CRAG FAQ

Local government is your most direct connection to democracy. Citizens are the building blocks for democratic institutions. We define the values and norms for a functioning accountable government.

What to do:

• Attend local meetings of city, township, and county boards and councils.
• Make a statement during the public comment period.
• Talk about local impacts, impacts on you and your family.

Why:

• Local officials are elected, they (should) believe in democracy.
• They are your most direct link to the democratic process.
• They are directly accountable to you.

How:

• Show up. Speak up during the public comment period.

What to say:

• Bring impacts home, make it personal.
• Identify local impacts of the coup, these are essential draw the links between federal actions and local citizens.
• These can be a few words off the top of your head, or a deep dive into the data.
• Examples

More:

• Why Local Action for Democracy
• • btw, I'm a newcomer to this; the League of Women Voters and Houghton County Dems have been tracking local meetings and issues for years.

Citizens Rally for Accountable Government: CRAG

The name was invented on the spur of the moment when I needed an idenitification.

I posted this overview of CRAG goals and history on April 13th.

1. Goals (and history) of CRAG (as of April 15, 2025)
This list has grown to 206 people. For new people, CRAG started spontaneously in February from my outrage at seeing attacks on government by a regime following an autocratic playbook, and inspiration from Timothy Snyder's Twenty Lessons on Tyranny. The curious can find all CRAG emails in an archive. Since then, our goals have consolidated to:

• Goal 1: Get people to speak out at meetings of our local elected officials.
• Goal 2: inform and educate about local impacts of federal government chaos..

Goal 1: Inspiration for Goal 1 comes from Janus Rose "You can't post your way out of fascism". The condensed version of that article is:

Scrolling, posting, liking, ranting, will not restore democracy. Citizens must ACT in the real world.

Progress to date: A small cohort of CRAG members have spoken up at about 20 local meetings.
Next steps: Expand the number of people attending these meetings.

How can we get you out to your township/county/other meetings?
Eleven events are on the CALENDAR this week (see below). We can help:

• Pair you with a buddy;
• Guidance in preparing remarks;
• Factsheet on your township;
• What else can we do? Childcare? Transportation? Lollipops? Let me know!

Goal 2: A CRAG team has come together to research local impacts. Our initial goal is factsheets on various topics. We can fairly quickly provide basic information on the demographics of townships, number of people on Medicaid, etc. If you plan to attend a meeting, let us know what would help you.

Your own email system flags messages as junk based on various criteria. To prevent this try:

• Reply to a CRAG email (just say hi!); this tells your email that you want these messages.
• Select a CRAG message in your junk folder and look for a "this is not spam" option in your menu bar.
• Add this address to your address book or email contacts: sarah@waterandstone.net.

The CRAG calendar has many options. Here's a guide to navigate the calendar options.

Yes! Anyone can subscribe for free from the link on this page or any CRAG page.

Yes!

• Please use email to alert me to relevant news or events from across the UP or MI-01.
• HINT: It is very helpful if you can archive news articles at the WayBack Machine, or copy the text because I don't subscribe to all the small (important!) news outlets in the region. Many are paywalled.
• Let me know if you'd like to hear about a specific issue.

No.

The CRAG archive can be found in the menu bar and here.

Here

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