VOTE!

Vote!

By Tim Krenz

February 17, 2014

100. 2014 The Cepia Club LLC

www.cepiaclub.com

Democracy works. Let it do so, and it performs a sort of magic. Perhaps it cannot do great magic, but it has a consensus for going forward and a tolerance for differences proportional to the effort that goes into it. Democracy, almost in contradiction, will only work if voters exercise an informed and thoughtful ballots at times of elections and the same kind of choices all times between official voting.

Citizens in a democracy, not subject to any power but themselves as owners of their government, possess what philosophers call a “natural right” to choose among themselves the government and levels of government to govern all. By definition, a people with a sovereign right to rule their own affairs do not set government above them, or allow the trusted servants of government to overlord the citizens who choose their leaders. Simple in concept, hard to do, democracy defines no separation of citizenship or rank between those chosen to govern and those who choose the leaders. In short, the government comes of the people, and must always remain accountable to the people for it to exist as democracy.

Democracy claims no perfection, and neither can any form of civil society or agreement to coexist made by those holding the power of sovereignty. And “sovereignty” means an ownership of the lawful right to political rule, and such rights can exist in unwritten or in written form (compact, constitution, etc. describing how to make laws that bind people together with common interests). Democracy like any human invention possesses flaws, but it has the fewest flaws within it than almost any type of governing system invented throughout history. (By definition, “anarchy” means the non-existence of government, and we can therefore exclude it from discussion, even though anarchy has certain unstated rules in every sense of the term).

Democracy without informed and interested voters suffers a fatal wound because citizens do not participate at a moderately high level of involvement or concern. Democracy can die, as several examples of history show—Athens in the late 5^th Century B.C.E., Russia's social democracy between March 1917 and its end in November of that same year, and the Weimar constitution in Germany with the advent of the Nazi Enabling Act, March 1933, to name some examples. When snuffed due to a lack of caring or concern for democracy, the body politic exudes the putrid decay where the maggots of politics thrive. The parasites of dictators, thieves, militarists, and elitists, eat off the dead democracy the flesh and wealth of a gift that forerunners and ancestors gave to the future—a living democracy then demised because it lacked the nurture and growth through its host people.

We as citizens of OUR democracy can save democracy in only one way. By exercising more democracy, over more issues, and obtaining more facts for sound choices, voters can better recognize the different choices as they actually exist, and also assert a position to demand more choices in every aspect of civil society. The acts described can revive any democracy.

In such a simple way as voting, a peaceful change, indeed a non-violent revolution in perspective and expectations, occurs. Instead of breeding parasites that feed off the lives and wealth of citizens, the
“body politic” and civil society sustains itself, resuscitates its life, body and blood, and brings more thought and reason into the process of government. With that, a little optimism and hope for a more humane future and dignified co-existence begins to strengthen. Conflict and even violence may not disappear, but those cancers of humanity become treatable and more limited.

Choices for democracy grow the length and breadth of personal liberty and the increase tolerance for others who live by their acts of choice that do not intrude the safety or steal the property of others. In such a state of choices, justice as an impartial and incorruptible source of legitimate rewards and punishments without favor to birth, wealth, position or fraud becomes commonplace.

Choices in democracy does not mean more flavors of ice cream at the grocery store or different television programs to watch. Those compose a modern ration of a bread and the circus of distraction. Choices in a democracy bring something more. Voting in democracy, based on facts and reason, make those choices for change more real, and bring a more perfect solution to practical ills that confront the world, even down to the village and town voting precincts.

By choosing to participate in a democracy, especially at the times and places available, in an election or between them, most futures can still arrive and most problems find solutions. At least we will have chosen together the fate we want to create.

VOTE!!

Cepiaclub Advisory Council Meets, Reaches Agreements

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE--February 8, 2014—Dresser, WI—

Cepiaclub Advisory Council Meets, Reaches Agreements

The Cepia Club LLC's Advisory Council met to discuss the Club 21: “Gamma Plan” for 2014, a focused Cepiaclub effort to increase publishing output, to build a local broadcasting system on-line, to engage in more community events, and to promote its “Connecting People. . .” mission projects to increase public awareness and encourage individual activism in Western Wisconsin's Polk County.

Cepiaclub Director Tim K. chaired the meeting of six for an open discussion format. Although the informal agenda covered the primary topics, the Cepiaglobal associates forming the council arrived at agreement with the Director's “gamma plan.” As the employment policies of The Cepia Club LLC do not allow the Director or any employed staff member to join the Cepiaglobal program, the council's purpose to “inform and advise” the Cepiaclub Directory settled on the following consensus.

First, the publishing of Freedom Scene America! will continue this year, but on a monthly basis, and cover the geographic area of the communities of Dresser, Osceola, St. Croix Falls, and Amery. The local area focus for the “news-zine” will continue indefinitely into the future.

The second consensus agreed with the Director's plan to republish the Cepiaglobal quarterly journal, renamed The Cepia Club Strategy Review, with an emphasis on informative policy analysis and idea sharing for effective local activism. The quarterly publication, meant firstly for the subscribing associated membership, also has a function as a public relations outreach tool, for individuals and for public library circulation.

Third in the list of council agreements, Cepiaclub media projects will continue with the resurrection of the Freedom Affairs flagship news magazine tele-web show. And by late summer of this year, the Director plans to inaugurate the regular telecast of Cepiaclub News Show, another tele-web broadcast thus far only available off-line in two pilot tests episodes.

Finally, as yet without agreement, Cepiaclub's Advisory Council will report back at its next meeting in March on possible community events in the Dresser village, and Osceola and Garfield townships area for later in the year.

“As the 'Connecting People. . .' mission states, we will continue our work of the past 6 years to provide people with important information, news, ideas, and analysis that can and will affect their lives at some point—politically, economically, etc.,” said Director Tim K. “But aside from that, we want to teach people by example to take initiative for needed activism on the issues, and the opportunities, in the places most important to them—where they live. We help connect the ideas, and hopefully bring many different people together for common aims: for democracy, peace, prosperity, and justice.

As Tim K. further explained, the focus on the Dresser-Osceola-St. Croix Falls-Amery “triangle,” as he calls it, brings it home to where the most good can come out of Cepiaclub's effort.

For more info on Cepiaclub, visit www.cepiaclub.com .

Hudson Area Library:Select Guide to Libraries of the St. Croix Valley

Review of: Hudson Area Library

For: Hometown Gazette

By: Tim Krenz

Series: Select Guide to Libraries of the St. Croix Valley

Date: February 7, 2014

Dedication: For Melba

The Hudson Area Library, serving patrons in and surrounding this St. Croix River city in far Western Wisconsin, offers a unique example for the Select Guide to Libraries of the St. Croix Valley. Already an established library, it moved in 2010 from several blocks up the hill, where it mis-fit within a concrete building in a residential surrounding, to this new location next to Hudson's city waterfront park. In clear view of the wintered, white and icy St. Croix River, this renovated former corporate office building, stylish in architecture as well as location, now proudly houses, with the police station attached in the back, a unified library service of several municipal areas.

As a library that sought to find a way to make modern requirements, and modern cost, work to its advantage, the distinction for the Select Guide series comes in how a former city library combines the efforts, the collections, the financial resources, and the governance of the area-at-large into an effective and modern public library. The result shines as an example of a good and worthwhile library to visit, and one for new libraries to emulate elsewhere, where the template might work.

On approaches the library walking downhill, on a side-walk street side, toward the river, from the main avenue that parallels the waterfront. To the left, the river front blocks of the backside buildings of Hudson absorb the winter afternoon south & westerly sun. To the right, as I ascend the front steps of the Hudson Area Library, the sun shines and warms the sandy-brick of the exterior wall, supporting the two-storey windows that facade the open-air lobby just inside the entry-way doors.

From inside, looking up and out the windows, lightly shaded by dim-green blinds that reach down from the ceiling, the white overhang makes a striking shade cap to the roof. This complements the intent of the BKV architects of the Twin Cities who redesigned the interior. Inside the lobby, beneath and around the base of the half-circling, suspended mesh and metal dark-green stairs, crawling the west wall, a living garden of plants and flowers, and fine art, grows life and refinement for the enjoyment of people sitting in cushioned easy chairs and couches in the lobby.

Linda Donaldson, the library director, in giving a tour, says that little of the upstairs needed changing when the library moved. A wonder of purpose, taste and décor, the second floor holds the stacks and stacks of the best and the recent non-fiction and fiction literature available to the 16,500 registered borrowers of the Hudson library. At 19,000 square feet total, the library offers in the vastness of books, adult, young adult, teen and pre-teen books and other media, but one simple attraction to a hard-working writer: A history room. This nook larger than a normal bedroom houses archived materials, original histories, and the memory of the Hudson area for researchers and family-historians to find their information not listed elsewhere, nor kept anywhere else in the whole world.

The second floor uses half the space for the young adult and younger sections. It has rooms for special purposes: play rooms, changing rooms, rest rooms, rooms for the disabled, and best of all, a colorfully decorated room holding a PUPPET THEATER!

Of the 300,000 items circulated through the Hudson Area Library, 63,736 came borrowed in 2013 to local patrons from the MORE library system and from the larger Indianhead Library Federation. Moreover, 66,466 in 2013 got loaned out of the library to other systems. Run very efficiently by 3 full-time employees, the 20 part-time library aides service all the library needs, with the work room behind the front desk buzzing with activity, and all desks throughout the building staffed and assisting people. Aside from Hudson's 10,000 or so residents, the community of the area library covers St. Josephs and Hudson townships, North Hudson village, and even the school district which also appoints one member of the 8-person library board.

The active friends of the library, as in every library, do hard volunteer work to support the overall investment of community capital and financial commitments by that community to make this library, like all great libraries, more than a sum of individual parts. Indeed, and not without some objections from citizens, libraries take both resources and commitment to successfully serve the public. And Hudson Area Library faces some challenges in the future, as any great and useful library must address in changing times, and changing technologies.

Primary among them in Hudson, according to Linda Donaldson, comes getting control of the budget, in order to increase the hours of weekly operation from the current 43 hours. Challenges like this, and ones similar, pose more in opportunities than obstacles, and will determine the futures of all the libraries in the St. Croix Valley in how well society learns lessons, good and bad, from 5000 years since the first library in ancient Mesopotamia. In true form to the idea of learning and teaching others, Hudson Area Library intends to shine as an example in its mission statement on the front door, “Where knowledge flows freely.”