With the world watching, will we save democracy?
Like the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City or what’s wrongly billed as the world’s deepest hand-dug well in Greensburg, our little newspaper office in Marion has become a tourist attraction of sorts. We even seem to be surpassing the site of the world’s largest marshmallow roast at the county lake.
This past week, we were visited by everyone imaginable — from members of an ultra-conservative group called the People’s Rights Network in central Oregon to what that group probably would regard as the ultra-liberal “Question Everything” broadcast from National Public Radio station KCRW in southern California.
Staffers and others were interviewed for two days by Sumire Kunieda, New York bureau chief of the largest newspaper in Japan, even as a documentary about us by Gary O’Donoghue, the BBC’s famous chief North America correspondent, began airing.
None of this, of course, is the type of attention anyone wants for our beloved hometown. But perhaps it should be.
Coming from left, right, or center, the theme of citizen and media attention we’ve been receiving is best summed up by a question Kunieda was asking during her cross-country reporting trip, which included a major stop here:
Are we witnessing the death of democracy in America?
To be sure, the First and Fourth Amendments and the Privacy Protection Act were infamously trampled by raids on our newsroom and two homes last year. Five civil rights suits attest to that, as will Monday’s scheduled court appearance of disgraced former police chief Gideon Cody on felony charges and a deposition later that day of former city administrator Brogan Jones in a separate open-records suit.
Those cases aren’t why Marion is getting attention, however. In many ways, we have become the poster child for a larger issue that spans a cavernous divide, including such diverse questions as whether President-elect Trump will suspend the rule of law and whether Vice President Harris, if elected, would have abandoned democracy for political correctness and socialism.
A central theme of the debate is whether we, the people, still control federal, state, and local governments. Nearly all of them seem increasingly insulated, secretive, ineffectual, and subverted by forces that alternate between imposing odious mandates and allowing unregulated predatory practices by mega-corporations.
Raids on our office and homes — and, in particular, 98-year-old Joan Meyer’s courageous challenging of them — merely put a local human face on a complex national issue.
Decreased citizen control of government is all around us.
Bodies like city councils, county commissions, and school boards resort more and more to secret, “executive” sessions, supposedly protecting privacy but too often artificially preventing dissent from being aired.
Officials at all levels overly censor, refuse to release in timely manner, or charge exorbitant prices for documents the public has a right to see.
Long-standing laws allowing limited home rule suddenly have become reinterpreted to allow everything from avoiding placing public notices where they can be seen to eliminating elections to approve borrowing.
Police reports are intentionally vague, delayed, or redacted, and police transmissions are abruptly encrypted — ironically on the very same day that Cody made his first appearance in court.
Citizens and officials with dissenting views are ostracized, marginalized, shunned, or driven from office, condemned like journalists for negativity in a Barney the Dinosaur, “Pleasantville” world of everyone seeming to happily agree about everything.
Laws that are supposed to be followed are subverted or weaponized to attack dissenters, opponents, or their kindred, whether they be President Biden’s now-pardoned son or President-elect Trump’s criminal convictions. Raids, impeachments, lawsuits, and the like have replaced civil discourse as a way to make what essentially are political disagreements even more divisive.
Those without faith in America’s more than two centuries of experience see all of this as foreshadowing the end of democracy. Those with a bit broader view understand we’ve been through this before.
One hundred two years ago, esteemed Emporia editor William Allen White won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial “To an Anxious Friend,” addressing very similar problems — problems that earlier had become so extreme that rival legislatures were seated in Topeka.
“You can have no wise laws nor free entertainment of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people — and, alas, their folly with it,” White wrote. “If there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison. . . . Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital.”
White understood that harmony cannot be forced or faked. Insisting on transparency, tolerance, and temerity to express contrary views and to listen without dismissing them are skills required not just of officials but of all citizens.
“Reason has never failed men,” White wrote. “Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world,” adding that when that happens, “brute meets brute on each side of the line.”
What makes America great again is not intransigence or government. It’s each of us demanding greater openness and personally exhibiting it in productive dialogue without fear of being bullied or belittled — and without bullying or belittling those with whom we disagree.
Democracy isn’t tidy. Those who seek to make it so by avoiding controversy in meetings, shielding the public from information, weaponizing laws, or demeaning dissent aren’t protecting us from negativity. They are challenging more than two centuries of democratic tradition.
Speaking up and speaking out are what each of us must do as citizens lest democracy actually die the death so many seem to believe is destined. And our community, with a spotlight on it, can become a shining example of how to keep democracy alive by practicing what we in our hearts know is worth preaching.
— Eric Meyer