Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
A few days ago, in my college friends group chat, I sent a screenshot from Google Maps showing that the Gulf of Mexico had been transformed overnight into the Gulf of America, per executive order. “There you have it, folks,” I wrote smarmily.
“Unbelievably stupid,” one friend replied. Another friend concurred that it was stupid, but added: “Also the least of the concerns I have regarding the current regime.” A third agreed that “there are bigger problems to address.” And then the group chat moved on to discussing one of those bigger problems — someone shared a link to a recent episode of “The Daily” on a possible trade war with China.
These days, it can feel like we have two options: stand and absorb the full force of the firehose, or run and hide. We can try to pay attention to every executive order, Truth Social post, DOGE overreach, and off-the-cuff-remark-turned-foreign-policy-statement, or we can cancel subscriptions to news sources, turn off the radio and the TV, and retrain our social algorithms to be blissfully — and naively — news-free.
But there’s a third option. One that doesn’t involve being bowled over 100 times a day or hiding under a rock until January 2029. We can direct our attention, time, and effort to where they can make a difference. We can look to the local.
Lately, I’ve been drawing inspiration from a writer who lived through a similarly tumultuous time. In “The American Scholar,” his 1837 effort to define intellectual rigor in a still-new nation, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution?”
I suspect that many of us could probably do with a little less revolution right now, but the fact remains that ours is, like Emerson’s Antebellum Period, an age of revolution. Emerson’s time, which has come to be known as the American Renaissance, was marked by renewed attention to “the near, the low, the common.” He writes, “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.”
Today’s revolution, however, is in many ways an inverse of Emerson’s. In our time we’ve seen a dismantling of the local community in favor of online worlds and, to make a pun on Emerson’s words, “things remote.”
For Emerson, the attention to the near and the common heralded a “new vigor;” our lack of attention to the near and the low signals a lack of that same vigor, manifest in the dismantling of community, a distrust of others, and a collapse of a shared story that is crucial to a functioning democracy.
But these are solvable problems precisely because they are local problems, and as I’ve turned my attention toward my local community on the North Shore, I’ve found something of the pragmatic spirit that later grew from Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalist thinkers.
Call it an anticipatory life change, this past September I had the opportunity to move jobs from a college 30 miles from my home to Salem State University, which is a mere two miles from my front door. Salem State hails itself as “The Commonwealth’s Civic Engagement University,” and this isn’t just an inspiring tagline. At every stage of the application process for my position, I faced questions about how I would extend my students’ reach beyond the classroom and into the local community.
Now that I’m here, I take this charge seriously, and even as I learned my way around campus this year, I’ve been trying to help students find their way off it. I’ve connected students with internships at local news startups, nonprofits, and literary magazines. In my Editing for Publication class this semester, I’ve partnered with a local environmental protection organization to offer students opportunities to do some real world editing of blog posts and op-eds. I’ve also made connections with local publications who have, in turn, invited students to contribute their own writing.
This work is tiring and time-consuming — some days I hardly have time to read national news, opting to catch up by listening to podcasts in the shower. But it is also rewarding and meaningful. I feel like I’m doing something. I’m not subjecting myself to the administration’s shock and awe campaign, meant to dizzy us into submission, nor am I blocking my eyes and ears and wishing the news away.
The truth is, we’re going to need people engaged at all levels, but no one can be everywhere at once. And, our local communities have been too long neglected. I believe that changes made in towns and cities have a way of working their way up to states and then the nation. Call it a reverse trickle-down theory — defying the laws of physics, I believe we can trickle up.
Ralph Waldo Emerson thought so too. As he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “The near explains the far.”
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is an associate professor of English and coordinator of the professional writing concentration at Salem State University.
