Diane Kalen-Sukra, Save Your City: How toxic culture kills community & what to do about it (5^th Anniversary Edition: 2024).

Review by Ron Dart

Cultural, religious, educational, and political wars are not new to our all-too-human journey. Sadly, with the rise of instant media, “cancel culture,” “wokeism,” and simplistic ideological posturing, a rather crude notion of polarization has come to define trendy progressivism and reactionary conservatism. In the process, healthy civic virtues and civility in the midst of the fray have been mostly banished.

The evocative and compelling beauty of the 5^th edition of Save Your City is the way Diane Kalen-Sukra, drawing from the best and wisest of political thought and activism, overcomes the toxic culture that kills community and shows us what can be done about it. In short, this bounty of a missive reflects on our contemporary crises and what, practically, can be done to bring health and healing to local communities again. Needless to say, such insights can also be applied to higher levels of cultural and political life.

Save Your City is both a short yet large book, short in length but a library of information packed into it. The missive is divided into three parts with an “Appendix” worth sitting with for many a lingering moment:

Part 1: “Welcome to Bullyville,” rightly so, walks the curious and attentive reader through the “City Gates” and “Surviving Uncivil Society.”

Part 2: “Journey to Sustainable” points the way out of the malaise in a positive direction to “Sanctuary,” “Join the Renaissance,” and “One Ship, One Destiny.”

Part III: Sustainable Culture” ups the challenge to yet higher and more significant levels, “Global Call for Values Education” and “Love is the Greatest Civic Virtue.”

The timely and timeless Appendix holds the reader and offers a mature path to a “Roadmap To Renewing Civic Culture.”

Is Save Your City a naively optimist manifesto, as some hard realists and cynics might argue (the position of such skeptics leading to impotence and paralysis), or does this book provide a pathway and opening forward to engage the tough issues in a demanding yet thoughtful manner? Diane has been in the thick of the fray for many a decade; hence, Save Your City is acutely aware of the low culture that often dominates much public discourse—she is realistic enough to know if such toxicity continues, communities, in time, will be no more.

So, such a book is realism at its most focused and engaged. Save Your City, for those with a background in Classical education, draws from the lessons learned from such a heritage and the lessons learned both for good and ill of the wisest women and men of the past. History, in short, is replete with many tragic and sad tales, for those who ignore both Cassandra and Tiresias, and Diane knows of what she speaks because of where she sees from. We do well to heed her seeing and speaking, vision, and committed activism.

I would not hesitate, for a moment, to warmly and highly encourage one and all to purchase, inwardly digest, and be shaped and massaged in mind and imagination, soul and body by Save Your City—the future of meaningful civic virtues and public civility hinges on understanding what needs to be understood at a deeper level to overcome toxic culture at many insidious and acrid levels.

Ron Dart
Professor Emeritus
Department of Political Science
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford BC