Sam Smith – There are 8 billion people in the world of whom less than 4% live in America. Even our largest city – New York – only holds about 1/1000 of the global total. A town of 8,000, like mine in Maine, would be 1/1000 the size of NYC.
In 1816, Columbus, Ohio had one city councilman for every hundred residents. By 1840 the figure was one per thousand; by 1872 it was one per five thousand; one hundred years later it was one per 55,000. Before having advisory neighborhood commissions, the lowliest elected official in Washington DC represented 90,000 people.
In 1979 these ANCs became part of the DC government with each commissioner representing about 2,000 citizens. While they lacked any real power they could organize, lobby and get publicity for issues. I was one of the first neighborhood commissioners and worked very hard. And it was clear that others took the development seriously as well. As I wrote later:
It began the morning after the election. Congressman Fred Rooney, who lived in my district and had taken a paternal interest in my electoral efforts, was on the phone: " Commissioner Smith: This is Rooney up on Highland Alley. Why hasn't my damn trash been picked up?" A professional politician was taking me seriously. A good start, I thought. I spent much of the day trying to find out why the congressman's trash hadn't been collected but the number downtown was always busy or unanswered. The next morning I checked my constituent's driveway. The cans were gone.
"Well," I said when I reached him at his Capitol Hill office, "I see we got your trash problem cleared up." He never asked me who we were. I had followed one of the first rules of politics: exploit serendipity.
Fred would call me Commissioner or Commish. Another rule of politics: make people feel good. Years later, he also told me that he had once received a call from a woman in a small town in his district wanting to know why her trash hadn't been picked up. "Have you called the sanitation superintendent?" Rooney asked. "No," the lady replied. "I didn't want to bother him, so I just thought I'd call my congressman."
My second problem was not so simple. Several homes had been flooded. The culprit was a conduit that fed water from a public playground near a row of houses. At issue, it quickly became apparent, was the question of whose conduit it was: the city's or the property-owners'. The city staunchly maintained that it was the property owners; I, as District Seven commissioner, just as staunchly maintained it was the city's and that the government should pay for the damage.
To win I needed proof, which is lost in the mists of history. City Hall merely needed to say no. The letters flowed back and forth, lawyers were visited, engineers appeared. I alerted the press to what I called the "Macomb Street Flood Disaster Area," but nothing happened, except for the cracking of walls and sinking of foundations. I recalled that Richard Neustadt had spoken of the power of the presidency as being primarily the power to persuade; I was quickly learning that the power of a neighborhood commissioner was entirely the power to persuade.
As Wikipedia describes ANCs:
ANCs consider a wide range of policies and programs affecting their neighborhoods, including traffic, parking, recreation, street improvements, liquor licenses, zoning, economic development, police protection, sanitation and trash collection, and the district's annual budget. Commissioners serve two-year terms and receive no salary… Candidates can accept campaign donations up to $25 per person As of 2023, ANCs represent more than 100 neighborhoods.
As with other politics, some days you win and some days you lose. But the potential for the former was now clearly in our ‘hood.
The drift away from locally based politics had begun seriously in the mid-20th century, aided by the rise of television and the growth of powerful institutions, corporations, advertising and public relations. We quietly but effectively became one of two cultures: those with power and those without.
I had started out as a newsman at a Washington radio station in the 1950s, and it was not surprising to find myself on the same day covering a White House press conference and then a local murder or fire. The local was still considered equal to the national as a major source of news.
That is no longer the case. Even the news is disappearing. As Politico reported in 2021:
Weekday newspaper circulation has dropped from about 55.8 million households to about 28.6 million in the past two decades. More than 2,000 newspapers have vanished since 2004 (most of them weeklies), creating what some call “news deserts.”
A college major in anthropology, I have long had an interest bias towards the cultural lives of citizens and what is actually happening to them. This so often seems more instructive than what some official says trying to get into the next news cycle. In 2009 I moved from my native home of Washington DC to a small town in Maine where my parents had long ago started an organic farm on which I had worked in the summer as a teenager. So I have lived with this contrast between the classic urban and rural for most of my life, yet find myself more conscious of it than ever.
Even during my time in DC I was deeply involved in local. I started a neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill back in the early 1960s, and helped start the DC Statehood Party. I considered the national and the local mutual parts of reality.
One of the things I noticed along the way was that among the most effective national figures were those who had come out of a community and still could treat America as their ‘hood.”
In attempting to track what I see now as the dehumanizing of American culture I put much of the blame on television because it distracted us from real folk and neighborhoods. The greatly increasing size of corporations and other institutions has played a huge role too. The Internet story is far more complicated because it both distracted us from others and helped us discover them.
Largely unreported has been the effect of these changes on formerly important community organizations. For example, Gallup reports:
Two decades ago, an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. A decade ago, the figure fell to 38%, and it is currently at 30%. This decline is largely driven by the increase in the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation -- 9% in 2000-2003 versus 21% in 2021-2023 -- almost all of whom do not attend services regularly.
Meanwhile, as Michael Brand reported in 2021:
In his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," Robert Putnam documented that attending club meetings, such as those held by Rotary and Kiwanis groups, has declined by 58 percent in the past 25 years. Putnam notes it's part of an overall trend by Americans who also have 43 percent fewer family dinners. Thirty-five percent fewer of us have friends who drop in to see us at our homes. Pick an organization and the numbers are telling. In the past two decades Rotary down 20%, Jaycees down 64%, Masons down 76%.
Meanwhile, more than 5,000 public schools closed between 2017 and 2022 including their parent-teacher association.
On the whole, we have been taught to devalue community and replace human values with those of institutions, grand media, corporations and artificial intelligence. For a journalist, for example, politicians are no longer colorful personalities fun to be around but too often just would-be images for TV.
It doesn’t have to be like that. For example, in the four decades that I played in jazz bands I was involved in a model of good community behavior in that each musician got to play their solos but most of the time were engaged in playing together or backing up someone else.
What can we do about this? We have to make community more important. We can do this by creating institutions like DC’s advisory neighborhood commissions. We can publish online or print neighborhood news. I’ve been running a Facebook page for my town in Maine and have over 2300 friends, more than one quarter the size of the town. And churches, PTAs, neighborhood groups, and other local organizations can meet from time to time to discuss how to make their role in their community stronger. For example, DC churches in the 1960s used to be gathering places for activist groups.
After all these centuries of American history, communities are far too valuable to lose.
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