Word: civics
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Roll over, Alexis de Tocqueville. The oft mentioned (but less frequently read) 19th century French scribe is being invoked by every dime-store scholar and public figure these days to bemoan the passing of what the Frenchman described as one of America's distinctive virtues: civic participation. "Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions," he famously wrote, "constantly form associations." In France, Tocqueville observed, a social movement is instigated by the government, in England by the nobility, but in America by an association. Tocqueville and small d democrats from Ben Franklin (who started a volunteer fire brigade...
That is why Robert Putnam's 1995 essay "Bowling Alone" touched a national nerve. Putnam, a Harvard professor of government, used the catchy image of more Americans bowling by themselves and fewer in leagues to assert that traditional civic engagement in America has been on a long, slow decline for the past 25 years. Citing diminished participation in organizations like the PTA and the League of Women Voters, Putnam's essay seemed to reinforce a widespread feeling that civic life in America just wasn't what it used it to be. The nation's diminishing social capital was lamented...
...widely accepted is this notion of civic decline that both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole have been exhorting Americans to pull up their socks. (Rhetoric is free; programs cost money. Besides, who isn't for volunteerism?) Clinton has used a series of Executive actions regarding teen smoking, gun sales and truancy as a paternal prod--in effect, making the Federal Government the village patriarch who reminds members of the community of their obligations to one another. Last week Clinton introduced a schoolhouse-repair program, which is meant to spur local investment, not as a public-works effort...
...weapons of labor's "corporate campaigns." Local 11 of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees sends delegations to Japan and Hong Kong to rally Asian unions against the hotel and urge travel agents to avoid it. It has secured endorsements from scores of the city's Asian and Latino civic and business groups, as well as 11 out of 15 city councillors, and it blocked rush-hour traffic with a sit-down protest last spring that resulted in 57 arrests...
...Other as bad guys in black spaceships, what does it mean? Clive Barker, the author (Sacrament) and filmmaker (Hellraiser), thinks the attitude is dangerously alienating. "It disconnects us from being able to operate in the real world," he says. "There's a sense we're unplugging from political activity, civic duties or even responsibility to our neighbors by saying there are things greater than us and secrets hidden from us. We are a superstitious species, and we need to look outside ourselves for something larger that will bring either calamity or wisdom or maybe both. This is about belief...