Just a normal city council meeting in our small town....
Defending Common Decency in our Towns and Cities
If you were at our City Hall after midnight Tuesday you could see decency in action.
I was at the City Council meeting at 12:20 am. I’m retired, so I had the luxury of staying up late to speak on a minor item on trees, the last item on the agenda. This was nearly 7 hours into a meeting that began at 5:30 pm. It had run continually with only a few bathroom breaks. Volunteer Council members had eaten at their desks.
Council & staff began discussing an agenda item on a new homeless respite center. A place so these folks could be off the street, out of the heat, smoke, rain, etc. during the day. A place to wash, bathroom and store their stuff. Where to put it? What services to offer?
I looked around, and noted --still in the council room after midnight -- was not just council and supporting city staff but also 15 residents of out small town (50,000) who stayed up to make a public comment on the issue. I watched as they provided useful input on the different options for the homeless center. To altruistically advocate for Council to take action to help the neediest in our community.
Yes, we will see this agenda item noted in the local newspaper, but you won’t see the pathos of this midnight scene conveyed -- because it’s not news. Rather its common for people to advocate for the betterment of people among us who struggle.
Common decency.
We need to recognize it more.
* * *
As I watch the scene at midnight before council, I thought of how it contrasted with dark rhetoric of Trump that has filled the national media and blogs, left and right. Most recently, Trump’s attack on the American city of Baltimore for having problems.
Thursday he attacked San Francisco and LA at his rally for having homeless.
Just as he has attacked the City of Chicago for having problems in past.
Attacked Puerto Rico while it staggered to recover in the wake of hurricane.
His worse-than-indifference word and treatment of refugee crisis at our southern border, of people fleeing what he labeled “shit hole” countries.
This is what is common for Trump. His verbalized schadenfreude. Curse the weak, the victim, the needy.
This rhetoric is what inspired the clergy of the Washington National Cathedral, to write a public letter last Tuesday rebuking Trump’s attacks on his fellow humans who struggle. The clergy asked “where is his decency?” (see Kos Blog post with copy of the letter).
But they also asked the rest of USA where is our decency that we tolerate Trump’s rhetoric?
You can find this decency in many places, In fact, City Council meetings are a good place to start. And School board.
But it’s time we more often note the pathos of this common behavior in our newspapers and blogs as antidote to normalizing Trump’s disparagement of others. An antedote to is feeding a hopelessness we can not fix things, so why try or even care. (see Rebecca Solnit’s book “Hope in the Dark).
And beyond this, I ask our scribes -- the pro’s, the bloggers, and the letter-to-editor writers -- to answer the call from the National Cathedral to overtly reject Trump’s behavior.
Silence is the acceptance of Trump’s Rhetoric.
In a civilized society, if you see a crime being committed, you take action. Trump’s words are a vandalism of the American spirit.
