What holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place.
The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract.
A Montana statue holds that a river has a right to overwhelm its banks and inundate its floodplain. Well, that's interesting, because it's not a right that we assign to the river. The river has earned it through centuries of deluging and shaping the floodplain, and the floodplain has a right to its rampaging river. They've earned their rights through a kind of reciprocal action.
