Shorewood must focus on and talk about the essential  elements that really respond to the organic impulses of community.

One of today's main elements of community is the school system where the children come together from all aspects of the community. Children from the various families meet and interact. Interaction is one of the basic elements of community and the schools provide that focus in the U.S.

Shorewood is one of the few communities in the Milwaukee area where children can walk to school and to the library and even to the central commercial elements of our community and then walk back home again. They interact primarily at their grade levels and not separated by economic status. .

We have families who economically are concerned about millions of dollars and families who are preoccupied with the lowest numbers of dollars in their everyday lives. Yet these are the basic differences that schools ignore, concentrating primarily on issues of human equity. 

We have elderly who can afford to travel and be away from our community as often as much as they want. On the other hand, there are elderly who can hardly afford to remain in the community that they may have grown up  in and that they understand to be their community.

We do not have an integrating mechanism like a school system for the elderly to put them all together as we do with children. Yet we can do that. We can even integrate seniors and children by expanding our school system to perform these functions, making them central to our community.

In doing so, we would also bring the parents of children together with senior citizens, completing the forming elements that help centralize the community. This is the social surplus that small towns bring to the American culture.

A surplus that is declining in our urban areas as they get larger and fractionalize, moving away from the centralizing ingredients of community. Shorewood has this possibility and we should not lose sight of it in everything we do, especially in our redevelopment processes. Condos on their own do not a community make.

I don't see that anyone of the professional staff or the elected officials of the Village of Shorewood who have a real sense or feeling for community. I hope that the candidates prepare themselves, as they are the only ones that can be questioned and it seems, only at election forums.

I would like them to begin talking about community before then, perhaps right now. As community is within our reach, it is something we should discuss and become familiar with. Where do candidates stand on community?

The primary element of what is Shorewood, is that from a physical standpoint, it is first of all, a cluster of people who as a social element have become a community.

It is the glue of location and cluster that then makes us a community. Secondarily then, as human beings we become a social entity, forming a social community.

To function as an integrated and cohesive community, we have to establish leadership. In today's language, we elect people to help translate that need through a form of local democratic government.

As we can not all regularly participate in the function of government, we elect representatives who are expected to represent the view of the community.

The main problem with this is that, it is difficult to translate what representation means. This becomes more difficult as the desire for authority turns the concept of representation into what the elected individual feels the needs of the community are. Authority then evolves into a social addiction.

It then becomes the duty of those few who observe the distortion of “representation” to intervene and point out the real requirements of their community and also to point out the addiction in order to get back on track.

It would be better to have the type of citizen town meeting structure similar that of the past where representation was not to be interpreted by those whom we elect but expressed by the people themselves.

I would therefore, propose that between the first and second Shorewood Village Board meetings each month, that a town meeting be held, that would include village citizens as well as elected officials, to discuss and to give direction to those who would be our representatives.

If our representatives really represent us, then they would accept this proposal and initiate it and integrate it into an unique democratic process. The present system, attracts few if any citizens to regular meetings.

I believe that each board member owes us, the citizens of Shorewood a response to this proposal, a proposal that would improve the status and function of our local government. Would town meetings be that bad?