Community is the rich thread count of our democracy
On May 20, the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County awarded its annual Making Democracy Work award to Helen Hudson. Hudson has been a member of the League for 37 years, serving in numerous positions, including president/co-president for six years.
Hudson’s strength is to see others for their strengths and invite them into roles where they can grow and shine. She looks for “mid-career, currently doing good visible work in the community, and if not in League, then League-adjacent and maybe a good potential member,” and she draws them into the good work.
Ever humble, she promptly deflected to previous awardees present on the night of her award: Deanna Durrett and Nick Hedrick.
As a writer and educator, Hudson’s acceptance merits sharing. The following is the first part of her speech, edited for clarity and brevity. Next week we’ll run the second half of Helen’s speech. The full speech is at https://lwvmontcoin.org/
Making democracy work, part I
At this point in time, we are all watching with gravest concern what happens when democracy doesn’t work. Our airwaves, social media, and print sources are saturated. For once in our communal lives, we’re all very aware of our government, and this isn’t altogether a bad thing. We are being asked to examine our beliefs and our deeply held assumptions about how a democracy works and what we owe it.
We know we’re in unusual times when the League of Women Voters, along with other voter and civil rights organizations, sue the federal government for a March presidential executive order seizing federal election regulations away from Congress.
What makes democracy work? What I’m really asking here is what makes it work beyond our privilege and duty to vote and protect our free and fair elections. Beyond that, I truly don’t know — it’s so organic — but I do know democracy when I see it, and I think it has a lot to do with community and caring about the public good.
Anything that divides us — the way we raise kids, if or where we go to church, or who we think should be our leaders — all those individual decisions are so far less important than caring for the community where we live together. From shoveling snow for the neighbors to bantering with the baristas at one of our four local coffee shops, community nourishes us. We can almost take it for granted.
When you buy nice sheets for your bed, the label will often tell you the “thread count”—all those little fibers woven together to offer you a good night’s sleep. That’s how community works: its warp and weft make possible a shared ease and a certain comfort and functionality in our daily lives. This lets us flourish, and our towns do their best work.
Community also functions like another implement we all appreciate having in our daily lives, and that’s a good umbrella. When it's raining hard, we can appreciate a good umbrella.
Otherwise, we don’t think twice about that intricate little device, and yet I always count on mine being handy. Democracy works if all our communities take care of their sheets and their umbrellas — the sheltering governance machinery. Our governance umbrella shields us and lets us operate freely as individuals.
Now, it’s popular to grouch about what we don’t like for us personally, but this governance is entirely vital, and we need to honor and respect it. We in the League know all about this. Think of the generations-long process to get women the vote. Think of the centuries-long process before that to allow anyone to vote. It was the joy of the suffragists in 1920 to declare their work over and proudly give women power within the voting system of the United States, unleashing the power to create “a more perfect democracy.”
Here in Montgomery County — and League members should be really proud of this one — our work on the LWVMC Government Directory lets our community understand more about our governance. This umbrella of League has enabled the new Montgomery County Clerk, elected last autumn in a contentious election, to say out loud to me that she told her staff that the best way to learn their new jobs was to rely on and learn from, to memorize, the LWVMC Government Directory of Montgomery County, and use it every day. She was asking them to “learn the thread count of Montgomery County,” and to notice where the umbrella is stored.
We always strive to keep the whole in balance and to call it out when it goes awry. In a community, this means trust and an ongoing resistance against the “them versus us” mentality.
Making democracy work requires community
The following is the second half of Helen Hudson’s acceptance speech for the 2025 League of Women Voters Montgomery County Making Democracy Work Award. Last week, we ran part one.
Making democracy work, part II
I grew up in a tiny community in a rural area with parents who took for granted that you helped out, not just on other farms but in town too: on the library board, on the church council, with elections, starting a Lions Club, being part of all those women’s organizations. When they saw the need for a community center, they got on it.
When my little hometown needed a new, bigger (still tiny) public library — the whole thing would fit in the foyer of the CDPL — and books were ready to move into its new building, all the kids in the upper elementary grades were recruited to bring their Radio Flyers to school and there was a parade of books in little red wagons moving the contents of the library those couple of blocks up the street. When I was a ninth grader, I remember enjoying reciting the names of the Supreme Court justices — somehow, democracy was near. I could also name all the Major League Baseball team players, too, and had serious opinions about who should start in each game of the World Series. Out there in remote, rural Iowa, I was a rabid Philadelphia Phillies fan. Johnny Callison was my main man. All this “love of the big family,” I think, somehow all added up to patriotism, I suppose.
Jill Lapore, one of our premier contemporary US historians, writes that as she walks down the halls in her Harvard Law department, others ask her, “Are you still a patriot?” I ask you now: are you still a patriot?
When I was young, politics was around, of course, and early memories of that are entertaining. I remember my dad saying he voted for Adlai Stevenson the first time. He later swore that he’d done no such thing. I had no idea what a vote for Stevenson even meant, but was intrigued by the name “Adlai”—who names their kid that?
I was in early high school when JFK ran for president. I sensed a bubble of consternation below the surface of regular life because Mr. Kennedy was a Catholic, not because he was a Democrat. It was in that context that I heard my first community rumor, but not from within my good-hearted, community-minded, square-dancing parents’ house. I heard it on the street or in school. “They say“ that Fay Glover, our Quimby telephone operator, AND a Catholic, was calling people and telling them to vote for Kennedy. I never believed it for a moment — Fay was nice, I rode the school bus every day with her four nieces and nephews. She would never do that — but I did feel the thrill of gossip surging around, and it was titillating.
Preparing words for this occasion, I realize that likely this was the first piece of “fake news,” which I registered for exactly what it was, and I remember the anxiety bordering on conspiracy/fear tied up in that emotion. I also remember knowing instantly that it was not true.
Jumping ahead a couple of decades, I became a passionate advocate for women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment because of my commitment to the common good in our one-person-one-vote system. I protested against building and launching nuclear submarines from their west coast ports.
Because of our differing positions on the Alaska pipeline, my dad reminded me of the priorities of community I’d long known. In my cocky early maturity I was going to argue him to the ground. After about 20 minutes, he paused and gently said, “We have to stop this, Helen.” This was no Hallmark movie scene but a silent, highly eloquent reminder that the kind of behavior I was exhibiting leads to no man’s land. In families and communities, individuals and their opinions do matter, but ego never has the final say. Ego needs to be curbed again and again and again, at least in my case.
For decades, I was a teacher of many subjects. I have been entrusted with training young minds. But toward what end? Lots of shared information that everyone needs to be “educated,” of course, but mostly teaching kids to read closely, write clearly, and think critically. All teachers do some form of this, and in so doing, we build young citizens for our democracy. In fact, the real job of public education in a democracy is to mesh skills so young people can pursue their dreams, but also, at a deeper level, ensure they can go on and create community and participate in the precious institutions of democracy. It is they who will carry good governance onward into the future. So they can work in the process of revising and editing our institutions so they serve us well.
Promoting the common good, community first, keeping little-d democracy in the driver’s seat has been easy and joyful to live out over decades in Montgomery County. I think of my students’ Amtrak train project, its garden, and the lobbying by 16- and 17-year-old CHS students in Congress. I think of The Athenas, HUE, the Mayor’s Youth Council, the MOVE House, my German students and their Green Weeks, work at the Lew Wallace Study, and 4-H. Also, how about Community Growers? And, FISH?
These show that no one in Montgomery County is really inaccessible. Wait! No one is really inaccessible unless they’re on some high horse, as I was during the Alaska pipeline argument with my dad.
I will admit I worry, likely too much, about too many people riding too many high horses right now, especially those with lots of power — but I worry about us too.
Our beloved LWV provides one of the very best tools for helping people get off those high horses before they morph into “mountains we’re willing to die on.” That’s a real danger now because a person standing alone on that mountain of power and self-righteousness cannot listen to other points of view nor see anyone else face to face. You cannot hear anyone else talking, and you can’t see anybody’s face up on those righteous mountains.
We in the League and in our C’ville/MoCo community say, “Wait a minute. Let’s talk. “How cool that your kid was part of that world-beating FFA judging team, or that world-beating dance team! Did you go to ISU too? I didn’t know you had a plot in the community garden? You like to throw axes? Me too!” From there, we can begin the ongoing conversation for the common good, promoting and knowing the kind of governance that encourages openness, fervent, dedicated listening, and is kindest to the greatest number of people.
One of my favorite moments in my years as League president came at a legislative breakfast. Someone asked a very long question in a very angry voice; the audience was restive and on alert—“I’ll never come to another meeting that guy attends, and all our legislators are jerks anyway,” someone near me grumbled. Audience and legislators were on edge. The event was ending badly. The young Chamber of Commerce moderator, looking like she wished to melt into the floor, broke in and asked, “One more question?”
Now I’m not a spontaneous person, but I raised my hand and asked if each legislator would tell us about the one thing they were most proud of in the session that had just ended.” I’ll always remember how the atmosphere in the room changed entirely in a flash.
A few weeks ago, I met an Episcopal priest who started Plainsong Farm near where we now live in Michigan. It’s a place for growing young farmers, for spiritual development, and for seeking. She and I were shoveling out clumps of dirt where high bush cranberries were soon to be planted and doing some introductory chatting. “Oh, the League of Women Voters!” she said, “I just joined the League. When I asked someone how in the world one can be useful here in these fraught days, my friend said. ‘Join the League.’”
When my parents were in their early eighties, they were taking my uncle for kidney dialysis a couple of times a week. I was concerned they were doing too much and said so. I meant to show concern. My dad must have sensed condescension in my voice. He straightened up tall, took a deep breath and said, “Helen, what are we good for if we can’t help one another?” So there it is. Civic and spiritual wisdom colliding—and we pause. We must never lose sight of that.
In finale, I ask you: How many high horses are you riding these days? Is there a way you can dismount and talk to another dismounted rider—one who thinks at least a bit differently than you do? When people are on high horses, it’s easy to forget that in our little-d democracy, we must always work to create a space in which every person has the desire, the right, the knowledge, and the confidence to participate. Please encourage them, especially young people. Sure, we all have mountains we’re willing to die on. Have you used every skill at your disposal to be sure that it’s this mountain you want to die on? The defense of democracy itself surely does qualify as a worthy mountain. Let’s talk about it— face to face.”