Axar.az presents an article “About City Council ” by John Samuel Tieman.

What follows is the revision of an excerpt from an email to an old pal, Michael Simms, a preeminent poet, novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and scholar. Originally from Houston, he now lives in Pittsburgh.

For those who aren't regular readers of this column, I was in April elected to serve the Second Ward of University City, Missouri, an inner ring suburb of St. Louis.

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As I enter my last years, as I turn 75, I haven't become any more conservative. But I do find myself more the preservationist.

Time-consuming though it may be, mine is a humble political office. I am at the most intimate level of the republic. Most of my tasks are tiny. Who owns this tree, the city or the property owner? What is a good deal on a new fire truck? I notify the City Manager of a sidewalk that needs repair. I attend a ribbon cutting. I sit on a neighbor's porch and listen. I give a rabbi my card. The small tasks of local politics, from which I've learned this. Whether one is called to great office or small, what matters is answering that call.

But, in these times so fraught with threats to democracy, so fraught with threats to the republic, there is at least one great call. And that task is to stand for the preservation of the democratic republic.

I view it this way. In one sense, I wasn't elected. I was chosen by my neighbors. I was chosen to be the one who does the small tasks that preserve this city, preserve this way of life, and preserve this form of democracy wherein one representative, a neighbor, lives right down the street.

Authoritarianism is about only those results which benefit the leader and those immediate to the leader. Representative democracy is about process and result. That's worth repeating. Representative democracy is about process AND result. A large part of that process – and this is key to the task of preservation – is to remember that the process is as important as the result. Folks need to feel included. Folks need to feel that their points of view have been heard. Folks need to know that when they phone their Council Member, their Council Member will answer that call. Folks can live with compromise, folks can live with decisions that don't go their way, when they feel the process honors them.

In my old age, I feel also the call of all those who formed me, my blood ancestors and my intellectual ancestors. I often think of my grandfather, who was on the Board Of Alderman in St. Louis. His old ward borders mine in University City. I think of his granduncle who was Mayor of St. Louis. My family has a long history of service at the local, state and national levels. And I think of those who formed my thinking, Martin Buber who spoke of dialogue, Frederick Douglass who wrote of freedom. I think of John Quincy Adams and Thomas More, not the president and the saint, but the work-a-day representative and the parliamentarian. I remember that Harriet Woods sat in my very chair on the City Council. That's Lieutenant Governor Harriet Woods, the first woman ever elected to statewide office in Missouri.

I have breakfast with the pastor of the Catholic church down the street. He wants to discuss some concerns of his parishioners. And I think how it falls upon me to preserve this heritage, this republic, this democracy. Not by any grand action, for I am not called to grand action. But by doing small things and doing them well. For there is this moment when the whole reason for the republic, the whole reason for democracy, comes down to a small question. I ask the priest, “How can I serve you?“