After my last essay about the need for people to start acting several people asked where to start. If there was any common thread running through what some people asked is what that they felt isolated or that in the words of one commenter, doing something might not have any results.
Many, many years ago there was a book called Bowling Alone that chastised this generation (and I include myself in this) for its lack of civic engagement. My son, who spent a year with Americorps and then time working with the homeless, took much offense at this saying the author did not know what he was talking about since he completely overlooked the importance of the Internet and other electronic networking.
Curiously I took a few of the same hits for my comments about Twitter and Facebook. My son sees these as great tools for political organizing and networking. He does have a point when he says without such social networking Barack Obama would not be President.
Perhaps now you can see where this is heading. But first a side trip for a bit of a historical parallel. Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, sees the end of the nineteenth century as the golden age of civic engagement, which if you use his criteria it was. Just look at something as simple as Presidential election turnout. According to Census Bureau figures, Putnam’s golden years witnessed the highest percentage of voters in Presidential elections in history.
A Bit of History
The numbers don’t lie. In 1896 an astounding 79.3% of eligible voters cast their ballots, a figure exceeded only by the 79.4% in 1880 and the 81.8% in 1876 and the 81.2% who voted in perhaps the most pivotal election in our history–the 1860 contest. These numbers come from table 27-78 in volume Y of the bicentennial edition of the Statistical Abstracts, which I have been spending a great deal of time with lately.
Besides the various community groups, I believe much of this was also spurred by the birth of the modern mass media. William Jennings Bryan was the first politician to truly take advantage of this. Long before most politicians recognized the power of the media, Bryan founded The Commoner in 1901, which at the height of its popularity boasted 145,000 subscribers, a readership larger than all but a handful of other political publications of its time.
Not until the age of blogging would another candidate follow Bryan’s lead. His brother Charles and wife Mary built a campaign organization that would be the envy of any contemporary candidate, using meticulous records organized into a card file that by 1912 had half a million names they had culled from Commoner subscriber lists and every letter Bryan received, each entry noting key information about that person. In the 1908 campaign, Charles used this list to send 6,000 letters to Bryan supporters.
The Potential of the New Media
My son’s theory is that the new social media offer the potential to create the equivalent of the Populist and other movements of the late nineteenth century. Barack Obama saw the potential of those tools, but now it is time for the grassroots to start using them.
So the first answer to where do I start doing something is use your networks. I would love to see this post spawn thousands of tweets and Facebook messages that have people asking each other about getting involved. If you throw the question out to enough people sooner or later you will find a connection. And out of connections grow movements.
If everyone who reads this would tweet and/or Facebook message with their friends about doing something about this mess think of what that might do.
The Best Game in Town
Those of you who read my comment to the previous essay will find this repetitious, but in this case repetition is a good thing. I believe the best hope we have is something called Wellstone Action. It was started after the deaths of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, their daughter and the campaign workers who were on the plane with them when it went down in thw woods of northern Minnesota on a cold, rainy day not unlike the one outside my window.
Among other things, Wellstone Action is dedicated to training a generation of political leaders and activists dedicated to taking back our country. At the center of this effort are what are called Camp Wellstones, usually weekend events that teach you how to become an effective advocate, whether for an organization, a cause or as a candidate.
Click on the link above for more information. Then the find out when there will be a Camp Wellstone near you and sign up to attend. Having attended one, I can verify that the networking alone is worth the price of admission (which is the best bargain in town, and as good a weekend as you can spend). You will find people like you and you will find they are as frustrated and angry as you are.
Add those folks to your Facebook and Twitter lists and you have an instant action movement going. That network will spread like a pebble thrown in a pond.
If you don’t want to or can’t attend a Camp Wellstone, think about supporting their efforts in some way or supporting something else like it. Find a local candidate you can support and get behind them at the next election. If you can’t find a candidate find a cause.
A Final Thought
Some commenters made the point that recent attempts to “do something” have often felt like beating your head against a wall. I can’t deny that I have felt that way myself. A common thread uniting the left and the right these days is that both believe larger forces are controlling things and making it impossible for the voices of ordinary people to be heard. The other strain that runs through the no-action rhetoric is that today’s problems are too complex for ordinary citizens to understand, much less act on.
These complex problems have made many people avid consumers of the easy answers of talk radio, Faux television and various so-called political blogs. There rants pass for analysis and rhetoric for reason. That in itself should be a call to action, for even if you feel you do not have the answers–as I often do–you can push for a higher level of discussion than what the media seems to be giving us today. We may not have the answers but we can certainly demand people ask better questions.
There are two other dimensions to action that cannot be ignored. The first is that those who show up get to define the agenda. If you don’t show up then someone else will. If you think the someone else’s running the country, your state, your city, your schools have the answers then by all means stay at home, but I don’t think too many of us believe that today. Polls show approval of elected officials is as low as it has been for quite some time–regardless of party or ideology. Those on the right don’t seem any more satisfied by those who purport to speak for them than those on the left.
The other part of political action is that you do not do it necessarily because you expect it to totally succeed any more than you play basketball in hopes of playing in the NBA. You do it out of commitment and faith. To believe in something is not enough; you need to act on it which is why the founders of some of the world’s religions were both thinkers and doers.
William Jennings Bryan, who is viewed as somewhat a kook today, is a great example. Many people in his own times also thought he was not merely a kook but dangerous. Yet Bryan championed several Constitutional amendments that became law including direct election of Senators, the income tax, and women suffrage. He ran for President three times on platforms that included one or more of those ideas and never won. Most of those causes did not enter the Constitution until after Bryan’s career was all but over.
Would those causes have succeeded had he not supported them–of course–for all those causes were bigger than one man. But the real question is whether or not he helped them to succeed and there the answer has to be affirmative.
I know a lot about lost causes. My grandfather almost died for one, opposing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as a German political leader. He then emigrated to this country and spent the rest of the 1930s trying to convince deaf Americans of Hitler’s madness. In 1943 he warned about what the Russians would do long before Churchill popularized the phrase the Iron Curtain. For that he was censured by other German exiles, warned by the State Department and seen as a potential subversive by the FBI.
I’ve worked for so many political campaigns and issues that I have begun to worry if I am a curse to them because a fair number of them met defeat. But as my friend in Alaska says, you just have to pick yourself up and keep walking or as my son often likes to say, better to walk than crawl on your knees.
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