We the People, Right Down the Road
Today is the Fourth of July, and this one carries a little extra weight. It's the 250th birthday of the republic. Two hundred and fifty years since a group of people decided they'd rather govern themselves, badly at times, than be governed well by someone else.
Over the past week I've been watching a documentary called The American Experiment, the kind of thing that fits well with a cup of coffee before chores. At one point it made the observation that a lot of small voices weren't in the room for that founding discussion. Ordinary colonists, soldiers, tenant farmers, enslaved people, the men and women who didn't draft a clause or argue a point of philosophy in Philadelphia.
That stuck with me, because I've got ancestors who fit that description exactly. Luke May. David Bruch. Abraham Depew. Samuel Cole. Alexander Sloan. Five men who served in the Revolutionary War. Not one of them sat in that room.
But here's what I kept coming back to: not being in the room isn't the same as not having a voice. Those five men cast theirs on a battlefield, with a musket and a long march instead of a clause in a document. That's a vote too, just a different kind, and arguably a harder one to take back.
And it didn't stop there. Their voice, and the voices of people like them, kept getting cast for generations after the war ended, just never in the big rooms. It landed in town meetings. County courts. Local ballot boxes down the road from home. That's always been the place built for people who don't get a seat in Philadelphia, the bottom of the pyramid where politics actually starts.
Springfield Township is about as far down that pyramid as you can get. No cameras, no marble, just a board handling financial and resource management, roads, and township assistance with whatever money and attention the community gives it. But that's exactly the kind of small, local voice this whole country was supposedly built to make room for. If my ancestors' voice mattered on a battlefield nobody remembers the name of, it matters at a township meeting three people bothered to attend.
"Of the people, by the people, for the people" isn't a phrase you carve into a monument and consider finished. It's closer to a fence line. Somebody has to walk it now and then, or it goes down quietly and nobody notices until the cattle are out.
Local government is unglamorous and easy to overlook right up until the day it isn't. That's not a flaw in any one office or any one person. It's simply how the system was built. The bottom of the pyramid still has to hold the weight of everything above it. It runs on attention. Ours.
So on this 250th Fourth of July, between the cookout and the fireworks, I'd ask you to do one small thing. Find out what your local board actually does and when it meets next. Not because there's a crisis. Just because that's the maintenance the founders were counting on, and two and a half centuries in, it's still due.
That's why I'm running for Springfield Township Trustee. Not because something's on fire, but because the fence needs walking regardless, and I'd rather be the one doing it than the one wondering later why nobody did.
Happy 250th, everyone.
Jim