An image of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations 

Brunswick, Maine is a town across the river from where I live in Topsham. It has a wide main street, and it is appropriately called Maine Street.

Brunswick has a tradition of years-standing that pedestrians crossing Maine street need only to enter the crosswalk, or need only to be seen waiting to enter it, and immediately all the traffic stops. People walk across, sometimes slowly as if savoring the moment, sometimes at their regular gait, and maybe sometimes they walk a little faster as if out of courtesy to the drivers.  Clearly, it’s a matter of people being more important than cars.

But mark this. On occasion, one will see a person, having started across, and having seen that all the cars have respectfully stopped, will nevertheless break into a run. Sometimes the body language is apologetic, sometimes even desperate.

Seems to me that the person’s mind has been colonized by the prevailing modern assumption that cars are more important than people. He or she is also the victim of a widespread dis-ease that has begun to afflict the American people. There are a number of names for this, but the one that strikes me as most apt is “the revolution of lowered expectations.”

Brunswick’s tradition on Maine Street, and the local laws and enforcement that back it up, stands like a beacon pointing back, and hopefully forward, to a culture and a practice in which people are more important than machines—where the people have the presence and power-of-self to believe in, and pursue, a revolution of high expectations.

John Rensenbrink

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