Revised December 29th, 2023
Message from the SCA Editors:
SCA was created to inform and advocate. Our purpose is to promote the transparency, consistency and accountability residents expect from Shorewood leadership. We educate residents on the processes used and decisions made at city hall. We hold our elected officials responsible for respect and civility toward residents and each other. We encourage residents to become more involved and respectfully find their voices for issues that matter to them. These are crucial ingredients for a thriving and engaged community.
SCA creates a space for public participation and diverse perspectives through our comment sections and editorial/opinion page. We invite the public to submit an editorial or sourced article. We encourage comments on the articles and welcome respectful discussion and debate.
SCA Editors emphasize fairness, truth and accuracy. We believe it is the recipe for constructive, informed conversations. We produce well-researched articles intended to bring about real change. If factual correction is needed, please reach out. SCA is a dynamic way to keep citizens informed and involved in the ongoing discussions and developments in Shorewood. Let your neighbors know about SCA!
SCA brings together a broad spectrum of skills and perspectives, creating a well-rounded force for positive change. We are a group with over 250 total years of living in Shorewood. Together, we have almost 50 years of service to the city in a variety of capacities. We are writers, researchers, environmentalists, entrepreneurs, blue and white collar, public and private sector, tech specialists, community elders…you get the picture.
Thank you for joining us in this evolving, interactive platform as we continue to foster and build healthy community engagement.
SCA Editors
Thank you for launching the kind of citizen-initiated medium that Shorewood, like most cities, needs. We must not allow the government to dominate, let alone own and control all democratic process, which it often argues is too expensive in one sense or another. (The cost of democratic process should always be the last reason for rejecting it.) We should have our own communication channels including our own meetings about what city hall is proposing and doing. We own and control the democratic process, not the government. (This is the first ‘fact’ about which the government and the people disagree.) We must reject the modern tradition of rule-by-expert, wherein the government claims to be the source of all the relevant facts and truth even about the nature of democracy. Too much of the traditional press and the internet has become an extension of the government’s competing tradition as a competing vocabulary issuing in a competing rationality and competing process. Democracy is first and foremost our ownership and control of the means of cultural production. We must examine the city’s language as a potentially, if not actually relative, competing tradition, generating relative “facts” (both moral and observational) and be ready to vigorously assert our own vocabulary, our own self-organizing, democratic culture, including our own facts. Every so-called ‘fact’ is anchored in the judgment that the language in terms of which we think it and state it is a correct use of language. In the meantime there are competing, incommensurate rules for using language correctly. We no longer agree even on the nature of facts, which common sense tells most of us cannot be separated from judgment. Democracy means that the government must adopt our grammar, not its own. In summary, remember that in our day and age the government has, to a large extent, become just another relative, competing tradition because our ‘representatives’ get absorbed into the establishment. (See “agency capture.”) Staff thinks our representatives are just sojourners and our representatives have been trained by modern western culture to kneel before expertise, as opposed to their constituents. We are living in a naive, modern authoritarian culture which inevitably generates authoritarian government.