What We Did to Avoid ‘Both Sides’

Community elections are stressful. They surface disagreement, activate identity, and compress decision-making into a short window. When communication shifts from policy to personal judgment, those pressures can escalate quickly.

In many neighborhoods, moments like that lead to cascading outcomes as disputes multiply.

We made a deliberate decision to prevent the avalanche.

The Risk We Were Navigating

By early September 2025, campaign communication in Ken Lake had shifted away from governance priorities and toward claims about character, intent, and legitimacy. Some materials relied on implication rather than documentation, and fear rather than process.

At that point, the risk was no longer “losing an election.” The risk was losing the neighborhood’s capacity to disagree safely.

Even careful, documented, non-personal speech — answering public questions, sharing source documents, explaining statutes or governance practice — was treated as equally divisive as fear-based or accusatory messaging. Speaking was framed as provocation.

When that happens, the issue is no longer tone or content. It is permission.

If everything we said was considered just as unacceptable — despite the absence of personal attacks — then the problem was not what we said, but that we had the audacity to speak at all.

This is a common dynamic in bullying and bias: participation itself is reframed as provocation.

Naming that pattern matters. But naming it during an election can also raise the stakes.

So Friends of Ken Lake made a choice.

The Choice: Containment Over Escalation

Friends of Ken Lake operates with a clear communication boundary:

We analyze systems, documents, and public claims — not individuals.

That boundary shaped every decision during the election.

Rather than responding rapidly or emotionally to each provocation, we limited real-time responses to situations where silence would have created confusion about process or fact. When response was necessary, it was narrow, sourced, and impersonal.

When response was not necessary, restraint was intentional.

This was not avoidance. It was containment — and it was not easy.

What Containment Looked Like in Practice

During the election, we focused on three things:

Correcting the record when specific claims misrepresented governance, statute, or procedure. 

Providing source documents so neighbors could evaluate issues independently. 

Avoiding amplification of fear-based messaging that would pull more people into personalized dispute.

Instead of rapid rebuttals, we published explainers, candidate statements in candidates’ own voices, and values-based descriptions of how we hoped to work with the broader community.

When neighborhood-wide flyers circulated, we acknowledged that they existed — because pretending otherwise would have been disingenuous — but redirected attention to issues, context, and process rather than accusation.

In several instances, we chose not to respond. Where claims lacked evidence, or where response would have widened the circle of harm, restraint served the community better than rebuttal — even if that restraint was read as passivity, condescension, or weakness.

Why That Restraint Mattered

Escalation feeds on repetition.

Every personal counter-attack legitimizes the tactic it opposes. Every emotional rebuttal invites escalation in return. We cannot ask anyone else to interrupt that dynamic if we were not willing to interrupt it ourselves.

That choice came with cost.

We were accused of lying and manipulation. Our website was called “nannying” and “passive aggressive.” I was dismissed as young and naïve. I was called political for answering public questions in a public forum.

What hurt most was not disagreement — disagreement is expected. It was the sense that participation itself was being treated as a violation.

By limiting real-time responses and refusing to personalize disagreement, Friends of Ken Lake hoped to prevent:

• a multiplication of targets

• the normalization of fear as persuasion

• the framing of disagreement as disloyalty

The election remained tense—but it did not metastasize.

The Shift After the Election

Once voting concluded, the communication environment changed.

With outcomes settled and urgency reduced, it became possible—and responsible—to step back and examine the campaign materials themselves. Now we could talk about the patterns we were aware of - the bias and bullying - from a stance of lived impact.

That is the purpose of the Election 2025 analysis series.

The series uses real, widely circulated election materials as a case study to examine how bullying and bias can emerge in ordinary governance contexts—often without participants recognizing them as such. Election messaging provided a concrete, shared record that made these dynamics visible without relying on rumor, memory, or personal testimony.

The analysis functions as a retrospective audit:

• how claims were made

• what documentation was used or omitted

• how fear-based framing operates

• and how governance discourse can shift from policy disagreement into personal disqualification

Why This Series Analyzes Campaign Materials — Not Friends of Ken Lake’s Own Writing

A reasonable question is why this series focuses on campaign materials produced by others, rather than analyzing Friends of Ken Lake’s own writing in the same way.

That choice was intentional.

Friends of Ken Lake’s materials were written with full access to our own sources, drafts, internal discussions, and decision-making process. Analyzing them would require readers to take our account of that context on trust — the very thing this series is designed to avoid.

By focusing on materials that were widely circulated, publicly accessible, and received without additional context, the analysis allows readers to evaluate communication patterns using the same information most neighbors had at the time.

This was not a claim that Friends of Ken Lake’s communication was beyond critique. It was a decision about scope and method: to examine how bullying and bias can emerge in public-facing governance discourse using shared records..

Friends of Ken Lake’s own materials can be found in our blog. This series asks a different question: how do communication choices function in the wild, when context is incomplete and trust is contested?

The series does not speculate about intent or assign personal blame. Its purpose is to show how these patterns form, why they escalate, and how they can be recognized.

By preserving a shared, source-based record, the series aims to help future disagreements be navigated with clarity rather than suspicion, and with awareness rather than repetition.

What Held — and What Is Still Being Tested

 Board work continued. Volunteers continued to engage. Meetings continued.

That does not mean the risks disappeared, or that subsequent governance choices have always met legal or procedural standards. Some have not, and those failures have required direct documentation and response.

What it does mean is that the election itself did not trigger an irreversible cascade of personal targeting, withdrawal, or institutional breakdown.

That outcome was not accidental.

During the election, specific choices were made—under pressure—to prioritize de-escalation, documentation, and long-term trust over short-term vindication. Those choices could be seen in the materials produced and reduced the speed and spread of conflict at a moment when escalation was most likely.

This was containment. When containment succeeds, it is often invisible. We did not use fear-based or loyalty-demanding rhetoric, even when that rhetoric was circulating widely around us. We did not ask neighbors to choose who to trust. We asked them to look at what was being said, and how.

It is harder to see what is not there than what is. The demand to pick sides still existed. The pressure to personalize disagreement was present. We simply did not add to it.

What held was not harmony.  What held was our shared humanity.

Even under pressure, we chose to speak without attacking, to answer without humiliating, and to keep treating one another as neighbors rather than adversaries. That choice strengthened our community, and we believe that it continues to matter now.

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