Laconia Human Relations Committee begins essay series on democracy

LACONIA — The Laconia Human Relations Committee has created a series of essays on the topic “Toward a More Perfect Union,” in an effort to open up dialogue within the community on issues of democracy.  

The goal for the series, according to Carol Pierce, former chair and current member of the committee, and David Stamps, chair since 2018, is to invite community members to consider how major political questions impact the Laconia area. The committee hopes that people feel compelled to respectfully respond to its essays, whether that be in writing or through simple conversation with neighbors. The essays are being published in The Laconia Daily Sun. The first appeared Tuesday.

“We are not trying to be divisive but educational,” Stamps said. “And education is about listening to tough points of view and using that to form your own.”

Stamps and Pierce said the committee is concerned the local discourse on politics and social issues has become inhibitive of productive and free dialogue. The trend of public animosity toward those who disagree with someone’s opinions, they said, threatens free speech and mutual respect between community members — key components of productive democracy.

The Laconia Human Relations Committee is a mayoral committee whose vision is “a world where everyone is treated with dignity, fairness, respect and kindness,” and whose mission and goals are to work to promote and protect justice, tolerance, understanding, individual dignity, education and civic engagement in support of that vision. For details about the committee, its members and its mission, visit laconianh.gov/413/Human-Relations-Committee.

Founded in 2000, the committee was established to facilitate a smooth and supportive transition into the community for refugees resettled to the area by the federal government. The government grants refugee status to people from certain areas of the world fleeing conflict or persecution and admits them to the United States to protect them. Refugees are not the same as asylum seekers, who request protection after arriving in a new country, or immigrants, who relocate by choice.

The refugee support from the Human Relations committee, Pierce said, ensured that all who were settled in Laconia “had someone they could rely on, usually a neighbor or someone from a local faith group.” The work of the committee in this area also aimed to create relationships and understanding between refugees and existing members of the community through its multicultural market days and other programming.

Over time, according to Pierce and Stamps, fewer refugees were settled in Laconia because of insufficient housing and lack of public transportation. As this took up less of the committee’s time, its action focused on human relations more broadly in the community.

The committee’s core mission — to foster a local climate of respect, anti-discrimination and dignity — remains. That prompted this essay series.

Pierce and Stamps describe the committee as a watchdog for how people relate to each other in the community and see promotion of healthy democracy and civility as essential components of that. The committee and its essays, Pierce said, will not prescribe what or how people should think but will seek to foster open and mutually respectful engagement of different perspectives in the community.

In the last few years, they said, the committee has seen a change in the tone of political discourse in the region and felt compelled to speak out.

“Laconia is a community-minded place,” said Pierce. “There is a strong sense of something beyond the self.” It is because of this, Pierce continued, that such animosity within the community disconcerted the committee and motivated it to action.

“Democracy is the framework of our society,” Stamps said, “and too many of us have taken that for granted.” He believes that civility and tolerance of disagreement are a foundational principle of American democracy and that American history is full of examples where parties with seemingly irreconcilable differences of thought found reconciliation through civil dialogue and a basic level of mutual respect.

According to Stamps and Pierce, the aim of the series is to start a conversation that inspires people to thoughtfully engage with one another and work through friction on public issues.

The committee's first essay expands on the purpose of its series through an exploration of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. The essays will appear in The Laconia Daily Sun on the first Tuesday of the month for a total of six months.