Partisanship is not new. But its current form is less accurate, more insistent, more intrusive, more eager to conscript every institution into its service, and too quick to assume.
Social media posts are constructed to provoke. Engagement is the currency, and outrage is the quickest mint. Tone sharpens. Context narrows. Motives are imputed. The appetite for humiliation grows.
That spirit does not build community. It hollows it out.
Consider what actually sustains a community. It is not the viral post or the sharpened accusation. It is the quiet work of noticing people who might otherwise go unseen. Kindness rarely trends. It does not announce itself. But it is the operating system of any healthy civic life.
Shari L. Shapiro, Executive Director of Kids In Crisis, describes how her understanding of distress has evolved. “Urgency doesn’t always look urgent. And distress doesn’t always announce itself with bells and whistles,” she writes. The children who concern her most are not the disruptive ones but the compliant and high-achieving. They do not demand attention. They avoid it.
One student, well-liked and outwardly steady, visited a counselor regularly because he felt he “couldn’t breathe.” Home was unstable. He caused no trouble. Few worried about him. Until he said, “I don’t think anyone would notice if I wasn’t here.”
That sentence should arrest any community tempted to fixate on spectacle. The loudest problems are not always the deepest ones. The child who smiles may be struggling. The neighbor who says “I’m fine” may not be. “These shifts matter,” Shapiro reminds parents. So do silences.
Kindness begins with attention. It requires the discipline to pause before assuming, to ask before accusing, to listen without rehearsing a rebuttal. It is not indulgence. It is moral clarity about what matters.
Shapiro urges parents to expand their definition of struggle: watch for subtle changes, make room for quiet conversations, normalize help before crisis arrives. Care, in other words, is proactive. It is patient. It resists the drama of the moment in favor of the dignity of the person.
The same ethic should guide public life.
When the Board of Estimate and Taxation reviews a budget, when officials debate housing, when residents testify at hearings, the obligation is not to score points but to weigh consequences. Local governance functions best when members of both parties remember, as one BET member recently put it, that “local issues are not partisan.” That statement is not naïve. It is necessary.
Kindness in governance does not mean softness in numbers. It means seriousness in motive. It means asking what policies will mean for the family receiving keys to a renovated apartment, for the teenager who cannot sleep, for the taxpayer calculating the next bill. Housing decisions, school budgets, mental health services — these are not abstractions. They shape lives. They require steadiness, not theater.
In public debate, as in parenting, intent matters. If the purpose is humiliation, the result will be division. If the purpose is stewardship, the result can be trust.
Abraham Lincoln urged Americans to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Charity, in its original sense, meant love — the disciplined willingness to seek the good of another.
There is a temptation, especially in the digital age, to treat every disagreement as a referendum on virtue. To assume bad faith. To demand alignment. To punish independence. But a community newspaper, a town board, a nonprofit serving children — these institutions exist to serve the whole, not a faction. They belong to neighbors before they belong to ideologies.
Partisanship asks: Who wins?
Civic responsibility asks: Who needs care?
A wise town chooses the latter. It resists the reduction of every question to a contest of enemies. It protects institutions whose intent is constructive. It understands that strength is shown not in domination but in stewardship.
Greenwich needs fewer traps and more listening. It needs adults who understand that kindness is not sentimentality but structure — the architecture of trust.
