The Village Square

Rickards High School Challenge Day

Add comment February 8th, 2010

We the People: Name a Wiki?

An exciting part of our project We the People will be building a cutting edge community Wiki, a tool to take good citizenship online to solve problems rather than e-scream at each other. We’ll take this model to new communities, so you’ll be the start of breaking new ground on the internet nationally. Confused about a local issue or clueless about a state vote? Look it up on the Wiki for a basic primer built by fellow citizens in constructive partnership. Your part? As simple as adding what you know to the mix. You can sign up to test drive the contraption (currently busy building it) when you sign up for our newsletter HERE. Good behavior is mandatory, so if you want to hurl putrid names at the people you disagree with, you’ll have to go to the whole rest of the internet.

Post on this thread if you’ve got a better idea as to what to call our Wiki. Working name is “We the Wiki” in a hat tip to our founding fathers and the whole “We the People” notion. Then when everyone in America uses it, we’ll affectionately call it “The Weki.” If you think this is a train wreck and want to save us from ourselves, please help us innovate. We’ll probably come up with a prize for the winning name.

Add comment January 28th, 2010

We the People: Tallahassee Brainstorm

Help us think through how we’ll implement We the People. (If you want your idea to see the light of day, make it civil.)

Add comment January 28th, 2010

Mary Ann Lindley: Progress calls for ‘healing language’

In today’s Tallahassee Democrat, Mary Ann Lindley writes about our Jim Leach 50-state Civility Tour lecture:

One night last week, I was inspired, however, by a small group of people who are trying to restore civility in public conversation — and therefore help us make better progress in solving our problems. Our big three, the economy, health care, war, are all stymied now by vast differences of opinion and approach — and high levels of mistrust — of each other’s ideas on how to move forward.

The Village Square, an informal civic group that’s now two years old here in Tallahassee, had invited to town former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach, who is now chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leach isn’t exactly a rock star on a world tour, but he is setting out to visit all 50 states on his mission of reinventing civility as a path to solving some of the above gargantuan problems.

It was just a few days before the earthquake in Haiti when The Nature Conservancy’s Andy McLeod, introducing Leach, spoke of avenues to progress. “Its saving grace is in a society that seeks to cultivate moral sensibility,” he said.

In its government institutions and among its citizens, progress can hardly occur without moral sensibility; that is, respect for each other.

This is notably lacking today with rancor that’s become business-as-usual and widely accepted. Spouting off is habit-forming — if even the loudest spouters realize it’s not very helpful.

Leach is mercifully self-effacing, noting that “few subjects are duller than public manners.” Yet his proposition is a simple challenge that any one of us can apply to ourselves (and our blogs): We can use words, he said, “to bring out our better angels” or we can use them dishonestly to confuse and undermine each other.

When it comes to the rivalry of ideas, Leach said, our choice is to “stir anger, polarize and compel violence” with what we say.

Or, conversely, we can use “healing language” such as Lincoln used in his second inaugural address, inspiring the nation to bind up its Civil War wounds “with malice toward none.”

Read the whole article HERE.

Add comment January 17th, 2010

Chris Timmons: Discourse or just noise?

The project The Village Square is working on, referred to in the article below, is finding more voices from both sides of the aisle for our blog, to engage in a real conversation (unlike the ranting on talk radio or TV opinion “news” shows). We’re particularly interested in auditioning blogging teams of friends from different political camps. If you’re interested, give us a yell at thecrier@tothevillagesquare.org. We tried this first offline in the “real world” in our invitation to have a lunch across the aisle. It’s our way, as historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, to “let friendship redeem the republic.”

Chris Timmons: Discourse or just noise?
From today’s Tallahassee Democrat.

Two weeks ago, I had coffee with Liz Joyner, executive director of the Village Square, about a project she’s working on, and I enjoyed her passion for politics and ideas.

Yet there was this tincture in the discussion. I noticed a small distress, a weariness about the close-mindedness, extremity and partisanship of politics these days.

She pinned it on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Not in that liberal, nose-upheld NPR kind of way, but more earnestly and with profound regret. I felt her pain.

I’ve listened to Limbaugh only once or twice myself, much the same for Sean Hannity.

They have some function in this world, and for many people, I’d bet they have sparked an interest and, let’s hope, a passion enough to search out all views. Something in me is hoping but doubts it.

There’s demagoguery, obtuseness and silliness in some of their views. I chuckled at Limbaugh’s bizarre plan to sabotage Obama’s primary campaign in Pennsylvania, dubbed with the military craft cliche: Operation Hillary. Yet Limbaugh and Hannity, in a circumscribed sense most certainly, are great entertainers working in a crowded field of political entertainment.

Anyone who listens to them with the intention of getting something intelligent out of it is simply lost. But they have little to do with what’s wrong in politics.

It’s those in the higher journalism attached to small magazines such as the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Nation, American Conservative, Weekly Standard, Reason, Commentary and the National Review that offer not a principled defense of ideas but the false exploitation of ideas and a misuse of language that have a stultifying effect on political discourse and disarm thoughtful people like Joyner and threaten to disengage them from the process.

At least, after reading some of Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” I have come to feel this way.

Its title is cheeky, a reverse insult to those liberals forever calling conservatives fascists, which historically we have not been.

I felt redeemed once I read the title, and because Goldberg writes crisply and with humor, I was looking for a quirky intellectual history. I didn’t get that, because Goldberg decided to go for something much smaller.

He wanted to rebut every New York Times columnist, New Yorker staff writer or Ivy League academic who ever uttered the words “fascism” and “conservatives” together. Really, he wanted to sock Gore Vidal in the mouth, in a literary sense.

So, we get liberalism is fascism. No, it’s a cousin of fascism. No, really, it has a resemblance to fascism. Hey, look at Hillary’s devious phrase “It takes a village to raise a child,” or Barack Obama’s equally menacing “We are the change we’ve been waiting for.”

It’s obvious: Fascism is back!

As Richard Posner wrote about a popularizer of academic ideas: No serious reader could be persuaded by his books.

When words have no meaning, ideas lose their substance, since both require honesty and mutual agreement about their definitions. In Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey,” the know-it-all Henry Tilney lectures the heroine on her careless use of words and the word, in particular, “nice.” “Every time (you say), this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh it’s a very nice word, indeed — it does for everything.”

It may seem a conservative cliche, a backward way of arguing for small government, but part of this distortion of ideas and words, the meanness and small-mindedness of our political arguments, comes from our having too many ideas on the table. Create a concept, somebody once said, and reality exits pretty fast.

The pundits and politicians have forgotten the serious stakes that all of the ideas on the table carry. We’ve seen cap-and-trade rushed through the U.S. House, the call for a new stimulus bill (somehow the other didn’t do the job), and now a renewed call by the president for an expedited health care bill by October.

A Republican senator says this is the president’s Waterloo. The president cynically says Republicans are playing politics. Speaker Nancy Pelosi causally dismisses citizen’s concerns about a real and unprecedented power grab by the federal government.

It should surprise no one that, once ideas and words are scrambled only for effect and no one thinks thoroughly and thoughtfully about them, it’s easy to have four different health care bills, major miscommunication or noncommunication, spin and political calculation, inflamed citizens — and all the rest.

At the president’s news conference, for example, his bill was defined as an extension of the free-market concept. It is anything but, yet the president indulges in this because he knows that explaining ideas honestly doesn’t work in this political season.

In a letter, Mrs. Humphrey Ward chastises Henry James about his boredom and cynicism about politics. For her, politics and ideas are the “salt and sauce” of life. I’m starting to reject her views and embrace James’s.

To me, this unreasoning, vulgar, groundless, deafening and sapping partisanship is the “very measure of insipidity” for those who love ideas, politics and the village square.

Add comment August 16th, 2009

Allan Katz resigns City Commission seat. He will be missed.

Today Village Square founder and board of directors co-chair Allan Katz has announced he is resigning his City Commission seat.

To watch Allan during his many years of service to Tallahassee was to have the pleasure of seeing the consummate citizen in action. Despite the dizzying speed that he moved from one commitment to the next, he was always up on the latest news and working to fully grasp the complexities required to make a good decision for the City of Tallahassee.

For those of us who know Allan best, we know he is brave. And we’re not talking vanilla brave… he is a nerves of steel, emperor has no clothes unflinching kind of brave that is sadly rare among the too many finger-in-the-wind elected officials of our day. Agree with him or not, he has never taken the easy way if it sacrifices what he thinks is the right way. He steadfastly put the best interest of Tallahassee well ahead of how he’d be perceived or whether he’d be re-elected.

When Allan launched an initially one-man effort to oppose buying into the Taylor coal plant, his re-election campaign was right around the corner. While he knew it would be a harder slog because of the coal fight, it wasn’t even a consideration. In the no-nonsense common sense signature characteristic of Allan, he called the coal plant “like buying into the last buggy whip factory.” When he later supported biomass, he set himself against many of his no-coal allies. Didn’t matter, Allan thought it was the right thing for Tallahassee, so he took the steeper climb.

The Village Square was inspired by the way that Allan has done his public service. Despite his devotion to the Democratic party, Allan has never been limited by the ideology or party membership that most of us find ourselves boxed into. He is committed to the world of great ideas, wherever they come from. Allan has deep and meaningful friendships across the aisle which we built on to start our tilting-at-windmills-pie-in-the-sky-civility-in-politics effort.

If The Village Square is even half as successful as Allan was, we’re good.

(Link to Tallahassee Democrat article.)

Add comment August 14th, 2009

Tallahassee Democrat on Biomass

Kudos to the Tallahassee Democrat for providing superb coverage of the local biomass issue.

Add comment December 21st, 2008

The Biomass hearing went better than this:

…No one said anyone’s “face looks like a bidet.”

Add comment December 12th, 2008

Civility takes a hit at Biomass hearing

Considering hosting our own public forum to make sense of the Tallahassee controversy on Biomass, I attended last night’s City Commission meeting that allowed public testimony on the topic. If you’ve got four hours (and a couple of Valium) you can watch it yourself courtesy of The Tallahassee Democrat.

The majority of discussion was respectful and civil – if not always entirely factual – although there were enough really bad moments that most of the commissioners felt the need to comment on the lack of civility as the meeting ended.

Mayor Marks:

“There were a lot of things said tonight. And a lot of them were accurate and a lot of them were inaccurate…”

“…It is clear there is a lot of misinformation, misleading information, bad information out in the public sector… some of it in my opinion was presented to the public deliberately in an attempt to confuse the public. And that’s troublesome to me. I’ve even had people fundamentally tell us that’s what they wanted to do… We will have civil, orderly procedures in these chambers. I will not tolerate anything else. That’s what our citizens expect and this is what we’re going to have.”

Commissioner Andrew Gillum:

“I think that the relationship between public officials and the public is a sacred one… We do a lot of things throughout the week and in our time as elected officials and sometimes people disagree with those things and sometimes people agree. What I wholeheartedly disagree with is demagoguing of people who give their time and their lives because they care and their talents to this community and at the first disagreement, they’re demagogued. They’re called baby killers, they’re don’t they don’t care about black people, they’re told they don’t care about kids and so many other things. And I think those are things that I reject are completely untrue and certainly not representative of the elected officials who serve on this body.”

Commissioner Debbie Lightsey:

“All the right and the wrong, the pros and the cons are never on one side of the equation. If they were this would be an easy job and I will tell you it is not easy… Part of the problem here is the public has not received adequate information to date. Some of the information I think should be very reassuring to many of you. Some of these things aren’t a matter of judgment, they are a matter of fact. You can look at what’s going to be burned, you can look at the emissions, you can look at all those kinds of things. This is factual information. There are plants like this in operation. It’s not he said she said. In this world there are still things that are fact and things that are factually incorrect and we need to sort those out here tonight. Because I’ve heard a lot of stuff that was not factually correct and in my view was stated to be alarming as opposed to informative. I told everyone that before this discussion to tonight what I wanted to hear from people was their view on this but that I expected people to be civil and honest. To a huge degree everybody complied this that, but there were a couple of exceptions. And I have noted those, as I always do and I don’t appreciate that. And you have no credibility in my book when you behave that way in these chambers. We’re here trying to make a hard decision that balances a lot of issues in this community and we’re doing the best we can. I expect everybody when we have this next public hearing to be civil, to discuss this on the merits, to not make snide personal remarks that get you no where here, in fact it discredits your position and you need to recognize that.”

Add comment December 11th, 2008

All GEOpolitics is Local

Tell us if you have thoughts from tonight’s dinner. Anything in our draft recommendations you think needs to be added? Deleted? Fact-checked?

If you get a chance read the Shell 50 year energy forecast referred to tonight. Find it here.

1 comment July 1st, 2008