Dreaming about the Common Good

When I started selling ads for the Community Newspaper, I imagined that a Community Newspaper might do what online news cannot: reconnect us to the places where we live and the people living there

A community newspaper could be the key to building a real sense of community based on place.

What happened in the US. to create a public where no one can agree upon anything even the facts?

Democracy is based on trust in people: We trust ourselves and others to make good decisions, even when we don’t agree because there is such a thing as “the common good.”

The common good has been dismantled by stories that play on our fears of survival, magnify our distrust, and argue for safety at all costs. Even if it means exclusion, epidemic levels of depression and anxiety, corporations who own everything and determine the rules of interaction.

I saw a glimmer of hope in the community newspaper. That through telling stories about actual people we know and people we don’t know who live in our community, we may once again begin to trust that we can change and improve our lives and the lives of others.

Stories are what enable us to connect despite our heavily reinforced silos of belief.

The willingness to know them, and to see us in them, goes a long way in breaking down those invisible wall that have made is safe and desperately lonely.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog