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Activism, Involvement and A Pursuit of The Common Good - That's The Key
Standing at the edge of the area reserved for Obama's people in Grant Park, Chicago, I had a good view of the President-elect as he gave his victory speech, but a much better view of the campaigners who had brought about this extraordinary victory, which was just sinking in around me.
The evening was radiant and glorious, but it's wrong to see this simply as the triumph of African-American blood or the finishing line of some long ideological march. 'Yes, we can' is a political slogan, but it is also the activist's chant, and what I saw on a lot of the faces was hard practicality and the know-how of civic activism.
The night before I spent some time at the 'Last Call For Change' event in the Democrats' temporary quarters in Illinois Street, Chicago. The 150 volunteers crammed into the hot, airless space weren't new to this game. Like Obama, who once worked in the city's deprived South Side, these people were veterans of campaigns to improve schools, the cleaning up of wasteland and the alleviation of the unbearable poverty that startles the stranger's gaze in so many big US cities. Twenty-four hours later they were the ones who cheered hardest when Obama talked about harnessing energy, creating jobs, building schools and looking after 'not only ourselves, but each other'.
As someone who has come late to political activism of a sort, that seems to me to be the single most important part of the transformational campaign. It is amazing to me that so many conservatives in America, and to a lesser extent in Britain, have not yet grasped that, while the Obama campaign championed rights, it also placed an equal emphasis on civic commitment, which is at the heart of his appeal. He is not the Obi-Wan Kenobi of liberals, as they tried to portray him, not a dangerous leftie or the champion of command economy reform. He is a practical man who shrinks from the individualism that was spawned by Sixties liberalism, nurtured by Margaret Thatcher's influence and encouraged by the Bush administration as a strategy of social abdication.
The philosopher Michael Sandel, quoted in the New York Times last week, talked about the multiple crises facing the President-elect. 'The challenges are so great,' he wrote, 'that he will only succeed if he is able to articulate a new politics of the common good. In this election the American people rejected narrow notions of the common good ... Obama will have to reinvent government as an instrument of the common good - to regulate markets, to protect citizens against the risks of unemployment and ill health, to invest in energy independence.'
The trick will be to move the ethic of local activism into the decisions of national government; and that, oddly enough, may be aided by the realisation that has dawned during the financial crisis that most of us had been looking after ourselves, rather than each other. What only a few saw was that easy credit and the illusion of wealth encouraged political disengagement. Politics became collusion between policy-makers, opinion-formers who were too interested in cosying up to power and the self-interest of the majority, which, as a friend of mine wittily put it, saw the business conducted in Washington and Westminster as no more interesting or relevant than the work of a utility company. Government was way out there doing its thing unseen and damned near unscrutinised.
It explains how the Bush administration passed so many laws that would obviously damage the environment, for instance the mountaintop removal by the coal companies in Kentucky, and why in Britain neither the widening gap between the rich and poor nor the attack on constitutional rights caused much alarm. We were too busy getting and spending cheap money that was stolen from the future.
The age of Obama will bring forth many pieties, but the truth is that activist politics of the type practised by the people I met in New York and Chicago is obviously more concerned with the common good than self-interest and to that extent we witnessed a real transformation in the United States last week.
I was more moved than I can say by watching the people in that Illinois Street basement as the minutes ticked away to the polls opening on the East Coast. There was something more than just the commitment of the party faithful on display - a determination that the other side of the American character would get a chance to express itself and influence the decisions of government.
As Sandel wrote, 'Obama's campaign tapped a dormant civil idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens.'
You can almost hear the ghost of HL Mencken ('Democracy ... is the worship of jackals by jackasses') chuckle at the hopes being expressed in the US media. With the exception of Fox News, which never lost its sneer and on election night gleefully ran footage of someone in the crowd outside the White House waving a red flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, most TV networks and newspapers fell into a swoon.
I would suggest that this is more a measure of disdain for the Bush government and what it has done to America's reputation abroad - something about which Americans really mind - than the expression of naive and witless hope.
Everyone knows the problems are unprecedented in scale. When the crowd in Grant Park began to shout out 'Yes, we can', Obama adroitly damped down the enthusiasm. And everyone knows that disappointments lie along the way, but at least we can take heart from the re-engagement of Americans with politics.
It was a night to remember, but I did have one doubt as I stood in the unseasonable warmth of Grant Park and that concerned the memory of a similar rally on the South Bank in London on 1 May, 1997, when a victorious Tony Blair was greeted by jubilant supporters. As he took power and showed himself, in Asquith's words, to be such a 'good butcher', the political classes dropped their guard and seemed to stop paying attention to what he was doing. Obama is a talented politician and, like Blair, he ain't no pussycat. He needs to be kept up to the mark by the activists who brought him to power: only with that scrutiny will he serve the common good.
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Show AllRE that "hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves"
This AM while fishing in international waters a few hungry Americans and internationals nearly got blown out of the water by the IDF.
79 year old American Palestinian, David Schermerhorn aboard the SS DIGNITY, reported that Israeli sailors aboard a large Navy Gunboat put on Hazmat suits and masks.
Five minutes later, fishermen and internationals were blasted by water from a cannon mounted atop that gunboat.
The water was filthy, with an appalling chemical smell to it.
"Listening to David on his satellite phone, we could hear water hitting the cabin, a harsh thumping sound. It was pouring into the cabin as the boat flooded with water that drained out through the back. The sharp staccato of machine guns in the background clearly sounded close to the boat. Everyone aboard the fishing boat was drenched...
"Nikolas Bolos, a chemical engineer from Greece and one of the DIGNITY crew members, collected samples of water in glass containers for later analysis. The three internationals on board reported that, from the moment the boat approached the Israeli-imposed six-mile limit, it came under attack by machine-gun fire and water pulsing out of the powerful cannons."
http://www.freegaza.org/
Dissent is what keeps democracies healthy.
The FREE GAZA Movement was co-founded by NONVIOLENT Americans.
You can get involved just by sending President Elect Obama a message to END THE OCCUPATION: FREE GAZA @
http://change.gov/page/s/contact
Eileen Fleming, Citizen Journalist, Author,
Producer "30 Minutes With Vanunu" and
"13 Minutes with Vanunu" FREELY STREAMING
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
The homeless that sleep on the streets and sidewalks of the Civic Center and Tenderloin areas of San Francisco are being roused from their sleep and told to gather their belongings and move before hoses from Department of Public Works tanker trucks begin spraying "pine" chemical on the sidewalk. Sometimes the homeless are sprayed without warning. The spraying is followed by a pressure washer truck. All this is in an effort to clean human excrement off the sidewalks, caused by a lack of safe public restrooms in these areas.
And It's A Hard Rain by Carol Harvey, http://cohsf.org/streetsheet/ November 2008 - article not on site as of post
The key is to have a revolution.
Otherwise, the situation will get worse.
Obama continually points to Lincoln, not as a rhetorical strategy, but to give us the moral high ground in pursuing the common good.
It is this fundamental idea that the American union was established in order to affirm the sovereignty of the people over any sort of monarchical or theocratic sovereignty. Using this as the basis for activism means that the Union repels and excludes the false democracy that would allow people to vote down the rights of others. To claim that the right to freely practice one's religion enables one's church to forbid same-sex couples from marrying is a violation of the very law that founds the country. It goes, then, beyond a violation of the enunciated rights in the Constitution. To be exclusivist while pretending to be democratic is an assault on the very bonds that are supposed to hold the populace together.
After 1968, progressives increasingly embraced a model of politics that condemned the US ab initio; that since our national origins were so infused with oppression, we could not embrace national symbols without defiling or derailing progress.
A young friend who has known nothing BUT the Bush administration told me the other day "For the first time in my life, I feel kind of patriotic." She feels that way because Obama re-ignited the true meaning of our identity as a nation. Even with rhetorical gifts, he would not have won a majority unless he had done so. He reached back before 1968 in order to find that Americanism which originally motivated people in the Civil Rights movement.
By recapturing the moral high ground & the national symbols, we expand the possibilities of activism & will be able to remind people that the American revolutionaries WERE revolutionary, for all their roots in the old oligarchy. Every generation needs to add to the meaning & the forward-looking hertiage of our original revolution.
Obama was elected president but what we really need is a Statesman. Imagine if on 9/11 we had a Statesman as president. I don’t think we would be where we are today if on 9/11 we had a Statesman who took the outstretched hand of the world and led them away from terror instead of into a crazy war on terror. On January 20, 2009 Obama will have the eyes and ears of the world as well as their waiting hand. The best way to take care of America is to take care of the world.
Hoa binh
Yes, Henry Porter, the future answer for transformational change in America is all about the common good. But it is not that simple! America has a serious problem with the common good.
How can the “cream of the crop” in America, the brightest and best educated of people, including “devout upper class people of faith" who have been raised by loving families with perfect “family values” be so indifferent to the common good?
Why has there been so much incessant talk about “Joe the Plumber” on T.V. without a forthright chastisement of Joe’s attitude of wealth without taxation?
To expect financial success without taxation in a democratic society is twisted logic. That is why unchecked capitalism is forever the eventual destroyer of democracy. All democratic societies have the ultimate obligation to serve the common good and to care for those who are poor, sick, confused or vulnerable for one reason or another. This is the test of compassion that all good democratic governments are measured by.
This comes to the nagging problem in America. Do we want a fascist capitalistic form of government or a democratic form of government? It is the evolutionary destiny of humankind to solve the problems of the world with more democracy. But democracy is only possible with the personal freedom from a dominating national culture to think great thoughts. This is the problem with all emerging democracies.
With a new presidential administration in Washington D.C., how often have you heard the statement: "How can we possibly pay for needed social change?" Daaaaaaaaaa! I have yet to hear a courageous person say “tax those who are extremely wealthy!” Is our nation really incapable of saying that after 1% of our population has been pillaging the rest for the past thirty years? Has American capitalistic culture made Americans stupid?
Until American society sees the preeminent need for the common good through a vibrant democracy, America will fail to heal itself and to be a healing force in the world.
"How can the “cream of the crop” in America, the brightest and best educated of people, including “devout upper class people of faith" who have been raised by loving families with perfect “family values” be so indifferent to the common good?"
They know that their primary interest is in getting theirs and getting out while the getting's good. Thus their primary interest is at odds with the "common good" they seek to escape.
The institutions abusing the fruits of resources do so from adopting a cultural heritage that demanded its encounters with others reflect their own reason for being, while taking the fully legitimate reason for being of the other as an infinite resource to be plundered for profit. No reciprocity - survival of the fittest. We now know that 'fittest' according to this model includes vampiric canibalism - the ecological crisis and widespread genocide being the prime examples. The corporate 'individual', a giant with clay feet has managed to put it crudely '$#!t the bed', demanded impunity, sucked from the common good like blood from a stone. The institutionalization of 'human' as consumptive is just that.
Howard Zinn and many others have continually pointed to those whose natural resources have been raped, repressed, disappeared and then doubly disappeared in falsified history and then blamed as the problem. What we see is a deep shift gaining a lexicon with which to articulate the history that is real and has been obscured. Awakening to the infantilization by abuses of power needs a conceptual jujitsu of the projection clearly enough that people realize the 'goal' has never existed. It is another way of manifesting an incapacity itself based in goal orientation itself. The puzzle is in recognizing that our history of 'privelege' is a red herring. We have reached the gaol/goal.
The most precious resource is the voice of people who have been silenced as 'less than human' or less than history. When you begin to list descriptions of this - it makes for an interesting profile. Everyone is human - except who is not.
"The most precious resource is the voice of people who have been silenced as 'less than human' or less than history."
The rightwing rose on the idea that there was a 'silent majority' in America that had been drowned out by the cries of the oppressed during the '60s. They were encouraged to feel that they were being deprived of their own history, that all their ancestors, and their own lives, were being destroyed in favor of those who were coming to exercise rights & enter history.
Obama's chief victory so far has been the refusal of this zero-sum identity politics. We have to progress beyond the point where we want to shout down opposition, but allow the opposition to hear their OWN voices -- and some will realize what horrors they've been saying. Obama didn't need to condemn Palin's incendiary remarks -- by keeping silent on them, he let Americans hear them & judge.
This is a good spot to mention School of Americas Watch, the November 21-23 Vigil to close the School of Americas (SOA/WHINSEC), at Fort Benning, GA.
From the SOAW website, "This is an opportunity for the progressive movement to push for the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC and to set an agenda for a new direction in US foreign policy."
Perhaps I'll see you there.
Bill in Dubuque
It would truly be wonderful if the bulk of America would figuratively join hands and sing Kumbaya as they went to work to undo the Bush years--perhaps something
like a cross between the "can do" spirit of the 30's and the "business as usual cannot go on" determination of the 60's--but I doubt it.
The war is detestable becasue it is still going on not because it was started by our very own home-grown fascist aggressor.
The land-slide victory was fueled more by economic self-interest than revulsion at the system that created the disaster. What we need is a very active and determioned progressive reform movement that will push Barack (as did Huey Long and the Communist, and Socialist Workers parties did FDR) to do what he must be forced to do unless the rest of the country wants something worse.
That way Barack, Joe, Nancy, Harry, Hillary, and all the rest can be Mr & Ms. nice-guys and shrug their collective shoulders and ask, "but what else can we do?"
Poet
old goat, misterchips, etc.
the elevating of the worthiness of one life over another is precisely the heart of the matter...the ability and will to manipulate an other, to convince that other through coercion, argument, or force, to self-subjugate their very thoughts and lives to a false purpose...the creation of false goals and false methods of achieving them, enabled by the human tendency to self-deceive, to manufacture from thin air the very emotions then used to validate thoughts or actions...
there must be a global movement among the general populace toward self-awareness and eco-responsibility...the focus on simple living, with accessible and healthy air, water, food and shelter...there must be a gloabl rejection of the job\paycheck\industry\consumption\waste mindset, largely fueled by petroleum and electricity...seductive as this life is to humans, it must be seen as false...
keys to me are:
a way of life in which one is, again, directly connected with, and raised to understand, one's place in the physical world and the need to exist as a harmonic part of that world for one's very survival...water, food, shelter...to me, this means removing infrastructure and planting, tending and harvesting sustainable crops...
an acknowledged transition point into adulthood...I would recommend puberty...the individual must, above all else, understand that, by simply existing, and, especially, reaching the point where they are now able to produce and raise offspring, they have been empowered with their own inalienable rights and responsibilities, and will be allowed by society to enjoy those rights as an adult as one wishes, barring harm of others, and to uphold those responsibilities as an adult as one should, and to do them both with the living planet around you foremost in importance...this also means a great deal of leeway must exist between those who would attempt to influence or curtail another's thoughts or actions...
an education grounded in logic, the arts and the sciences, with an emphasis on ecological morals and ethics...
a drastic alteration around property ownership...the elimination of industry...
we must learn to view humans as a global ecological force for either good or ill, while understanding how a very few like-minded humans might successfully mislead the rest, and how our own mental, physical and spiritual make-up might assist them, even to our own detriment...
we must clean-up the existing, toxic 'progress' mess, and move forward with a rural mindset...