Democracy as a collaboration, not a fight
Wed, 05/18/2011 – 4:51pm
Members of Congress, trapped in a political process corrupted by money, simply cannot take the bold and audacious steps needed to reform our broken government.
< Knowing this, we cannot afford to just wait to see what happens. It’s time for us to set aside our differences, roll up our sleeves, and figure out how the American people can climb into the driver’s seat of our government.
It’s easy to get discouraged about the possibility of achieving meaningful reform, but now is not the time to give up. We can’t give up on our own government, our country, our future. Giving up is not an option because things will continue to get worse if we do nothing. This much we know for sure.
No one has all the answers, but if we agree to work together to find good ideas, aggregate our energy and pool our talents and resources, we just may create something really powerful, quite revolutionary, together.
As reported in the Washington Post recently, we have something to learn from ants.
When in danger of drowning, a colony of the critters — thousands of them — will save themselves by joining forces and forming a raft. They pile together and lock legs and jaws. So bound, an ant raft can survive for months. “Water does not penetrate the raft,” said Nathan Mlot, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Even the bottom layer of ants stays dry, he said.
The individuals act as one, becoming what entomologists call a super-organism.
Amazing! That’s the kind of spirit we need. Especially since it feels like we are drowning in corruption, misinformation, conflict and economic insecurity. Imagine. If we learned to work together, perhaps we can become a super-organism. That is the hope inherent in democracy as an ideal.
Democracy can and should be a collaboration, not a sport or a fight. It should feel more like building a house (or a raft) or putting on a musical together, less like playing a football game.
It is not easy to achieve effective collaboration. Here are some challenges: 1) We are most often working in a virtual environment. 2) We are all volunteering. 3) Among other bad habits, we are in the habit of thinking of politics as a fight, thinking we must get our way or we are losing.
Mostly, collaboration is not easy because our goal is difficult to achieve. There is such powerful institutional resistance to real change. It will be tempting to quit along the way and say "it’s too hard," "it’s too late," "it’s impossible," or "it’s too _____."
For all these reasons, it requires commitment to continue despite the challenges. And, we have to accept the fact that it is just going to be hard. We must counter the difficulty with our resolve.
It might be useful to think of our society as suffering from addiction to drugs or alcohol. We are working on quitting and recovering. For some it may take a few months to quit and for others, it will take years.
Remember that it took years for the suffrage movement, civil rights movement, anti-apartheid movement to achieve their goals. We don’t know what our journey will look like.
As we know, American democracy has always been an experiment. We embrace the fact that we are part of that history of experimenting with this ideal, with the intention.
Whatever the challenges, we must learn to overcome them all. Or, at least die trying. We owe that to the future generations that will inherit this mess.
So, come and experiment with us. Let’s learn to collaborate toward creating an informed and engaged citizenry. Toward catalyzing a rebirth of democracy in America.
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Democracy as a collaboration, not a fight | Coffee Party