Local importance: the foundations

By: Hlib Miasnychenko

In the heat of 2020 and the recent deepening of the political division of the USA, it is common to ignore politics, especially on lower levels. How many of us can name the governor of the state? It is not hard to guess the answer.

There is no surprise in that. Significant national events (or foreign policy) are lovely things to steal people’s attention, just like exotic parrots in a zoo full of animals, but with so many things to see and analyze, an ordinary citizen gets lost in dizzy patterns of bird’s feathers, yet the public’s attention to local events is unjustly underrated.

The local events lack drama sometimes, but they do not lack importance. The reason behind it is that municipal and state governments are the backbone of the democracy, not necessarily the President of the United States. One way of thinking about it is, who is the President without the voters? A person with so much power is fenced with departments and bureaus backed only by administrators of his own kind – what actually may sound like a dictatorship.

The lower offices do not have such luxury of keeping distance from the public. They do not have a duty to keep an eye on foreign affairs, nor do they have ministers to hide behind. Instead, their primary reason to exist is to deal with real problems, tangible for their voters — what many of us had forgotten.

With those words, I want to urge you to look closer at what’s happening around you, and pay attention to the local administrators. Try to think about what has occurred with the Student Council or what they discuss during leisure time. What about the governor election? Would you be too surprised if I said it would happen this year? What are the main problems the candidates are going to talk about? Some of you will actually be eligible to vote in the elections, so it is important to know.
The problem is a lot of us don’t know that. The majority of us are lost in the zoo looking at the same stuff. For that reason, I would like to change that.

I would like to announce a series of articles about the Local Importance to encourage a healthy interest in politics among young adults. Without understanding that even the Empire State Building has the first floor, we cannot build a better skyscraper.