We can show them how it's done

We have to remember how to act in a democracy if we expect it to last, and for a while there, it seemed we might not be able to do that. But it could be that those troublesome signs are waning, even if our troubles aren’t.

Maybe it’s just that the day’s news is not quite so relentlessly pessimistic, or perhaps the rhetoric of our national politics has cooled off a degree or two.

Or maybe it’s just that much of the nation is focusing more on local issues, the one’s more of us can actually do something about.

That can be both a good thing, for solving more problems and making the world a better place, or a bad thing, if we choose to abandon en masse, for our own sanity, those big issues in the world that we can only take so much of.

I wonder about citizens just coming of age who have been subjected to extreme rhetoric for years and think that’s just normal America. Although the political circus we’ve lived through over the last decade or two is not normal, it’s not unprecedented either, and the country will live through it.

If we remember how.

The how of that sentence will depend on us all doing what we can to model good civic principals, how things are supposed to run in our democratic republic. That means debating hard questions and listening to — and understanding — each other’s differing views to come to reasonable solutions, including compromises.

That’s something that we in small towns can accomplish. We can show the rest of America how focusing on our common desire to make life better will do just that.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher