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Homer Residents Meet To Discuss Democracy

Kachemak Bay Campus

Homer residents gathered at the Kachemak Bay Campus on Jan. 16 for the annual Civil Rights Day and Martin Luther King Day event.

This year’s program, “Celebrating the Fundamental Ideas of Democracy,” was a nonpartisan community conversation that included readings of classic civil rights texts, personal essays about the democratic process and even some poetry.

Former Alaska State Writer Laureate Nancy Lord organized the event with retired political science professor Mike Hawfield. She also read one of her poems during the event.

“The rights we have we must protect, to honor those with all respect,” Lord read.

According to Hawfield, the goal of the event was to encourage local political dialogue. He says that having political differences is not necessarily a bad thing.

“I was looking forward to the diversity of opinion, the level of engagement that my neighbors have. I would always welcome more and more of those ideas, more and more of those different perspectives because it’s out of that that real education, real growth occurs,” said Hawfield.

Local author Tom Kizzia shared an original piece on media and democracy.

“Now we find ourselves in a world of Facebook and Netflix, where we each get our own personalized reality. Not simply one that we piece together, but one that in a sense creates us, for we evolve into a product of our own social media algorithms, like androids on Westworld,” said Kizzia.

Even within families, perspectives can be different. Local Carolyn Norton told a story about her experience voting with her parents.

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to go along with your mother and father to the senior center on a cold November election night and wait while they stand behind plastic curtains, it will be the first time you will conceive of your parents as separate individuals,” said Norton. “It will dawn on you that each of them does not know the other’s thoughts. Before the curtain, they are equal partners united in their love for each other and you. Behind the curtain, they might keep secrets or cultivate unspoken desires. They might be transformed.”

This idea of political separation and differences, between rural and urban, between generations, and backgrounds was a main focus of the event.

Afterwards, audience members like Ken Castner spent time talking with one another and sharing their thoughts on politics and community.

“I think that it’s really great to get a bunch of intelligent people together and great writers together to remind ourselves that if people need to assert their citizenship, they need to do it with some vigor,” said Castner.

Editor's note: Carolyn Norton now works as Morning Edition host for KBBI.

Owen Duffy was born and raised in Homer. He began volunteering at KBBI in late 2013, his senior year at Homer High School. After graduating in 2014, he began working at KBBI as a fill-in host. He has hosted Weekend Edition, Morning Edition, and All Things Considered. This year he started a reporting internship with the News Department and plans to study journalism in college.