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CITIZENSHIP
By Paul Rogat Loeb
When I was a child in the 1950s, I envisioned the future in terms of technologies and objects. Flying cars, Dick Tracy
two-way wrist radios, Disneyland houses of tomorrow. Technologies have obviously transformed our lives and will continue to
do so. But when I imagine the world that I
want to help create, I think less of technical artifacts, however consequential, than of the webs of cultural, economic,
and political arrangements that will determine whether our inventive and transformative genius becomes a
blessing or a blight. I think of the qualities and choices necessary to shape a more humane world.
We've made some major democratic advances during the past
half-century. Legal segregation no longer rules the American South. Women are far less economically marginalized. Gays
have come out of the closet. America's
military interventions are now often challenged. We've begun to think about the environment.
Yet the gaps between rich and poor are wider than ever. It damages us all that the United States leads the advanced industrial
world in rates of homelessness, child poverty, lack of health care, infant mortality, and nearly every other index of desperation
among the voiceless and vulnerable. For all the environmental talk, we continue to despoil the Earth. Large numbers of Americans
feel disconnected and powerless. How do we create a more humane world during the next 50 years?
We can begin with some deep-rooted wisdom about mutual respect. Two thousand years ago, Rabbi Hillel explained, "What
is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary." Yet we've still not
lived up to Hillel's words. We've still not created a world in which everyone has access to food, housing, and medical care;
in which no one beats, shoots, evicts, tortures, or otherwise degrades their fellow human beings; and in which individuals
can express what they believe without fear. Most of these values were enshrined just after World War II in the United Nations'
International Bill of Human Rights, signed by all the major
nations on Earth. But it will take more than formal pronouncements and more than individual acts of decency and civility
to make these rights global realities.
A good society would create a sense of economic security for allso that, in the words of singer Bruce Cockburn, "nobody
has to scrape for honey at the bottom of the comb." Virginia Ramirez, a San Antonio woman with an eighth-grade education,
testified before the U.S. Congress and Senate that she sees human dignity embodied in how we treat our children. "I'd
like to see a world where every child has the same opportunity," she said. "I see children suffer from hunger, sickness,
cold, and lack of education. Or they're abused, humiliated, or whatever. That's the hardest thing to take, to see children
suffer. To me, there would be justice if every child in this world got treated well. I don't know if that's ever going to
happen. Maybe it won't. But for me, that would be perfect justice."
A good society gives ordinary citizens opportunities to shape a common future. "What we're trying to do," says
longtime community organizer Ernie Cortes, "is to draw people out of their private pain, out of their cynicism and passivity,
and get them connected with other people in collective action." In this sense, the very act of taking responsibility
for our communities embodies the vision we seek. It makes democracy more than a vague slogan masking manipulation and greed,
but rather a living process by which all citizens participate in the creation and governance of society. It makes the public
arena the property of everyone.
In America now, too many of us treat the choices by which we decide our common future as the territory of others. We feel
that we don't know enough to act on issues that concern us, and that our actions will make no difference, our voices will
never be heard. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we withdraw from civic life, the more we leave immensely
consequential decisions to a politics driven by greed, short-sightedness, and expediency. Conversely, the more we take on
the difficult
problems of our time, the more we can tap common power, creativity, and strength.
In 50 years, I hope that our culture will have learned to encourage citizen involvement rather than delegating our most
urgent common concerns to distant and unaccountable experts or to the small number of socially involved individuals whom we
think are more noble and saintly than we. Most Americans think that Rosa Parks started her activism that famous day on the
Montgomery, Alabama, bus and have not even a notion that it began a dozen years before that, when Parks became active in a
local NAACP chapter. Our current myths suggest that change happens when individuals act on their own, in isolation, for mysterious
reasons. The real history teaches lessons of common action, of perseverance, of working together for change.
Imagine if we taught how ordinary citizens have changed the world, again and again, even against entrenched resistance.
Young women and men just coming of age would learn the stories of citizen efforts like the abolitionist, women's suffrage,
populist, union, civil rights, and environmental
movementshow ordinary people have learned to act despite their flaws, hesitations, and failings; learned to persevere,
even under the most difficult of circumstances; learned to keep on until they prevailed. Historical examples can teach how
seemingly impossible efforts can
create powerful change. They give a sense of possibility that counters cultural cynicism. They allow those coming of age
to think not only about addressing small, immediate issues, but also their deeper roots. They teach the arts and skills of
democracyhow to reach out to our fellow citizens, organize them for change, and make our common voice heard.
Civic conversation needs to continue well after citizens leave school. In the Scandinavian countries, study circles encourage
citizens to take on the most difficult common issues, coming together to reflect and to act.Participants even get tax credits
for participating. We too could institutionalize these approaches and make our schools, libraries, churches, and temples centers
for reflection and discussion. Whatever our desired society of 50 years to come, civic participation must be at the heart
of it.
A good society would help each of us fulfill the full bloom of our uniqueness, what Jungian therapist James Hillman calls
the acorn of our character. It would honor our individual gifts and encourage our particular callings. It would give all its
inhabitants the economic, emotional, and
spiritual support needed to follow their dreams. Unjust societies, in contrast, starve hopes, aspirations, and possibilities.
They stunt lives and potentials.
Because we realize ourselves fully only through interaction with others, a good society would foster community in all
its forms. It would nurture rich and vibrant places to live where we are surrounded by friends and acquaintances, feel a sense
of belonging, look out for one another's children. Such communities once existed in our small towns and urban neighborhoods.
The longing that most of us have for places where intimate connections are commonplace speaks to the depth of our social needs
our reliance on the company of other human beings to feel at home in the world. We need to rebuild a world of face-to-face
exchange, of communities where we are known, of places that are not interchangeable.
Wherever we reside, we'll realize neither our individual nor our communal selves if we're totally consumed by our work.
That points to another feature of a good society: We should be able to make a liveable wage without sacrificing our psychological,
spiritual, and sometimes even physical
well-being by giving over our entire lives to our jobs. The saying on the bumper sticker the labor movement: the folks
who brought you the weekend is more than a joke. For generations, citizens struggled to shorten the hours they worked; indeed,
democracy is impossible when employers control our every waking minute. But the time that we spend related to our jobs has
been steadily increasing for the past several decades, even though American industrial productivity has more than tripled
since 1948. A good society would allow citizens time to think and reflect, to be with their families and friends, to engage
themselves in their communities. It would foster a culture that allows us to slow down the pace of global change, challenge
the idolatry of mindless consumption, and wield our awesome technological capabilities with enough humility to respect the
dignity of the Earth.
Aristotle once said that a barbaric culture consumes all of its resources for the present, whereas a civilized culture
preserves them for later generations. Many of our society's most destructive present actions yield consequences whose gravest
implications aren't immediately apparent. That's true of our casual destruction of the planet. It's true of our writing off
entire communities of young men and women who will grow into adulthood bereft of hope and skills. It's true when we say, in
one of the richest countries in the world, that we can't afford to address our most pressing common problems.
The alternative, as environmentalist David Brower said, is to act so that "the new child or the new fawn or the new
baby seal pup that's born a thousand years from now . . opens its eyes on a beautiful, livable planet." Latina activist
Virginia Ramirez touched on this in explaining why
it's important to persist: "Maybe the things we're working on today won't bring about changes for years. But it's
just as important that we do them."
Working for the future requires a vision of accountability by which we hold individuals and institutions responsible for
the impact of their choices, linking even seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. Congressman Ron Dellums once said
that we know the state of a nation's soul by looking at its budgets. In Dwight Eisenhower's classic words, "Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are
not fedthose who are cold and not clothed." I've seen this statement on so many posters, banners, T-shirts, and signs
over the years that by now I barely notice it. At present, we spend $300 billion a year on what we call defenseas much in
real dollars as during the heart of the Cold War and a figure that, when added to
costs still being paid from past wars and weapons buildups, accounts for nearly half of all current discretionary federal
spending. Shifting from this direction would ease the endless cycles of threat and counterthreat, retribution and vengeance,
into which we put so much of our energy,
passion, and creativity preparing to annihilate our fellow human beings.
A good society would be clear about the human toll of our choices, asking who benefits and who pays. When a nurse I know
was conducting physical exams of inmates in Seattle's local county jail, she discovered that a huge percentage had chronic
ear infections. That prompted her to think
about the implications of young kids with untreated earaches: They can't concentrate in school because it's hard to hear
what the teacher is saying. This makes them feel angry and edgy. Soon they drop out, start stealing to
survive, and end up in jail. My friend wondered how many of these young men might have followed a different path had their
families had access to decent medical treatment.
In 50 years, we should have long since exhausted our excuses about providing health care for all of our children, ensuring
that they attend adequate schools, making sure that they have roofs over their heads. We will
have stopped building prisons and returned to building youth employment programs, so that we can nurture those who fall
between the cracks. We will have made a priority of protecting our environment, the world our children and
their children will inherit. "We can clone animals," pointed out David Lewis, who spent 17 years in the California
prison system before founding a pioneering
drug rehab center. "We can send rockets into space. But we can't give young people anything better to believe in
than worshipping the god of money. We can't make drug treatment programs available to everybody who wants and needs them.
I would like to see that same kind of effort applied to saving people's lives."
David's point hits home to me. Enough resources exist in America to meet our public needs. If we learn to consume sustainably,
our inventive spirit should serve us well in the future. But we must reform the policies and institutions that allow our society,
in the words of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, to be dominated by "private affluence and public squalor." Budget
numbers seem abstract until we realize that they represent the common
resources of our societyresources that could support better schools, efficient mass transit, low-income housing, community-investment
corporations, inspiring arts programs, universal health care, or a serious effort to repair the environment. The most successful
attempts to heal our
society's ills and promote human dignity are often local grassroot efforts; imagine their impact if we gave them enough
resources to do their work as well and as powerfully as possible instead of forcing them to scramble constantly for crumbs.
To borrow a phrase from the ecologists, imagine if we developed a full-cost accounting of all our political and economic
choices, so that we realized what we're losing by our shortsightedness: When kids don't get treated for earaches, many end
up in jail; when watersheds are devastated on speculators' whims, salmon runs dwindle; when the wealthiest get an endless
succession of tax breaks, children go hungry; when corporations lay off employees, speed up production, and reduce benefits,
families disintegrate and communities erode. We need to think about all of the deferred, denied, and unintended consequences
that ripple out over time, including opportunities lost and potentials unrealized. Only by being honest about the consequences
of our choices can we move forward.
***
Paul Rogat Loeb, an associate scholar at Seattle's Center for Ethical Leadership, comments on social involvement for the
New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Utne Reader, Mother Jones, New Age Journal, CNN, NPR, C-SPAN,
and elsewhere. His most recent book is Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. His previous titles include
Nuclear Culture, Hope in Hard Times, and Generation at the Crossroads.
This Essay is taken from the book IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century. ©2000
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting http://www.fair.org/
FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering
well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating
for greater diversity in the press and
by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.
LINKS OF INTEREST:
Environmental Awards: Honoring the Righteous
http://www.sierraclub.org/e-files/awards_rolex_2002.asp
Amnesty International- Racism and the Administration of Justice Report
http://www.stoptorture.org/report/index.htm
Everybody's Talkin' Across America, a new kind of conversation fills the air
http://www.utne.com/bPractSeeker.tmpl?command=search&db=dArticle.db&eqheadli
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