(Community Matters) Since resigning from President Obama’s campaign at the end of the year in order to take on the Pres/CEO role of MPR & KXWT, I’ve gained clarity about the real threat to our democracy – the fact that we are driven to only recognize what divides us, rather than what can unite us. Our failure to even acknowledge common values & principles but instead to vilify those who might interpret values differently, then to lash out in ways and with threats that none of us should tolerate . . . . these are the real threats to democracy in America. Photo: Terry Jones, Quran-Burning Pastor, Hangs Barack Obama Effigy Outside Florida Church
community matters
It's about community, entrepreneurs, politics, art . . and sometimes just silly fun . . . a slightly gay blog.Eugene Sepulveda
Love big West Texas skies, the unimpeded horizons of the coasts, Austin and my husband, the Rev. Dr. Steven Robert Tomlinson, with whom I’ve spent the last 24 years – nineteen years since we were married on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. Then, married again at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin, TX on June 27, 2015.
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Community Matters 
Threats to democracy
1) Willful ignorance
2) Humans’ inability to cope with information about the world and adoption of systems that simplify and filter and explain everything to them. People have always used these systems, but in an information-rich world we rely more on them. Better to turn off the television than to let Glenn Beck explain the world to you….
3) Misplaced sentimentalism about the good old days of ones’ youth. This is likely to get worse with the aging of America.
4) Misanthropic ideas about everyone else and how dumb they are (wait, I just did that in my first point)
5) Misplaced concern about the tyranny of the majority and an increase in the number and scope of claimed individual rights. There is always a tension between democracy and rights, between straw-man populism and rights of the individual, and we have swung too far away from democracy and toward rights. (I’m sure you disagree with me about this.)