because they don't serve the needs of those in power to support and argue them.
We are coming upon a new era in our sport, a sport that is one of the more rapidly changing ones, with new ways of flying, new concepts of instruction, new disciplines emerging daily. Thus, we need a leadership at our representative organization that can shepherd those new ideas into acceptance and be more in touch with the "common skydiver", the one for whom this sport represents sheer enjoyment, and not necessarily a business interest.
This is not to say business is bad; for without the money that flows into the sport through new products, progressive drop zones with an active student program, and the myriad other commercial ventures operating in our sphere of the world, our sport would truly never have evolved as quickly as it has. But, in order for our sport to continue to evolve, we need leaders who represent a diversity of the interests operating within it. Continued on Page 2
>>> USPA Elections Special <<<
  
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