Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Steen, of South Burlington, who is now retired after being a scholar and teacher of philosophy, followed by a 20-year career in health care planning, health regulation and public health, ending as a professor of health policy and a private consultant. He is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association.
In Vermont, we are privileged to have the fine public interest reporting exemplified here: N.Y. Times give VTDigger a shout-out for Covid coverage. For me, it speaks clearly about the political culture of Vermont, and makes me reflect on the historical changes I have witnessed in my life.
The “high degree of social trust among residents” we are credited with by the Washington Post is the communitarian resource most vitally necessary to sustain democracy. That was the essential insight of Vermont philosopher John Dewey who taught that democracy exists in the minds and hearts of the people as their faith and their aspiration, or it doesn’t exist. Democracy requires the active involvement by average citizens in the political life of their community. It existed for Dewey in the 1930s as it had for Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s when he found a saving grace here for American individualism in our public-mindedness, a willingness to compromise for the sake of the public good that made possible the world’s first mass democracy.
I fear, however, that what is really being reported here is that these benefits have lasted longer in Vermont than elsewhere in the nation. We have been experiencing a half century of social decay, a loss in our sense of “we, the people.” At this time of a deteriorating social fabric, unprecedented political polarization, and hurtful public discourse, our fragmented nation needs to regain its social trust by renewing the moral commitments we learned in our families and communities. We need once again to hold what we have in common above the many animosities that separate us – to regain the solidarity we knew in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the communitarian ethos needed to rise above the seemingly irreconcilable cleavages in American society we are confronting today. The social trust we still have in Vermont is a principal reason for our success in containing the spread of Covid-19 here.
I have long been reading independent, intelligently written news sources. One of the best of them was The Village Voice, the first alternative newsweekly in America. The year it began publishing its free weekly, 1955, was also when I began my daily travel on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to attend Stuyvesant High School, and so I could pick up my copy on a corner there each week. In the Voice, we got the vital news of the week combined with the insight needed to understand and appreciate its significance. It reported superbly on the riot at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 that was blindly depreciated by the establishment press, including the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post and other mainstream media at the time. Here is a fine retrospective on how the Voice reported the event.
It was a major institution in Greenwich Village and the city, raising the awareness to important events of each, and strongly supporting a sense of community.
The Village Voice ceased publication in 2018.
Having experienced the profound benefits to the community of 63 years of publication by the Voice, I want Vermonters to see how much they have to gain by supporting VTDigger’s role in giving us the benefits of its reportage. But most of all, we need devotion to revealing truth above producing profit, and the restoration of a free press. We have a great need to come back together as a nation, to recreate a civic community, and the Digger is one of our best resources for achieving that.
“The democratic faith is this, that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves.” — G. K. Chesterton
