Photo credit: Kenneth C. Zirkel licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
by Jamie L. Banks, PhD, MS, Executive Director, Quiet Communities, Inc., Co-Founder, The Quiet Coalition and David Sykes, Vice Chair, The Quiet Coalition
As Justice Louis Brandeis noted long ago, America’s “laboratories of democracy” are its individual communities, and its state and local governments. In their new book,“Our Towns,” Deborah and James Fallows describe their search for local success stories occurring in cities and towns across the U.S., despite the partisan gridlock in Washington D.C.
We hope you enjoy reading the statement below from the editors of The Atlantic, and we strongly urge you to click on the links which provide further exploration of areas where America is thriving and succeeding:
If the future of the federal government seems bleak, James Fallows offers an unlikely source of hope: the decline of the Roman empire. Rome’s fall, he writes, including the collapse of central governance, ushered in a sustained era of creativity at the local level, which in turn led to cultural advancement and prosperity. In America, it may be up to states and the private sector to function in the areas where federal governance has failed, from climate change to higher education. And if anyone knows what’s happening in America’s local communities, it’s Fallows, who for years has traveled the country to explore how smaller towns are tackling challenges that seem insurmountable from the national perspective. He writes: ‘A new world is emerging, largely beyond our notice.’”
Making change at the local level can be very, very hard if you’re faced with organized and well-funded opposition from outside the community—as the Fallows discovered when they helped lead a noise control initiative in their own hometown, Washington DC. But a carefully coordinated and locally-controlled process of community change there yielded the results that residents were looking for.
