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Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What to Do About It

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Diane Kalen-Sukra

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“Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it's important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word "library," liber; means both "book" and "free." Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that -- even in an age of atomization and inequality -- serve as bedrocks of civil society. Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.”

Civil SocietySocial InfrastructurePublic Libraries
Book:Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
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“When civil society languishes, when the life of organizations and voluntary associations is curtailed, then sooner or later political parties will begin to languish as well, until, ultimately, they become degenerate ghettos whose only purpose is to elevate their members into positions of power.”

PoliticsPowerPolitical PartiesCivil Society
Book:To the Castle and Back: Reflections on My Strange Life as a Fairy-Tale Hero
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“There is, however, a more fundamental and interesting issue behind the apparent receding popularity of the Parliament, and that relates to the 'ownership' of the institution. Put simply, whose Parliament is it anyway? This is a serious question which grows out of the long process of Home Rule. The failure of Westminster parties to deliver devolution - and let us remember that a majority voted yes in the 1979 referendum meant that it was left to civil society to agitate for the Parliament. The twent-year campaign since 1979 was waged by a motley crew of campaigners and civil associations from trade unions to churches and women's groups, all unelected, but all donning the mantel of speaking for Scotland. Some parliamentarians like to think that as elected representatives, they alone represent the nation, but that is not how the nation sees it. Parliament became the people's forum, on loan to the political class, as long as they treated it, and them, with some respect, given the partiality of poitics in the twenty-first century. Power sharing - between government, parliament and people - is a three-way system, and not the preserve of any single agent.”

PoliticiansCivil SocietyHome RuleScottish ParliamentParliamentarians
Book:Creating a Scottish Parliament
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“The need to revive civic education in our modern democracies is of the utmost importance to our future ability to preserve our democratic institutions and civil society. It is critical to preserving the equality of fundamental rights of all people. It is critical to developing the capacity for effective action to address the many complex social, political, economic, and environmental challenges arrayed before us. It is critical if we are going to successfully navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution and ensure it truly results in positive disruptions that work in the interests of the people by democratizing social, financial, and political edifices -- rather than simply intensifying the concentration of wealth, power, and influence.”

JusticeDemocracyCivilityCivicsCivil SocietyToxic CultureCivic Education
Book:Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community & What to Do About It
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“...[E]ven in cases where art institutions are not being actively menaced by the state there has nevertheless been a collapse of more classically political institutions, like churches and unions. The result is that--as Hito Steyerl discusses in "is the Museum a Factory?"--thins that usually were shown or done in union halls and church basements are now housed inside art institutions. This explains the anxiety lurking behind a question like "How can an institution address the dichotomy between art as cultural entertainment and art as political inquiry?" This anxiety is the anxiety of a host confronted with refugees who might not be able to return home anytime soon. Like police departments, or public school teachers, art institutions now seem expected to do the work of three or four different kinds of civil society organizations. Can we provide moral education, collective solace, and class-based advocacy in addition to our other mission of producing, collecting, and displaying works of art? Are we even doing these other things? Or just noticing a need that is going unmet but that exceeds our capacity to meet it? {written by Stephen Squibb]”

Civil SocietyArt Institutions
Book:As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now?
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“[Tolerance means] I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off. [Patriotism means] love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”

LoveCountryTolerancePatriotismCovenantCivil Society
Author:Senator Cory Booker
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