Many of us are paying more attention now to the ways the system grinds away under its own power. In this article, I’m going to mention some recent decisions my own municipality has made, as if it is business as usual, without an understanding of the changes we have been seeking since the murder of George Floyd and many other Black people before him. In order to change the system, we are going to have to pay attention to the hundreds of these seemingly minor issues and find ways to interrupt the system.

Imagine this headline in your local paper: “Mayor and chief of police discuss defunding the police.” My first thought was, Where are the people most affected by this decision? Where are the people who have experienced situations with the police that could have, should have been handled by an experienced social worker or health care worker?

The mayor and the police chief are assuming their authority makes it right for them to make the decision alone. We want authorities to listen more, to include the voices of real people living their intensely vivid lives when making such decisions. We and they need to hear the individual stories of people who have been affected by police presence at a time when a more person-centered, healing-centered role was needed.

Did the mayor and police chief research the towns that ARE defunding the police and directing that money to other, community-wide resources, and how they are doing it, or did they just create their answers out of personal belief and a review of the current budget? In order to interrupt the system, we need to push our local authorities to do the research and do the work of including our voices.

Here’s a different story, one where the people pushed to have their voices included. A local select board, along with the police, discussed how to curb the amount of parking, people, and litter along the river in a spot that is famous around here for fabulous tubing on a hot day. They made decisions to post “no parking” and “live parking only” signs, and to have more police patrolling the area.

Did they invite the folks who use that spot for recreation to participate in problem-solving? Did they let the community know that they were seeking a way to make the recreation-seekers more sensitive to the neighborhood, to social distancing in this time of CoVid, and to the amount of litter being left behind?

Not at first. Instead, the authorities created some very angry people who love to use the spot for tubing, who showed up in a heat wave expecting to tube, and who were turned away by the new parking regulations and by a strong police presence. Several tubers became belligerent towards anyone who tried to direct them away from nearby private property. Pitting the tubers against the neighborhood and the town, instead of working towards inclusion and cooperation, was a failure.

The select board decided to continue their discussion on this issue. Now, however, town officials have been joined by residents (tubers and neighbors) as well as representatives of local recreational facilities. Working with everyone involved to promote social distancing, environmental stewardship, and community pride fosters a shared sense of ownership in all of the related issues, rather than divisiveness among interest groups.

One final note. This summer a group of local children attending a summer workshop joined the weekly vigils for racial justice that have been held on the common. They hold up their own clear messages about not wanting bullets to kill them, or hoping people will be kind to one another.

Children are tuned into crises in our development as a country. Children need to have adults open more doors for their participation in the changes we seek. Children have important stories to tell, too: about tubing, policing, racial justice, and all the rest. We need to listen to their concerns.

Protests should more appropriately be called “pushing the nation closer to its founding principles and its highest values.” Protesters are people who work to interrupt the system where it is failing, and ask that it do better for all citizens. If we do this with our own municipal authorities, then we are part of the movement to be better than this.