I write as regularly as I can for Villages-News.com and wonder whether its readers understand why it is one of the most innovative examples of New Digital Journalism in America today. I also write for the Daily Commercial, the Lake County newspaper that is—heroically and somewhat idealistically—fighting the same “good fight” against enormous odds. In my spare time I also write for FruitlandParkNews.org, a pale imitator of Villages-News.com but with a slightly different and more focused purpose.
My personal passion is democracy. (To some extent it is also food—my wife and I own the Fruitland Park Cafe, which brought us from Orlando to this area in the first place).
Short of tending to your own family and what you might do in a church, synagogue, ashram, mosque, or closet (Matt. 6:6), I believe democracy is the noblest, holiest experience any of us get to enjoy in this life.
One of the biggest mistakes our radicals made in the 1960s—echoed by our equally redolent radicals today—is to express contempt for our government. In a democracy, we are our government.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Walt Kelly, the philosopher cartoonist who penned the Pogo comic strips in the 1950s and ’60s, is credited with that line and it is prescient. We are our government.
Or at least we should be.
My wife and I own a small business. I know—from experience—that if I ignore the details of that business, pretty soon things go askew. Don’t get me wrong—we have wonderful employees. They are like family. I would trust any one of them with my car, my house, my bank account even. They work hard, they are all well paid and they deserve more.
But none of them have exactly the vision my wife and I have, nor exactly the motivation. If we look away too long, things start to change, and if we look away long enough some of those changes turn counter-productive.
Government works the same way. If we’re too busy to take part as our elected representatives conduct our business, pretty soon our shared values, our collective wisdom, our respect for consensus, and the prominence we give to governance over partisanship all begin to erode.
Pretty soon we get a mess. I can’t think of a better example than the U.S. Congress.
More than any others, two distinctly American institutions created our nation: the unfettered participation of individual citizens and our public media. The first newspapers were published around 1700. Three generations later they played a vital role in the creation of our democracy.
This is why I feel so strongly about Villages-News.com and the Daily Commercial, as well as FruitlandParkNews.org. Our public media should provide a window into our government, the same way X-Rays help doctors see our bones. Villages-News.com does that especially well, which is why all my contributions here have been voluntary. I look at it as a civic duty.
But good public media can’t do it alone. Individual participation is what drives government forward.
So when I read the article posted on the front page here (AAC’s Gary Moyer agrees with Villager’s idea on prescreening requests), I felt compelled to respond.
Ralph Niederst is correct. The more we can make governing more efficient, the better. I have sat through my share of lengthy commission, committee and board meetings that are maddeningly dull.
But when I read the quote from Gary Moyer, arguably one of the three most influential Gary’s in this part of Florida, it gave me a chill.
Moyer is a business guy. He wants to get things done, done correctly, and done now. I respect that. And any reasonable person has to respect the work he has done. But Moyer also realizes that government isn’t business. It’s government.
“Anybody that wants to address this board on any subject has absolutely the right to do that, regardless of whether we have procedures or not,” Moyer said.
It can be a pain to listen to all those speakers, I understand. And some of their suggestions are absurd, to be sure. But that’s the price we pay for democracy.
Mr. Niederst was expressing his opinion, a good one. Bless him for that. But if you are to stifle the opinions of others there’s a price. And eventually, it’s a mess.
Democracy is far and away the best form of government on the planet and the only one I can live with. But nobody ever said it was the easiest.
Democracy is hard work.
Steve Fussell is a journalist based in Fruitland Park.