Community, Integrity, Vision
The three major challenges in American politics today are the triplet deficits of community, integrity and vision.
COMMUNITY in America is in decline: people feel increasing disconnected from their neighbors; groups that could be organized into empowering networks -- workers, customers, interest groups -- are instead herded under corporate, media and government bullhorns; national solidarity is increasingly limited to writing checks to those in need as opposed to directly interacting with them in authentic ways; the once-communal labors of caring, teaching, healing, feeding, sheltering, and serving are becoming evermore bureaucratized and hidden from view; and words like "patriotism" become increasingly out of style, as some businesspersons move their activities overseas and some churches and neighborhoods become satisfied tending only to their own gardens, disengaging from our more difficult, shared needs.
Institutions that depend on INTEGRITY are corrupted by money: Legislatures and administrators meant to depend upon the will of the People alone are corrupted by campaign donations; businesses started to create value for everybody begin to limit their scope to creating value only for customers and then eventually limit their scope more to creating value only for shareholders and then eventually limit their scope even more to creating value for only their elite managers, inventing justification after justification to validate their insatiable appetite for more money; universities that were created as moral communities of shared uplift come to be seen as only tickets to one's private success; and our emotions, vulnerabilities and precious cultural touchstones get endlessly converted by marketers and "public relations" consultants into tools to squeeze more money out of us, creating a national culture whose BS-to-non-BS ratio is becoming untenable.
Lost in the fog, we lack VISION of where to go from here: our political parties are abdicating their responsibility to help point the way towards better days, trading that role in for one of co-producing a 24-hour theater of fear and cultural resentment; our academics must laser-focus on tinier and tinier slices of policy analysis to get ahead; and our time has produced few moral leaders in which to turn for stories of where we came from, where we could go and how we can get there.
But there is hope! Much can change in a generation. If we can address these deficits, we can rise out of our present malaise.
Here are the questions our generation must be asking:
How can we re-build COMMUNITY in America? How do we: come together to make spaces into places again; create participatory counterbalances to corporate and state power; humanize our caring infrastructure; and build programs for national solidarity?
How can we restore INTEGRITY to American institutions? How can we: free politics from the grips of monied interests; return business to the holistic mission of creating value for shareholders *and* customers, workers, communities and the environment; re-moralize universities to their public interest covenant; and restore the sanctity of our personal vulnerabilities and emotions so as to lower the amount of collective BS in our national culture?
How can we find VISION again for America? How can our political parties, intellectuals and moral leaders think broader and more long-term, helping shine light on a direction in which we could again move?
Can we feel part of a national community again? Can we trust in the integrity of each other and our public institutions again? Can we have the vision to know, in part, where we come from, where we could be going and how we get there again?
Yes, yes, and yes...but only if we get to work!