Think Local

The Nation is me.

Day Seven, in the week without you-know-who.   For a week I have ignored that giant golden source of heat, light, and gravity.   I have pretended there is politics without our Sun King.   His speeches, his travels, his tweets, whether he stooped to accommodate the person giving him a gold medal or whether he was actually bowing in recognition of the magistracy of Islam and oil wealth, they are all the news.

The exercise was instructive.   

Conclusion:  the sun is everywhere and we cannot escape it.

Think Globally, Act Locally

College classmates James Fallows and Debra Fallows have been traveling the country looking at communities that seem to work.   The burden of their message is that amid all the problems in Washington DC, with its fake news, political gridlock, ugliness, dumbing down, and general disfunction there exists another America, one that lives at the city and county level, and that there is a lot of good going on there.

They cite the redevelopment of Fresno with a downtown art district and the re-emergence of the rustbelt Great Lake city of Erie, Pennsylvania as an employment center.   They visited Bend and admired the brew culture.

Their message is simple:  real self government in America is working.  It works at the local level, where people actually live.

And locally in my community there are good things happening: a library and Rogue Community College are re-centering the historic downtown with new activity, there is new building, new parks, and a city government that appears to work.   The work of local self government is underway.  Kids are getting educated, water and sewer systems work, city parks and county libraries are open.  People go to work and live their lives.

All quiet.

We had a local election for the offices of school boards, library district board members, transit district boards.   Turnout was minuscule: , and this in a state where elections are by mail.   One get the ballot and a voters pamphlet in the mail, one can fill it out at leisure, then mail it back in.   Easy.

One of the candidates for the Library District board announced that he didn't like or use libraries and he would use the office, if elected, to reduce costs significantly since we didn't need libraries.  He lost soundly.   Another candidate said essentially the same thing about the Transit District, saying the didn't use or appreciate the service.  He won.   A perennial  candidate for local offices said he wanted to get onto a school board so he could shake things up and cut costs dramatically.  He lost.

What does all this mean?   I consider it to mean that the general work of local government is going on without great effect from the national turmoil.  All the offices are non-partisan.  None of the fifty or so candidates in the local Voters Pamphlet mentioned national politics. 

You can escape the sun.   You just have to get down to the non-partisan level of on-the-ground self government.  The serious work of government including water out of the taps, of streets being maintained, of schools open, of police responding to 911 calls are all taking place with civic minded people volunteering to make the community better.   People disagree about what that is, but it is done without reference to the issues that are argued about on cable news.    They want government to work, and it does.