This morning we discussed an article about the consequences of civic disengagement in a particular small town: What Croydon, a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town, Learned About Democracy [our copy here]. In Croydon, it took a crisis to wake up the citizenry to the reality that democratic self-governance can produce awful results when most people assume that someone else is paying attention. But the story is actually full of hope. A renewal of civic engagement, with good results for the whole community, resulted from the crisis. An extremely high level of participation DID NOT have the results that Republicans apparently fear: it did NOT trample individual rights and did NOT hand control of the town over to the Republican’s favorite boogeyman: the “woke mob.”
Will it take a crisis for our community to learn fully the value of engagement? What about our nation? How can we get there without going off the cliff?