Last month I rewatched “It’s a Wonderful Life” with my kids and saw it in a new light.
It’s more than a sentimental holiday TV staple. It’s a parable about the care and sacrifice it takes to build community. George Bailey, the main character, sacrifices big dreams to stay home and preserve his father’s rundown savings and loan, ensuring that the town’s workers can keep their homes.
This month, I discovered a real-life George Bailey as I edited Monday’s special feature on Los Mariachi Troyanos at University High School. Band director Archie Hatten IV has made it his life’s work to light a fire of passion and purpose in these student musicians.
Hatten, a Waco pastor’s son, played trumpet in the school’s mariachi band in the late 1990s. He returned to his hometown and alma mater after college and found the program defunct. He resurrected it in 2005 and built it into an institution that turns shy, self-conscious teens into confident young adults through the magic of music and tradition.
A capital idea
Bailey’s and Hatten’s stories point to something called “social capital,” a concept popularized a quarter century ago by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam.
Imagine that every community has a bank account stocked not with money but with civic trust, which allows it to work together for the public good. As people cooperate for their mutual benefit, this treasury of trust grows.
Social capital builds and compounds partly through individual actions but especially through voluntary associations – PTAs, churches, Scout troops, civic clubs, even sports leagues, as well as city councils and school boards.
Like the customers at Bailey’s savings and loan, we all invest in each other, and we all borrow from each other.
In this 2000 bestseller “Bowling Alone,” Putnam concluded that communities with high levels of social capital are “more resilient to economic shocks.”
“Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph,” he writes. “In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives.
He adds: “Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”
As the century turned, Putnam lamented that America’s social capital had ebbed since its mid-century high-water mark. In a more recent book, “The Upswing,” he tracks its continued retreat, and the resulting civic dysfunction.
Cracks in the foundation
I’ve covered Waco as a journalist for nearly three decades, and it has become my family’s adopted hometown. I know it as a place where relationships matter, where churches and nonprofits and local governments work together and where civil dialogue is still possible across partisan battle lines.
I also see cracks in the civic foundation: low voter turnout rates in local elections, lack of knowledge about local government processes and difficulty in filling boards and commissions.
News organizations are part of that civic foundation. Community journalism is under threat, and Waco is not immune.
Maybe you’ve seen the statistics. In the last 20 years, the U.S. has lost more than a third of its newspapers and three-quarters of its newspaper journalists.
More than ever, in a time of unrest in the streets and swarming misinformation on our phones, we need shared truth from trusted news sources.
The supply of such news has shrunken nationwide due to corporate disinvestment and vanishing ad revenue. What worries me more is that people may not notice when it’s gone.
Mistrust, hyperpartisanship and distraction by a million shiny digital objects tend to spoil our appetite for serious reflection on local affairs.
I usually refrain from high-minded talk about journalism as guardians of democracy. In a democracy, only the public can save itself. But I do believe that the day-to-day work that we and our fellow community journalists do is crucial to self-governance. That goes for unglamorous reporting on zoning decisions and school budgets as much as big exposés.
Bridging differences
Putnam distinguishes between two varieties of social capital: bonding and bridging capital. The first is like Superglue, strengthening connections between people who already identify as a group. Examples are political parties, some religious organizations and identity groups.
Bridging capital is like WD-40, reducing friction among different parts of the community and allowing them to work together despite differences.
It’s clear that the second type is in scarce supply, and it’s where I hope a newsroom called The Waco Bridge can help.
In polarized times, I believe common ground is still possible at the local level. I believe Wacoans of different views care about Waco. They care whether our school districts succeed or get taken over by the state. They care about the impact of potential data centers, good and bad. They care about jobs, mental health, the future of water, downtown development and job creation.
So for every story, we start with the same question: “How does this affect Waco?” The result is what I call civic news.
Join our movement
Whether The Waco Bridge succeeds at this mission long-term depends on the support of those who think our kind of journalism matters.
Starting any kind of news organization is a gamble in this era, especially a nonprofit in a mid-sized city. We’re fortunate to have generous financial support from early donors, including three leading local foundations (see the donor list here), plus the professional support of The Texas Tribune. We now need to widen our grassroots support to sustain us into a growing and long-lasting institution, and you can help us by donating at any level.
Outside the movies, we don’t expect a guardian angel to show us how our efforts have made our communities flourish.
But we do see in real-world stories like Mr. Hatten’s the value of patience and persistence. It took him decades to get funding for authentic mariachi suits, or trajes de charro, for his students. When the students finally suited up in December, he said it was like Clark Kent changing into Superman.
Who knows what those students he mentors will go on to accomplish? Who knows what future generations will rest in the shade of the saplings we plant today?
Let’s keep building together,
JB
