Ringwood: Is national politics destroying neighborhood and civility?
/By Rubashov
A few weeks ago, The Economist posed the question: “What gets lost when national politics eats everything?”
In an article, about how national politics is dividing a small town in Maine, the magazine cited a 2016 book by philosopher Nancy Rosenblum called Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America. Rosenblum is the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University and co-editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. She studies modern political thought and constitutional law. Professor Rosenblum has been the Chair of both the government department at Harvard and the political science department at Brown University, and a member of the leadership of several professional organizations in political science and political philosophy.
In her book, Professor Rosenblum warned of imposing abstract and totalist political ideologies over the daily interactions of a community and the people who live there. Rosenblum writes: “For reciprocity among neighbors as ‘decent folk’ turns on the real possibility of disregarding precisely the social inequalities, racial and sectarian differences, and conflicting ideological commitments that citizens bring to public life.”
The Economist notes: “Passions about such matters can simplify and coarsen relations among neighbors. They collapse the generous spaces made – not always, but often enough – for eccentricities, personal lapses and political opinions, for the tolerance and empathy that sustain pluralism.”
Looking around New Jersey, you can find no better example of what happens when one group decides to erase those “generous spaces” than the town of Ringwood, in Passaic County. Yes, Ringwood, a semi-rural enclave once called Stonetown. By the 1960’s it had been transformed from farms to residential developments and summer homes. Back then there was a sort of hippie commune, called Camp Midvale.
The Sierra Club’s Jeff Tittel grew up there and provided this background: “The original founders of the camp were a European hiking group, the Nature Friends. They were pioneer conservationists. They were an open people and their camp was an interracial camp.” Ah, the sweet air of tolerance!
In 1991, the site of Camp Midvale became the Weis Ecology Center and today is the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts, and Recreation. The Highlands Nature Friends, Inc. is the non-profit membership organization that owns and operates The New Weis Center. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
But today, neighborhood groups like the Highlands Nature Friends must share the public square with groups like the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative – an organization not unlike the gangs of puritan witch hunters that once roamed the countryside, looking for people to burn. Pity the person whose social media pages get noticed by this group, because you will never pass muster, never be pure enough.
From what it has posted on its own social media page, this group appears to support “Antiracism and Equity”, while opposing “Equality and Whiteness”. The group advises its neighbors in Ringwood to “treat racism like COVID-19” and to do the following:
1. Assume you have it.
2. Listen to experts about it.
3. Don’t spread it.
4. Be willing to change your life to end it.
In humanspeak, this translates to:
1. You are guilty of the original sin of skin color!
2. Shut up and listen!
3. Don’t talk back!
4. Be willing to do what we tell you to do and (most importantly) pay the price we tell you to pay!
Yep, it is little more than modern day fascism. With an economic sting in its tail that is more scam than justice.
What effect will this have on the neighborliness one hopes to find in a small town? How will it end?
Well, Professor Rosenblum has this warning for us. Citing how some Americans stood by and watched as their Japanese-American neighbors were packed off to internment camps during the World War Two, she writes: “The family next door was seen through the lens of racial and political categories, and through the miasma of mistrust thrown up by war. Pluralism gave way to totalism.”
Author and civil rights pioneer Lillian Smith offers this perspective (given when she accepted the Charles S. Johnson Award for her work):
“It is his millions of relationships that will give man his humanity… It is not our ideological rights that are important but the quality of our relationships with each other, with all men, with knowledge and art and God that count. The civil rights movement has done a magnificent job but it is now faced with the ancient choice between good and evil, between love for all men and lust for a group’s power.”
“Every group on earth that has put ideology before human relations has failed; always disaster and bitterness and bloodshed have come. This movement, too, may fail. If it does, it will be because it aroused in men more hate than love, more concern for their own group than for all people, more lust for power than compassion for human need.”
“We must avoid the trap of totalism which lures a man into thinking there is only one way, one answer, one option, and that others must be forced into this One Way, and forced into it Now.”
Unfortunately, the "anti-White" ideology of the Ringwood Anti-Racism Collaborative has been wholly embraced by the local Democrat committee in Ringwood and by its candidates. One candidate for town council, Jessie Kitzman, is a young and very radicalized Public Defender who has completely lost touch with common sense. For example, Kitzman calls for the abolition of confinement for criminals – at a time when violent crime is surging across the United States.
Except that she doesn’t believe that…
Kitzman does crazy...
What is happening in Ringwood is an example of what not to do if you value your town, your neighbors, and civility. We will be following the goings-on in Ringwood over the next months and reporting back.
Stay tuned…
“It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.”
Robert Heinlein, author
