High Season For Ideas

Newtown’s three political parties are unpacking their bunting, updating their websites, and sharpening their arguments in anticipation of what promises to be the most highly contested local election campaign in memory. The Republicans, Democrats, and the Independent Party of Newtown have spent the last few weeks filling out their slates to vie for seats up and down the ballot. We can soon expect a river of words to rise to flood stage for the next three months, fed this year by some new online tributaries including Twitter and Facebook, and swollen as usual by letters to The Bee, brochures, press releases, and position papers. The purpose of all this communication will be to sweep you, the voter, off to the polls convinced beyond doubt that a particular candidate, or group of candidates, will transform our community from the deeply challenged place it is into something significantly better — something smarter, safer, more responsible, more prosperous, and (our favorite) more transparent.

The transparency catchword is on everyone’s lips this year, from Washington, D.C., to Washington Avenue. We take the political usage of this word to mean that people should be able to see into their government with sufficient focus and clarity to watch how every last gear and cog meshes in the transmission of power. Every time we hear the word, we think of gleaming glass public buildings surrounded by a voyeuristic populace nodding approvingly at governance gone good. We have been following politics long enough to know, however, that the actual election-year behavior that goes on in and around these imaginary glass houses, proverbial prohibitions aside, involves, if not outright stone throwing, considerable mudslinging. Mud thrown in the name of transparency — now there’s something to ponder in the voting booth.

Seriously, Newtown, like every other town or city this year, is in dire need of better and smarter ideas, and the next three months should be high season for examining ideas for their merit, no matter where they originate or which party or candidate claims proprietary rights. The real challenge is evaluating ideas, proposals, and promises in the context of campaign rhetoric, which inhabits its own peculiar landscape strewn with rosy scenarios, straw men, and canards. The best way to meet that challenge is to meet the candidates themselves.

Don’t go with the flow in the river of words that is headed your way. Get out there in the current, and stand your ground. Attend candidate coffees, accost the politicians at the recycling center and the shopping center, ask them your own particular burning question, and when they give you their stock vague answer, follow up and ask them: “Can you give me a concrete example of what you’re talking about?” Only through the constant burnishing of sincere and persistent questioning can we clear away the smears that block our view of a politician’s true inclinations and intent. Only through direct human interactions can we take the measure of the people who would lead us to our town’s future. Only through being good voters can we select good leaders.