To the Editor:
In her recent letter, Versha Munshi-South calls for “reasonable” residents to drown out the “belligerent” voices currently dominating Stamford’s civic discourse. While the call for broader participation is noble, we must be careful not to use the word “reasonable” as a silencer for those who are simply exhausted.
In early 2025, Munshi-South was a vocal proponent of “eliciting and responding to feedback.” Now that the feedback is still coming but no longer aligns with the board’s direction, she has rebranded it as “belligerent” and “monotonous.”
This is a classic political tactic: when public outcry aligns with your goals, it’s “essential civic engagement.” When that same outcry persists because your response was insufficient, it becomes “noise” that “drains” officials. You cannot claim to value diversity of thought while simultaneously labeling the most impacted voices—our parents and educators—as a “narrow set of perspectives” that should be tuned out.
If our elected officials feel “drained” by the community’s persistence, perhaps it’s because they have spent more time managing the TONE of the debate than solving the actual substance of the grievances. We don’t need more “reasonable” voices to dilute the room; we need LEADERS who don’t change their definition of “reasonable” based on which way the political wind is blowing.
Furthermore, labeling passionate residents as a “narrow set of perspectives” is a classic tactic used to dismiss legitimate grievances. When parents and teachers show up month after month to speak on issues like high school schedules, it isn’t “monotonous” noise—it is the sound of a community that feels IGNORED. If leaders had engaged the public meaningfully from the start, the volume wouldn’t need to be so high.
We shouldn’t be asking for “quieter” residents; we should be asking why our current officials only seem to hear us when we shout.
True democracy isn’t a polite academic seminar where we agree to move on from “urgent” issues just because they’ve become inconvenient for officials to hear. It is messy, it is loud, and it is driven by the people most impacted by the decisions. To suggest that these voices “weaken” our democracy is to misunderstand what true democracy is for.
Stamford doesn’t have an “imbalance” of voices; it has an imbalance of listening. Let’s stop judging the tone of the community and start addressing the substance of their concerns.
Democracy is loud for a reason,
Jonathan Saint Victor
Stamford, CT