How others help us

Sam Smith – As our national engagement with democracy and decency fades thanks in no small part to the action and views of the most distorted presidency in our history, it is worth looking for places where people are still doing things right.

For example, I suspect part of our problem is the result of smaller families than in the past. I grew up in a family of six children and so learned early in life that not everyone agreed with me and that just arguing about things didn’t help much. It was finding what you shared that really mattered.

Lately, it has struck me that another underrated blessing is living in a small town. I now live in one in Maine with a population of 8000 and I am repeatedly reminded of how different it is than what I see on TV about our national leaders and their policies and statements.

I can’t think of anything about my town that has outraged me as have the policies and verbiage of our national leaders. And this is not a new experience.

For over four decades I lived in DC covering both national and local news and it was the local that often really drove my efforts and my appreciation for that of others. In fact, in attempting to come up with the names of national figures who contributed to my energy, direction and values, I could only come up with a handful while the count of those worth admiring in the ‘hoods was substantial.

In fact, one of my earliest publications was the Capitol East Gazette – a local newspaper about the neighborhood near the US  Capitol that not only was a mostly ignored community but back in the 1960s had a substantial black population. 

One of the things I learned in local Washington was that blacks and whites could find things in common. For example, when I was in my twenties, I took part in a one day boycott of DC Transit to protest a fare increase. I drove 77 people to their destination and then wrote a piece about it. Which is how I got involved in civil rights and became friends with another guy in his 20s who had organized the boycott: Marion Barry.

Increasingly, as time went on, I learned the numerous ways that community, rather than just power, produces change. We ordinary citizens can do it without the direction of the powerful.  We have civil rights, labor unions, environmental action and women’s achievements thanks in no small part to the work of the ordinary. And I found, even though I was a rare church goer, that my activist friends included quite a few ministers and others involved in a church.