This week, in our local Front Porch Forum, neighbors wrote in to complain that there was too much political discussion going on regarding the events in Washington. They felt that FPF was a place for neighborhood news, not opinions about the state of affairs with our democracy. Yet, Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who writes for the Atlantic, recently cited Front Porch Forum in Vermont as a shining example of democracy in action, a place where citizens can engage civil discourse regarding topics that engage them.

Timothy Snyder, author of the book, “Freedom,” grew up in rural Ohio, near Dayton, and writes about how every small town had its own newspaper, often a bi-weekly, with local reporters who lived in the community. These papers covered local issues such as school board discussions, town budgets, local police reports, the things Addison Independent and Front Porch Forum cover each week. They were the glue that bound people together. But, in those towns of his boyhood the local papers are gone. He writes,

“The end of factuality, of home truths, brings national discord. As a sense of local reality dissolves, Americans ceded their opinions to faraway people on talk radio or cable television, then to placeless algorithms. In the absence of shared local knowledge, human anxieties and fears have to be processed as national politics, ideological conflict or social media spats. When we no longer have any reporters, we say we ‘distrust the media,’ but all the while we cling to the mechanized bits of it that are attuned to how we already feel. Once we substitute Facebook for local newspapers, as people in Warren County and Clinton County have done — as much of America has done — we drift toward a spectral world of ‘us and them.’”

We need Front Porch Forum, we need the Addison Independent, and VT Digger, and Seven Days, to be able to learn what our neighbors think and what our local reporters are able to dig up. All this information from all these sources gives us perspective that canned television and internet sources can’t provide.

Years ago when I was an art instructor, I would often hear young students say that they didn’t want to be distracted by other artists’ work, they wanted to develop their own style. Instead, I would suggest that they look at all the art they can find and their style would emerge, and not to try to work in a vacuum. It applies to the way we consume information, look at everything, base your opinions on more information not less.

We need to hear what our neighbors are saying and what our local reporters are reporting so we can hone our values on local issues before trying to engage at the macro-level. And we need to support local news sources by subscribing and by donating — when they are gone it will be too late.

Richard Butz

Bristol