I recently listened to 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, first in a Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart, and then in a speech at the U.N. this week.
Over a two-year period, she received 10 arrest warrants for reporting facts as a journalist in the Philippines during the Duterte presidency. Duterte has since been arrested for crimes against humanity and awaits trial in The Hague.
Ressa notes that her country’s addiction to social media made it susceptible to a carefully orchestrated trolling campaign that undermined basic human respect for truth and for empathy. She describes how government used social media algorithms to grow the isolation and anger that allowed authoritarianism to rise. She is part of the International Commission on Information and Democracy to push back against this rising tide of authoritarianism through free speech and the regulation of social media to benefit humanity.
According to Ressa, lies and false news spread six times faster than facts on social media platforms. That suggests that politicians who don’t spread fantastical lies don’t get heard. Don’t worry. I’d rather be ignored than join that club.
For truth-telling local governments, it’s become very difficult to communicate what we do to the people we serve. Yes, we make efforts to get the clicks by spicing things up from time to time, but the algorithms just don’t work in our favor. Of course, they could if the billionaires in charge of Meta and X wanted them to. They could simply boost messages from democratically elected government sources, or from sources that pass fact-checking tests.
In my introductory remarks Monday morning to the crowd gathered in the auditorium at Chesapeake Arts Center in Brooklyn Park for the first of three public presentations by Dr. Pam Brown on the findings in Poverty Amidst Plenty, I said that this was the most important thing happening all year in our county. I said that because the story being told is so compelling, and it’s a story that will never break through in mainstream or social media.
You can read the 120-page report here, or you can attend identical presentations at Maryland Hall on Wednesday, October 1 at 9am or Anne Arundel Community College on Wednesday, November 5 at 6pm. This every-three-years “community needs assessment” tells us about our health and wellness, the things that I believe every government and every community should be measured by, and the thing that should drive all public policy. It’s published by the Community Foundation of Anne Arundel County.
Dr. Brown not only presents data — on income, cost of living, life expectancy, causes of death, housing costs, childcare availability, transportation access, violence, youth isolation, and more. But she also tells the stories about how the data impacts lives.
I often tell people these days that I’ve been reminded in my seven years as an elected leader something that I already knew from my ten-year career as a community organizer. We have no shortage of proven solutions to the problems we face, and we even have some good elected officials who want to implement those solutions. What we lack is the mobilized and engaged citizenry to support that implementation.
Dr. Brown ended her presentation with a powerful call for community-building, for human connection, for the ingredients of a mobilized and engaged citizenry.
The Summary of Principal Findings in Poverty Amidst Plenty ends with this.
Loneliness/Loss of Community
According to participants in this Needs Assessment, loneliness and a loss of a sense of community are issues that we all contend with, from the smallest children to the senior population. While there is currently no quantifiable data to support these comments, they are trends that researchers are reporting nationwide. Lack of social connection is associated with low academic achievement in children, increased risk of heart disease in adults, anxiety and depression, and an increased susceptibility to viruses related to a weakened immune system. County residents cited the isolation that began during the pandemic, an ever increasing reliance on the virtual world, and the diminishing numbers for church attendance as contributing factors to the issue. Some participants connected the lack of social interaction and loneliness among teens with the documented numbers of county youth expressing lack of hope in the most recent behavioral risk survey.
Some of you have written to me, questioning why I spend so much time connecting our local challenges to national and global ones. It’s because we’re not alone in Anne Arundel County. The core of our local challenges are the same as the ones being seen across the country and the world. We are connected.
But that connection is no excuse for failure. We’ve done good work in our county, been recognized for it, and will continue doing it. The foundation of lasting progress is at its base - local communities whose residents demand it. So please, check out our community needs assessment, and get to work meeting the needs.
Until next week…