WHY OUR HOME TOWNS ARE SO IMPORTANT

Sam Smith - Bad as the recent news has been, it's worth keeping in mind that we still have our home town where we spend most of our time, a lot of our money, and work with other Americans. 

I keep it in mind because most of my adult life has been spent in a combination of reporting national news while living quite locally. In the  early 1960s I even started a neighborhood newspaper in the community adjacent to the US Capitol. Later, after we moved to a another part of DC, I led a public school's parent association and was elected to one of the new advisory neighborhood commissions, a novel idea for the city's hundred neighborhoods.  

Then, about fifteen years ago, we moved to a small town in Maine where, some 70 years earlier, my parents had started what was then a rare organic farm and where I worked in the summer, learning the skills and values of farmers. 

Thus my life has been bifurcated for a long time and I have increasingly sensed the high value of the local and the small where I live with real folk, deal with real issues that will soon matter and enjoy the real work of community rather than that of corporate, institutional or money driven leaders.

It all got started in part with my first job - working as a newsman for a radio station in DC. My daily assignments varied dramatically - from covering a traffic jam or a fire to attending a White House news conference or a Senate hearing. I l quickly learned about the two Washingtons and as time went on I increasingly preferred the local souls and their activities.

This was a time when DC was turning into a black majority yet in my more than four decades in modern Washington, I hardly ever faced ethnic problems. Instead, I learned that if you want to bring people of different ethnicities together, do it with common issues like it was in DC with home rule, transit fares and planned freeways.

Here in my Maine town, I still find the local fascinating, encouraging and fun. For example, I have met no one here as obnoxious as our next president, people know how to treat each other decently,  and relations are based on one's skills and manner. And this coastal town has been a part of the progressive side of Maine for a long time.

The media fails to point out that the people who run this country are far less human than those people with whom the less powerful deal every day. They are obsessed not only with power but with the modern tools of power such as public relations, money, subhuman institutions,  deceitful language and a mythology that mainly serves those like themselves.

As we start to deal with this awful election that such values have produced, we should think not only about reforming the top of our society but those parts that define us as real human beings. We can make the powerful America far less popular by building from the bottom up - in our towns, our schools and our community institutions - building an America defined by our best souls and their common places rather than the money, ego driven decisions and rotten tricks that have so distorted it.