I recently spent a week with family in the Town of Ashland, Oregon. Ashland lies at the very southern end of the state, nestled between the Siskiyou and Cascade Mountain ranges where the two intersect. The centerpiece of the Town is Lithia Park, which unfolds from the town plaza up into the foothills.
Lithia Park is named for local natural spring waters containing lithium (which unsuspecting visitors immediately spit out if they take a drink at the water fountains on the plaza). It features walking paths and hiking trails, a Japanese garden, a couple of duck ponds, a bandstand with lawn where the City Band plays on Thursday evenings in the summer, a playground, and a swimming hole above a small dam where the water is icy cold and refreshing on a hot day. Through and by them all rushes Ashland Creek. It’s a gem of a park, of a size and quality that would shine even in a much larger town or city.
At the park entrance sits a small commemorative plaque set in a modest stone close to the ground. On prior visits, I walked by many times before stopping to read the inscription: “In Recognition of the Women of the Chautauqua Club and Woman’s Civic Improvement Club who, with Vision and Tenacity, Began in 1902 to Shape the Uniqueness of Ashland.”
Years before the women of Ashland had the vote, they organized and advocated for the creation of Lithia Park, which resulted in its official creation in 1914. These women had a vision: They imagined what could be. And they were tenacious: They took action to bring their vision to reality, even though formal channels were closed to them.
On another trip in mid-December, Malka and I joined dozens of other Champions of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Our Common Purpose (OCP) initiative for two days of discussion, reflection, and brainstorming at the Academy’s headquarters outside Boston. It was an honor to be a small part of the Academy’s long tradition, dating all the way back to 1780 – several years before the Constitution formed the United States as we know it today. The Academy’s founders, like the women of Ashland, had imagination and a capacity for action, even in the face of uncertainty.
A key focus of the convening was civic culture, the indispensable grounding for a functioning democracy. Let me reframe that as a statement: Civic culture is the indispensable grounding of a functioning democracy.
In the welter of formal institutional arrangements that accompany a nation on the scale of the United States, it can be easy to lose sight of democracy’s essence. At the Champions gathering, civic-culture-building and civic-culture-builders took center stage. What actions nourish civic culture? What on-the-ground initiatives are contributing, and how can they (we) support and leverage each other? How can other organizations offer support? Along with lively discussions of these and related questions, there was time for simply connecting.
In a recent Civity podcast, peacebuilder John Paul Lederach refers to our essential social contract as being to work through our differences without violence. In a similar vein, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde recently highlighted the “unity [that] is the threshold requirement for people to live together in a free society.” This “unity,” according to Budde, “is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences.” Democracy is fundamentally aspirational – continually reorienting toward a how-we-are-going-to-be-with-each-other North Star. Vision.
Democracy is also and always a work-in-progress. We never pass the finish line, hang up our running shoes, and declare victory. As Ella Baker, griot and pivotal organizer of the Civil Rights Movement, recognized, “The struggle is eternal.” Democracy isn’t a one-time-only; it is an over-and-over-and-over-again. It is the everyday listening and offering of respect and empathy to those “others” who are different and yet still inevitably “in this” with us, which creates civic culture. Tenacity.
We are in a tough time here in these United States, and we are not going to magically snap out of it overnight. What we can do, what is perhaps our only choice other than simply giving up, is to hold fast to the vision that we all matter and to be as tenacious as we are able to take the steps we can – each in our own sphere of influence – to midwife that vision to life. We the People, here and now. Civic culture isn’t just up to us; it is us.