Sam Smith - A major reason we're in such a mess is that that the national institutions supposedly guiding us have increasingly become indifferent, incompetent, disconnected or dishonest. For example, the "capitalism" that supposedly guides our economy overwhelmingly ignores the needs and interests of small businesses. Our collegiate academic institutions emphasize analysis but offer little training in what we can do to change the found facts. Our high schools offer our students - including future Trump thugs - little education in the civics of a democracy or the multicultural nature of our society and how to be a positive participant in it.
Meanwhile, our media has shifted from reliance in the 1950s on a majority of reporters who had only a high school education, to over 80% college grads increasingly part of the elite. Even political corruption has fleeted up from serving the powerful in a pol's constituency to serving the donors of external bribes from major national corrupt institutions.
While it's not surprising that conservatives favor viewing things from the top down, it is one of the great failures of liberalism that its advocates often fail to notice the significance of organizing from the bottom up. They forget that there were hundreds of environmental laws passed at the local and state level before the federal government got interested, or that the civil right movement was overwhelmingly dependent on local action, or that right now change is occurring in our policy towards marijuana not because of federal decisions but from a half century of local struggles.
The local has always been a basic part of my political thinking including editing a community newspaper in the 1960s to serving as an elected advisory neighborhood commissioner. It has just always seemed to me that you can't understand national politics without spending a lot of time watching the local as well.
And it's not just about politics. Our social emphasis has changed as Robert Putnam described two decades ago in Bowling Alone. An example:
“In the mid-to late 1970s, according to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times per year, a decline of 45 percent in barely two decades. An entirely independent series of surveys from the Roper Social and Political Trends archive confirms that both going out to see friends and having them over to our home declined from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Yet a third archive (that of Yankelovich Partners) reports a decline of nearly one-third between 1985–86 and 1998–99 in the readiness of the average American to make new friends. Visits with friends are now on the social capital endangered species list."Meanwhile the local clearly was more positive in many ways:
"Virtually all forms of altruism—volunteerism, community projects, philanthropy, directions for strangers, aid for the afflicted, and so on—are demonstrably more common in small towns. Crime rates of all sorts are two or three times higher in cities. ... Store clerks in small towns are more likely to return overpayment than their urban counterparts. People in small towns are more likely to assist a “wrong number” phone caller than urban dwellers. Cheating on taxes, employment forms, insurance claims, and bank loan applications are three times more likely to be condoned in cities than in small towns. Car dealers in small towns perform far fewer unnecessary repairs than big-city dealerships."
I didn't know the numbers, but I was feeling that my hometown of DC had been seized by a culture that had increasingly less connection with my own interests and values compared to those of a small town in Maine where I had spent many vacations. And so eleven years ago, we moved to Maine in no small part to become human again. It was a smart move. Unlike DC, I don't feel ignored or dismissed. The people around me are honest, working for a decent purpose, speaking with fairness. and, although it is not ethnically diverse, caring for those having a hard time making it. For example we have a community services program whose efforts include a food pantry working to feed hungry poor including a summer lunch program. It has a transportation service that provides rides to medical and counseling appointments. Rides are available to those who are temporarily or permanently unable to drive, have no vehicle, and have no other means of transportation. There is heating fuel assistance, medical equipment loans, and youth programs all supported in part by a thrift shop selling goods donated by citizens in a town of only 8,000.
And when its oldest church declined seriously in memberships the town's arts & culture organization worked out a deal where service would be held on Sunday and the rest of the week it became an arts & culture center.Even for the police, there is a different style in dealing with problems as in this from its Facebook page:On 3-3-2021, K-9 Cassie and Sgt. Moorhouse assisted Officer O’Toole and Officer Brown as they were dispatched to a disturbance. While they were assisting with this call for service it was determined that an individual was just having a bad day. Officer’s had learned that this person had lost their house keys in the woods and was unable to get into their residence. K-9 Cassie immediately was put to work for an article search and had subsequently located the house keys in the heavy vegetation. Every town is different but the chances that choices in them will be easier to make, wiser in tone and more human in approach is high. At a time in which depression over the course of our country is growing dramatically, it is crucial to remember that you are also a member of a community, a town and a neighborhood like those that helped to create the national environmental and civil rights movements. The media and those at the top won't tell you this but real change may be just down the street.
