Simple outrage would be the easy (and potentially right) response to the crazy situation in which Rep. Anthony Weiner finds himself embroiled. But, it’s more pain and sadness I feel today. While Weiner may yet have to resign his congressional seat, I wonder what the real cost is to the rest of us, what relationship we want with our leaders, and what we will do.

I’m in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, today to conduct the second focus group of a series to be held across the nation with a cross-section of Americans on the state of politics and public life. This year marks the 20th anniversary of our landmark study, Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street, which we’re updating, again in conjunction with the Kettering Foundation. In Detroit last week, where I held the first conversation, people could not name a single “leader” they trust.

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In our hopes to hope again, the result is that we jump from one political leader to another, in search for Mr. or Ms. Right, while political leaders become cartoon-like figures, contorting themselves to fit different political niches.

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Weiner’s actions may only deepen the negative, damning narrative Americans have about their leaders. Again and again I hear people say that political leaders are crooks, self-aggrandizing, concerned only with their own personal and partisan interests.

Meantime, our political leaders hold themselves up to be the final arbiters of truth and morality, all-knowing, even unblemished heroes. They seek our adoration and absolute approval.

To me, both approaches are sorely wanting. For in this construct there is little room for a real or authentic relationship. Give-and-take is replaced by bluster and condemnation. Finger-pointing and blame becomes the norm. Understanding is victim to shallowness. The quick fix is the coin of the realm.

In our hopes to hope again, the result is that we jump from one political leader to another, in search for Mr. or Ms. Right, while political leaders become cartoon-like figures, contorting themselves to fit different political niches. The upshot is that we lose sight of reality, people’s real needs and aspirations, and what it takes to create progress together. We forfeit the possibility to get good things done. And in this ugly process too often we give up on decent, honorable leaders.

As I watched Weiner’s press conference yesterday while in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I couldn’t help but think about how fraught with frailties our lives are and how things so quickly can fall apart. In recent months, we’ve witnessed such human frailties as the result of natural disasters in Japan, Alabama, and Joplin, MO, among others.

And yet, such frailties are the result more times than not of our own making, as is the case with Weiner. He was forced in public to reveal what may have been his deepest, darkest private secret. Who knows the personal demons that caused Weiner to go down this path – he will need to figure that out.

But this latest episode causes me to wish that we would not place our leaders on pedestals, nor ask them to be super-human. In return, leaders would act with greater humility, and understand they are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. They are human, frailties and all.

I’m not suggesting that you or I simply forgive Weiner’s frailties; he will have to work out his personal and public future, and each of us will come to our own conclusion about his actions. But, here’s the kicker: so long as we remain on the current path, we are destined to encounter even more anger and frustration – and sadness.

Simply throwing up our hands in disgust about Weiner will not enable our communities and the country to move ahead; nor will looking for the perfect leader. There are good people all around us; let’s find them and lend them our support.

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A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people’s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We’re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

Part 1 of a 4 Part Series

Ticonderoga is a small town of 5,300 in upstate New York. It’s story isn’t a one-of-a-kind, that is, a town’s largest employer packs up shop and leaves a town, thus crumbling the local economy, stifling growth and setting the area into a cycle of hard times for years to come. But the resiliency and innovation of its residents is a story that never gets old.

A number of concerned residents decided to stay and fight for their town, to resist a mass exodus that could have rendered the town indefinitely stagnant . . . at best. They formed the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance. The alliance has applied innovation, passion and old-fashioned hard work to make Ticonderoga a prosperous place once again. This story was brought to our attention by the alliance’s Chairman, Alex Levitch. Alex’s passion was infectious and the town’s story magnetizing. We knew that we wanted to share it with you.

“Rise to Greatness” is part one of a four part series. Be sure to visit every week in June for the continuing story.

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The Ticonderoga Story – Part 1

Rise to Greatness

Ticonderoga, a postcard picturesque town of 5,300 souls in upstate New York, serves as the gateway to six million acres of the Adirondack State Park. Here, in the fabled North Country of James Fennimore Cooper and The Last of the Mohicans, is the birthplace of America’s best preserved pre-revolutionary fort. Here, between Lake George and Lake Champlain, is where North America’s political boundaries were defined.

The beauty and prosperity of Ticonderoga was not a secret; from the mid-nineteenth century and through the early twentieth century, America’s rich and famous were drawn to the region’s cooler summer climates and natural splendor. During these “golden years,” the town became a haven for artists and writers seeking exclusivity and serenity. The tourist boom encouraged and strengthened Ticonderoga’s fledgling industrial economy, which soon included a graphite mine and mill and a paper pulp mill, which employed more than half the town.

Over time, Ticonderoga became a household name for every student who used a “Number 2 Ticonderoga pencil” and studied the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars. In addition to its rich natural capital base, Ticonderoga began to boom in a scope disproportionate to its small size: its invested capital base soon included an airport, hospital, community college and historic Main Street.

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The alliance has produced video interviews with residents and alliance members alike so that you can hear about their experience and fascinating stories first hand. It made sense to start with Alex. Below is part one of a four part interview. Visit the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance website to watch the other three parts, the other interviews, amazing photographs and other features.

Interviews conducted and produced by Josh Clement. Contact Josh here.

Be sure to visit Monday, June 20th, for part 2, “Ticonderoga Today,” and don’t forget to visit their official website for other features, information and updates.

In Birmingham, Alabama, a woman cashed in her savings and dedicated her life to offer free music lessons to underserved children of the city. Al Letson, host of NPR and PRX’s State of the Re: Union, brings us the story of Jeane Goforth and her Scrollworks program.

Be sure to visit our Birmingham page where you can listen to the radio episode, read letters to the city, check out the photos we took during our trip and much more.

When I was young, I watched a lot of wildlife/outdoorsy shows, and in middle school I briefly considered a career in freshwater ichthyology. This career track was abandoned later in life when I had to take high school biology.

Sadly, I have not turned out to be the adventurer/outdoors-person I once hoped to be, but I have done some backpacking, hiking, cross country skiing and scuba diving over the years, and it is always a special thrill to see something wild and scary, a puma crossing a high meadow or a black tipped shark swimming twenty feet below.

One thing I’ve never seen (outside of a zoo) is a bear. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid seeing bears, especially grizzlies. I find that singing “What Do You Do with A Drunken Sailor” at the top of your lungs is an effective bear avoidance strategy while hiking near West Yellowstone, Montana. Black bear encounters when camping in the Rockies and Sierras can be minimized by tossing a weighted rope over a tree limb and hoisting all packages of freeze dried spaghetti and ground beef Stroganoff into the air.

As any fool knows who has ever watched Animal Planet or an episode of Yogi Bear knows, it’s never a good idea to feed the bears.

Welcome to Kenai, Alaska, a town where the police are as likely to get a “negative human/bear interaction” call as a burglary or homicide. A major salmon fishery, Kenai is home to hundreds of hungry bears, both of the relatively innocuous black variety, and the more frightening subspecies of brown bear, the grizzly. Even the Latin classification—ursus arctos horribilis—is enough to inspire dread, and not without reason.

The sad fact is, however, that in the course of all these negative bear human interactions, a lot more of them get killed than us. Killing more than 20 Kenai bears a year, wildlife biologists say, could decimate the population. During the past decade, the number of bears killed by cars, citizens or authorities in or around Kenai doubled.

The main reason for these negative bear interactions, of course, is the careless storage or disposal of food. The city has what are known as “bear highways,” where bears know they can find garbage, bird seed, dog food, fish carcasses or fish in smokers or livestock feed. Bears get into freezers and tear down fences. They break into garages and homes. The locals see them wandering through parks and golf courses or strolling past bedroom windows in the dead of night.

Several years ago, the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Alaska Audubon Society, Waste Management, Inc. and the City of Kenai instituted a “Bear-Safe Neighborhood” program. The upshot was no negative bear reports for a period of two years.

Because of its success, Fish and Game and the city decided to expand the program citywide. Kenai’s Wildlife Conservation Community Program has become a model for other Alaskan cities seeking to deal humanely with their bear issues. The main feature of the program is subsidizing the use of bear-resistant garbage containers in residential areas and local parks, but funds were also used to purchase and distribute thousands of copies of the Audubon Society’s “Living in Harmony with Bears,” a publication well worth reading if you live in bear country. Volunteers go door to door handing out info on bear safety and answering questions from residents. The success of the program has attracted interest from communities as far away as Crested Butte, Colorado. It is one of three projects—all devoted to environmental issues—the Kenai delegation will present at the annual All-America City Awards in Kansas City, June 15-17.

It’s heartening that Kenai—and several other finalist communities—have focused on wildlife preservation/environmental themes. Thanks to the news media and the political culture, a stereotype has been perpetuated to the effect that denizens of small towns in general and Alaskans in particular are especially hostile to environmental concerns.

You certainly can’t say that about Kenai. Click here to find out the communities three green themed All-America City projects—the Wildlife Conservation Community Program, the Kenai River Working Group and the Caring for Kenai initiative.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

When you first go to the website for the University of Wynwood in Miami, you might mistake it for an actual academic institution, if you’re not paying close attention. Look, there is a list with the school’s mission, its faculty numbers, tuition rate, even its mascot. Except—the listed number of faculty: zero. Students: zero. Tuition: Free. Mascot: The Lady Python—which actually does have a story behind it, involving snakes and the rambling logic of the University of Wynwood’s founder, P. Scott Cunningham. Who is, in fact, a real person.

The stated mission, in fact, illuminates the real thrust of the University of Wynwood: to “curate an imaginary Miami,” a Miami that is what its inhabitants would like it to be. “Miami is in a sense always the imaginary Miami,” Scott told me when I met him during SOTRU’s reporting trip there this year. “It’s always the Miami of the future. Miami is always about imagining itself and what it could be, as [opposed] to what it used to be.” I got this sense, too, traveling around the city, talking to the wide sampling of people that SOTRU always encounters during production: this is a city that is relentlessly forward-looking—sometimes to its detriment. Development seems not to be an “if” in this city, but a “when,” regardless of what treasured history might be in its path. But the upside of that attitude is that this is a prime place to experiment. “There’s this sense that we can always be better than what we are,” Scott says, “we could always start a new project; we can totally reinvent ourselves and become this completely new city, which is what to me makes it really exciting to live here.”

It also makes it really exciting to start a fictional university here, with an aim as ephemeral as its mission indicates: to make Miami a more poetic place. Scott and his partner in many of the University’s endeavors, Pete Borrebach, are both poets who met while getting their creative writing MFAs at an actual academic institution, Florida International University. That program seems to have bred a longing for community involvement in many of the young writers it’s trained; Scott, Pete and a group of fellow students also started the Miami Poetry Collective, whose Poem Depots literally brought poetry to the streets, with members selling poetry written-on-demand. The University of Wynwood also came out of a desire to “have poets be civic people,” as Scott says, and a sense that a literary community might come out of the woodwork in Miami, if writers had something—even a fictional something—to rally around. And, lest you think that these young men are all fancy ideas and no action, just check out what they spent their April doing.

The University of Wynwood’s largest endeavor to date was “O, Miami,” a county-wide poetry festival that lasted the entire month, with a goal of having every single person in Miami-Dade County encounter a poem during April. Funded by a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, O Miami was unlike any poetry festival you’ve ever heard of. Yes, there were readings—oodles of them—and poets pontificating on their craft. But there were also “Poem Drops,” in which poems fell from the skies on unsuspecting residents in neighborhoods like Coral Gables and Little Haiti. Or a partnership with a local artist, Agustina Woodgate, to do a project called “Poetry Tags.” “We gave her a bunch of labels with lines of poetry on them,” Scott says, “and she went around Miami throughout the month clandestinely sewing those labels into random items of clothing in thrift stores.” You can watch a video of that here:

They bought advertising space on airplane banners, but not to draw crowds to a reading. A line from Rilke, instead– “You Must Change Your Life”–  rippled across the heavens above Miami during April, as did “Naciste para vivir en una isla” (roughly “You were born to live on an island”) from Octavio Paz, which Scott says flew over beachgoers every weekend during the month. (And for a video about that one, check here. )

While Scott says they’re not sure they actually made their goal of reaching each individual in the county, they certainly broadened poetry’s usual audience in Miami, through unconventional efforts like those above. And they’re ambitious about the future: “Moving forward,” Scott says, “we’d like to make deeper in-roads into populations that we only scratched the surface of: the prison system, schools, women’s shelters, [the neighborhoods of] Overtown, Hialeah, Homestead, Sweetwater, etc… [This] was really only an opening salvo.”

And that’s the great thing about the imaginary—whether it’s a university or an entire city: it’s totally up to you, to create at will… Which reminds me of something Pete said, back during our trip to Miami, that “a poem only exists when it’s being read out loud or if it’s being read from the page by a reader. And in the same way, University of Wynwood, without a building, without any faculty, we’re really our audience and our participants.” So a poetry festival can exist, too, sewn into the hemlines of secondhand clothes and written across the sky. “Whenever the University of Wynwood happens,” Scott says, “it’s only happening in that moment and it’s disappearing back into the ether of Miami.”

To listen to SOTRU’s Miami episode, go here. To root for the Lady Pythons via Twitter, go here.