April/May 2008
Moving Immense Possibilities Into the World
Jeff Golden
How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and
Restore America’s Original Vision
Thom Hartmann
Beyond the New Deal
Howard Zinn
Democratizing Capital
Sherle R. Schwenninger
If We Want to Survive the Climate Crisis We Must Change
Bill McKibben
A Green Corps
Bill McKibben
Moving in Harmonious Relationship With
Our Environment
Angelika Thusius
Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic
Dr. Bruce E. Levine
Numbing Attractions
Peter Moore
Mediation Works: A Center for Community Dispute Resolution
Jody Woodruff
Liberation: An Interview with Mukti
Margaret Brownlie
The Feminine Face of Awakening
Rita Robinson, M.A.
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
Moving Immense Possibilities Into the World
by Jeff Golden
As I write this, Barack Obama is speaking in an overflowing Medford, Oregon gym. He is thrilling the crowd, as he has crowds all over the country, with the music and lyrics of change. Mainstream politics hasn’t moved so many people since at least the final days of Robert F. Kennedy. We can argue about whether or not Obama’s the real deal, but the power of the thirst for change into which he’s tapped is clear as it can be.
It’s equally clear that wanting change isn’t enough to make it happen. You may remember Howard Beale, the raging anchorman in the 1976 film Network, who described a nation gone desperately wrong and told people to throw open their windows and scream out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Thousands of his fictional viewers did, and tens of millions of us left theatres ready to sign up. That was thirty-two years ago. Think how much more we’ve taken since then. It turns out that “not taking it anymore” involves more than screaming that we won’t take it anymore.
I’m not anti-screaming, but I know there are channels for our energy more likely to get us what we want. I want you to know about one that’s emerging under the name Immense Possibilities Radio (IPR). To connect it back to the messages of Barack Obama and Howard Beale, let me ask and try to answer a series of questions. IPR will be waiting for us at the end.
What, first of all, are we mad as hell about? A political system that promises so much and delivers so little, that sucks us in every four years like Lucy holding the football in place for Charlie Brown, that puts and keeps in power people who consistently take us where we don’t want to go.
Why do we continue to elect people who take us where we don’t want to go? There are plenty of answers to this one, beginning with: maybe we don’t. Astonishingly enough, we’re tolerating a national voting system so flaky that nobody will ever know if the man in the White House since 2001 was actually elected president. Another answer points to the kind of information we get from mainstream media—a hundred stories about $400 haircuts or angry black Chicago preachers for every story comparing the candidates’ health care or climate change plans. Our voting decisions can only be as solid as this information. A larger answer is the brazen system of bribery that we call campaign financing, which simply astonishes the other relatively democratic countries of the world.
These are powerful reasons. They are also excuses. The field of candidates in most elections already includes people who aren’t for sale to the highest bidder. There are Internet, broadcast and print media who cover them and report on what’s actually going on in the world. Some of these have never run a single story on Brittney Spears. The modern corruption of American politics makes quality citizenship harder, true, but in the end we vote for what we don’t actually want—even when, as during the recent primary seasons, there are plenty of choices—because we don’t pay enough attention. We don’t invest the effort needed to reach beyond network newscasts and the headlines of the nearest newspaper for information that is not filtered and approved by corporate America.
If we’re not willing to do that, and to take action based on what we learn, the changes we claim to want will never happen. Barack Obama is one of many candidates who carry that message. Obama ended his Medford speech by saying that great things “can happen when you set the agenda. When democracy works the way it should. It requires you to be involved. It’s not enough just to vote … you and I together, we can change the country and change the world!”
Words like those have become political boiler-plate, so clichéd that they can blow right by us. But the cold fact is that a President Obama (or anyone you’d rather plant in the Oval Office) would be stopped cold by entrenched political forces unless millions of us claim an active citizen role between elections. We’ll start getting what we want from elected representatives when and only when 1) they know clearly what that is and 2) there’s more political danger in ignoring us than their big contributors. That’s not how it happens now, because we’re so easily placated by lip-service to American values, or distracted by cynical red-meat issues like flag burning or gay marriage.
It’s delusional to expect good leadership without good citizenship. Good citizenship isn’t about opening our windows to scream about how mad we are. It’s about getting reasonably informed on issues we care about, finding others who share our viewpoints (an easy task online), joining with them to deliver clear expectations to elect representatives and holding those public servants accountable for what they deliver. The tools to do that are already in place: letters, phone calls, visits to Capitol Hill, organized presentations at Town Hall meetings. Anyone who says those can’t work should ask a Congressional staffer how his or her boss reacts after receiving as few as one to two hundred personally-written letters that carry the same message. That’s not to say that elected representatives always follow through; they often assume that if they ignore us long enough, we’ll go away. They’re usually right.
Okay, why do we go away? And why don’t we pay enough attention to what’s going on in the first place? Another cluster of answers pop up, starting with the withering of public education. Most of us can remember when citizenship was one of our highest imparted values. No one graduated my high school without passing a course called Problems of Democracy, which sounds like a quaint relic in the barebones factory-classroom era of No Child Left Behind. A more obvious reason is how overwhelmed by daily life most people feel: I have to become a more active citizen? Read more material? Join another group? Start going to meetings? Right, I’m sure going to do that.
But saying we’re too busy is just another way of saying that citizenship doesn’t matter to us as much as all the other things we’re doing. So what would it take for citizenship to matter more than it does? Some say it has to seem more directly relevant to our daily concerns, the ones that keep us up at night and wake us up in the morning. I’m not so sure. My guess is that most people already know at some level of consciousness that three trillion dollars spent in Iraq is three trillion dollars we won’t have for health care, libraries, roads, education and job development that could ease their lives. Citizenship doesn’t need more relevance as much as it does more energy. People won’t suddenly step up to citizenship because they “should.” But what if they can sense that engaging with others in civic life could make their lives more vital, more meaningful, even—we can say it—more fun?
What’s likely to make that happen? Not logical persuasion, not shoulds, and not civics lessons. Much more powerful is the inspiration of pure human energy. Anyone who remembers the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally knows how this works. After Meg Ryan’s character finishes her ear-shattering fake orgasm in a café, a middle-aged woman nearby tells the waiter “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Most people want what animated, dynamic people they see around them are having. Shining light on people who are stepping up to engagement and civic responsibility with obvious pleasure may be the best way to transform people—in Buckminster Fuller’s phrase—from passengers to crew on Spaceship Earth.
What’s the best way to shine that light? There are more than one, but I’m picking talk radio, in a new multi-media form that takes the name Immense Possibilities Radio (I told you we’d get there). Talk radio’s power is hard to match and harder to explain. It has fascinated mass audiences almost since the radio tube was invented, back to the times of Aimee Semple McPherson and Father Coughlin, who came out of nowhere to deeply move millions of people. Today, in the midst of countless flashy media choices, talk radio is as popular and influential as it’s ever been.
You might point out that modern talk radio has done more to tear us apart than to build civic community. That’s because most of it has been bent on pulling people towards ideological positions, to rally right- (or left-) thinking people against the Dark Side. The predictability is boring and the enlivening potential of talk radio is squandered.
Immense Possibility Radio is a fresh attempt to break the pattern. The most perfect words I’ve heard to describe IPR’s intention came from the late Reverend Howard Thurman:
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
People who have truly come alive will find healthy ways to work through political differences, and most likely do right by each other and the planet in the bargain.
IPR premiered on March 11 as a video webcast of an interview with author Frances Moore Lappé, a High Priestess of Possibility in the world. You can watch that and subsequent IPR interviews online at www.eq.tv. Through the rest of 2008, IPR plans to extend its signal to satellite and regular broadcast outlets, and to add special features that tap into the audience’s creativity and sense of humor. Two of its foundational principles are to bring together the generations (Elders, Boomers, Gen X and Y-ers, Tweeners, Milleniums) for richer conversations than we’ve been having, and to build common ground among factions that have been at one another’s throats. In a media world dominated by a narrow commercial formula, IPR will flourish only with support from people who share its vision. If you might be one, I invite you to send your email address to ipr@opendoor.com so we can keep you plugged in (addresses will not be shared for any reason).
Jeff Golden hosted Jefferson Public Radio’s talk show The Jefferson Exchange from 1998-2007. Unafraid, his latest book, is an unusual Novel of the Possible, with special meaning for those whose memories include the day that JFK died. Read excerpts at www.unafraidthebook.com. His other books are As If We Were Grownups and Forest Blood.
Jeff Golden
