I'll check that box.
I realize that I haven’t written very much about politics in the last couple of months. It is not for lack of interest but perhaps a lack of energy. It all depends on your definition anyway. “Politics” is just an evolved word for the way we live together. Its root is the same as metropolitan. It is how we humans function en masse; it is how we treat our neighbors behind the masks of our systems.
Democracy is a beautiful but imperfect idea. It will never be a gospel answer for the world’s problems, but the design does ring true with Western ideas of the right to reasonable self-governance. The citizens that have chosen to adopt it have found it to be fairly successful. And consistent with the philosophy, it has yet to thrive very well without a core of internal momentum.
We all know that in the end democracy just projects how we treat our neighbor- whether physical or national. That personal decision is the one that dictates how we vote. The more the conversations fly around on cable television, the easier it is to forget how immediately tangible those politics really are.
I wonder- what would happen if our country decided to love our nation-neighbors as ourselves? What if we valued non-American lives as much as American ones? Suddenly we would be genuinely interested Mexico’s economic development and the health care of those citizens that have never even seen a doctor. Canadians might start to like us. And really, it feels reasonable to consider most nations as our physical neighbors. We live on a fairly small planet, you know. It just seems that we spend so much time as Americans talking about how to take care of our own while we blatantly sit in the middle of so much plenty. We love ourselves so much that we mow down developing countries to make our lives just a bit more comfortable. It could be really healthy for us to change our national frame of mind.
In all my idealism, I think I am easily exhausted by our broken little human ways. I think that greed will always make a bigger splash than compassion. I am pretty sure that we couldn’t talk our entire nation into loving others as ourselves, so my idea is probably dead in the water. But it is nice to think about, isn’t it? And we can always start small, friends. We can always start small.
Democracy is a beautiful but imperfect idea. It will never be a gospel answer for the world’s problems, but the design does ring true with Western ideas of the right to reasonable self-governance. The citizens that have chosen to adopt it have found it to be fairly successful. And consistent with the philosophy, it has yet to thrive very well without a core of internal momentum.
We all know that in the end democracy just projects how we treat our neighbor- whether physical or national. That personal decision is the one that dictates how we vote. The more the conversations fly around on cable television, the easier it is to forget how immediately tangible those politics really are.
I wonder- what would happen if our country decided to love our nation-neighbors as ourselves? What if we valued non-American lives as much as American ones? Suddenly we would be genuinely interested Mexico’s economic development and the health care of those citizens that have never even seen a doctor. Canadians might start to like us. And really, it feels reasonable to consider most nations as our physical neighbors. We live on a fairly small planet, you know. It just seems that we spend so much time as Americans talking about how to take care of our own while we blatantly sit in the middle of so much plenty. We love ourselves so much that we mow down developing countries to make our lives just a bit more comfortable. It could be really healthy for us to change our national frame of mind.
In all my idealism, I think I am easily exhausted by our broken little human ways. I think that greed will always make a bigger splash than compassion. I am pretty sure that we couldn’t talk our entire nation into loving others as ourselves, so my idea is probably dead in the water. But it is nice to think about, isn’t it? And we can always start small, friends. We can always start small.
posted by Erin 11:48 PM
2 Comments:
Erin, if you ever start a movement, sign me up!
That's a great response from Heather. I'll second that.:-)
When I took a class in adult development, I was really taken with the various models of psychological and moral development - Piaget, Erik Erikson, William Perry, Carol Gilligan, etc. But what emerged from all of them is that the majority of people don't reach the level of "development" ascribed to people like Gandhi. A lot of us remain at the "we-right-good/other-wrong-bad" sort of adolescent stage - the sentiment that can easily get stirred up along with patriotism. According to those theorists - and I should read up to see what people are thinking about it now because that was ten years ago - it's a big leap from conventional, balck-and-white to more relativistic thinking that many never make. I don't know - those models struck me as pessimistic and definitely male-biased. I'd rather believe the human race is capable of more. But "We: Right. Good, Other: Wrong, Bad." - I'd like to get that printed on a t-shirt.
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