The civic miracle has happened in a dozen American cities over the decades. Neighbors across those cities have joined each other to demand reform. The miracle has typically begun small and quiet, within neighborhoods in Portland and Denver, Phoenix and St. Louis, Atlanta and Baltimore.
As the social scientist Dan Yankelovich has recently shown with research in San Diego neighborhoods, such reform never comes from the top. If the public will is to be heard, it must work its way up from below.
It spreads from one neighborhood to another until it gains the strength of voice to be heard and initiate change. The steady drumbeat of an aroused citizenry is soon heard through the media, which itself is likely in need of arousing.
Soon the movement picks up support from all who fear being left behind: Leaders of labor and management, chambers of commerce and service clubs and women's clubs, churches and temples. It offers new entry points for the people of ethnic communities to be heard. It gains strength through outrage and conviction, anger and hope.
And if ever the people of any city had the provocation to rise up and force local government to behave, it is the people of San Diego, now. If it can happen elsewhere, it should be happening in San Diego now. The people of those cities have cried, enough!
Across social and economic spectrums, they have held public meetings. They have organized. They have proven that the system works only if citizens work with it. We have in our civic laps now the mess that forms when we elect local officials but do not pay attention, do not demand openness... do not take the trouble... and the risk... to complain publicly.
City hall is not all bad news today if we can manage to contrast this mess with the reformed city government that people in these other cities have demanded. As we begin to unravel years of corruption that we ignored, we realize that most community organizations, even the media, dismissed ugly warning signals as just politics.
In his first term, Mayor Murphy scheduled two long meetings to tell me that my critical columns were making it harder for him to do his job. I was urging that he use the mayor's bully pulpit to bring the city together in facing ugly issues that already were clear. Diann Shipione had blown her whistle on the pension fund, but Murphy shrugged her off and said that was not an issue.
We get another chance, when we elect San Diego's first strong mayor on July 26. Let's not mess this up again. Our first step toward civic reform is to think first of our city, not our party or our pals, but of which candidate can best bring San Diego back home.
