Granted, I haven’t been following the situation as closely as some, but something feels odd about John Hill’s Providence Journal article, yesterday, about the Central Coventry Fire District collapse:

Until Governor Chafee ordered a state takeover last week, the district’s governing board and its firefighters union were locked in what looked like a fiscal battle to the death. A Superior Court judge had ordered the district’s property be sold and its employees laid off by May 16 in an effort to pay off its debts. The state police financial crimes unit was even called in to find out if the collapse was due to criminality or incompetence.

From the article, a reader would have no idea that events are the culmination of citizen activism — the fruits of an engaged electorate.  When I liveblogged a meeting back in 2012, the story wasn’t board versus union.  It was government (i.e., board and union) versus taxpayers.

It’s a small thing, maybe, but it seems important to me.  Democracy, even representative democracy, starts with and relies heavily upon the engagement of the people.  Yet, from standard reporting (at least in blue states), taxpayers never get to be the heroes.  Unions can be the heroes.  Government officials can be the heroes.  People demanding handouts from the government — or more generally that government take some action — can be the heroes.

Private citizens who take time out of their lives to understand government budgets, finding errors or simple poor management, and then who brave hostile meetings at which the officials in charge literally snatch the microphones from their hands while people on whom they might rely for safety or to teach their children shout and glare from around the auditorium?  Not so heroic.

This is a problem not just to the extent that a society will limit its number of heroes if it treats them like non-entities, or even selfish villains, but also because of its effect on general attentiveness.  The story of Central Coventry Fire as told in the Providence Journal is of a battle between a local government unit and a government union, now set to be arbitrated by the state government.

If government’s got it all handled, why do private citizens need to pay attention in the first place?