Over the last three decades, we have watched as people have left the "we" lifestyle and gone to the "me" lifestyle, only to appear to be coming back around to the "we".
What do I mean? Back in the 50’s and 60’s as I was growing up, neighbors helped neighbors, families were close. I am talking of extended families. They held regular family dinners, some more than others, but they faced one another and talked, really talked about the issues of the day.
I can remember the heated debates around the Sunday Dinner Table at Grandpa McBride’s house, where the merits of Eisenhower and Stevenson were expanded on, and people actually voiced their opinions and voted their conscience.
Today there is no neighbor helping neighbor (for the most part), no Sunday Dinners, no face to face debates. Instead we have everyone out for themselves, spending their free time in acts of sin, or setting in front of the boob tube, or online visiting lord knows what. But even when they join an online debate, they won’t use their real names, instead using "Anonymous", which gives no validity to their arguments. This is the "me" lifestyle.
WeDems was created to form a Community of like minded Progressives, a place where they can have their say, a place where they can be themselves online, not having to use "Anonymous". It is the "we" concept I spoke of in the first sentence. WeDems meet for regular meetings (dinners if you will) where they can face one another and talk, really talk about the issues.
I have noticed that "we" or "me" is involved in the Media Wars. Take Yahoo vs Google for example. I love Yahoo. It is user friendly and has sooo much stuff, but for all that its still an old line Media Company in so much, as they control content. They market to get you to come to them. Then they feed you as much advertising as they can, until you leave. That’s the centralized model of media. This is the "me" concept where one person, company or group, controls everything. While with Google, they have a decentralized, distributed model. They go to where you are and put service and advertising there. Your pageview is then their pageview. And they have enabled you to do what you want to do. Wikipedia is another that is of the "we" concept. And we can all do more of it.
But how do we bring "we" to politics instead of the "me" that has prevailed since 1968?
One way of course is the blogs. Those are more of a "we" concept, although many have become so proprietary that they are looking like a "me".
Many are like the dead tree guys. They feel that readers and commenter’s belong to them, that they own us, as does the mainstream media. When you hear CBS, NBC, CNN, or whomever, say that "we control 24% of the market" or that "we own 24% of the viewers", that is contributing to the old "me" paradigm. It doesn’t fit into an open source, free thinking Democracy.
Not only is it almost impossible for anyone to do anything that affects others anymore without it being reported somewhere...it’s now almost impossible to do so and not get feedback on it...and THAT is the natural evolution of democracy, in my opinion.
Someone said that we all dream of owning our own home in the country on 5 acres. But they warned that doing so would make us unhappy, and socially unconnected. Well let me tell you they are NUTS, I grew up on a farm that was 7 miles from town, a mile off the gravel road on top of a bluff. That was about as remote as you can get, and was not unconnected. We had Sunday Dinners with extended family, we had Church on Sunday and Wednesday, we had monthly meetings at the rural one room school house, and we had the monthly trips to town to do shopping, where one could visit with all the other farmers on benches around the town square. We were very connected politically as well. We were involved. We got out and talked up our candidates. We voted and supported the Party.
It wasn’t until I graduated from high school and decided to join the corporate world, moving to progressively larger cities, that I began to feel disconnected from reality. Sure I played the game, the ME game, but when all was said and done what did we have? A title (VP of Operations), a new car, a home that we weren’t satisfied with, and loads of debt. We couldn’t put out a garden, didn’t have time, and couldn’t travel to Grandpa’s for Dinner anymore, too far away, didn’t attend community dances or box suppers because there were none. Instead, we had to contribute to others in the "me" generation. We ate at McDonalds. We went to theatres to see new films. We bought a colored TV, and later we bought ever larger computers. But there was something missing in our lives.
When I had my accident in April, 1997 that disabled me, we were forced to face reality. We couldn’t afford the new car (ours are now 15 and 20 years of age). We couldn’t afford the fancy house (we now live in a 1974 house trailer). We couldn’t afford to go to the show or go out to eat. Our biggest expense, as well as our largest eater of time, became medical. But we noticed that we were happier. We were able to live our old lifestyle from the "we" generation of the 50’s and 60’s. We had room here on the family farm to put in a garden, attend Sunday Dinners at our parents’ houses. We got involved in local politics. We became part of the NEW "We" generation.
When our neighbor is mowing his fields, he sometimes mows ours without asking, and when he has to leave for a month or more, as he does twice a year, we mow his without being asked. When one of us is in the hospital, which happens more frequently of late, the neighbors pitch in and help out.
Robert Putnam wrote a really interesting book, Bowling Alone, about how we Americans are becoming less and less connected to one another.
"Countless studies document the link between society and psyche...People who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors, and supportive co-workers are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping...The single most common finding from a half century's research on the correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections."
Many people would love to have the kind of connections Putnam talks about, yet still find themselves living lives of lonely desperation.
"Families are isolated,"
says Carolyn Cowan, a research psychologist with the UC Berkeley Institute of Human Development. With her husband Philip, Carolyn studied 200 nuclear families and found that up to a third experienced
"tension, conflict, distress and divorce in the early years after the arrival of a first child,"
conditions that thrive in social isolation.
"Increasingly, new families are created far from grandparents, kin, and friends with babies the same age, leaving parents without the support of those who could share their experiences of the ups and downs of parenthood,"
write the Cowans.
"Most modern parents bring babies home to isolated dwellings where their neighbors are strangers."
That is what I call the "me" generation and its report card can be identified by the number of divorces that take place each year. By the sale of anti-depressants that are sold. But again I ask what we can do to reverse the trend. I know that in our Church, it has been suggested that we pray for those less fortunate. Now as a minister I understand the power of prayer, but I am realistic enough to know that God helps those who help themselves (no not in the ME concept). It reminds me of a story I once heard.
There was this new minister who was out driving through the countryside talking to people and introducing himself. As he drove along he noticed that most of the farms and farmers were kind of run down and had that brown-gray look that said poverty, that its owners were having a hard time making ends meet. When suddenly he rounded a bend in the road and saw a beautiful farm, with whitewashed fences, rolling green fields and well kept buildings, he spied a man in the fields with a team of horses working newly planted corn. He pulled to side of the road and walked over and leaned on the fence, in a little while the farmer came around by him and stopped, they exchanged pleasantries, and the minister said "The Lord shore has been good to you, just look at this beautiful and abundant farm." The farmer took off his straw hat and scratched his head, thinking of the thirty years that he had worked to get what he had, when he started his farm looked like all the others around him, then he said, "Yes, yes he has, but you should have seen what it looked like when he had it all to himself."
What this farmer knew is that while the lord may have blessed his farm, it was hard work by him and his family that had created the masterpiece before them. Same with the WeDems community or the Democracy Community. It won’t develop on its own nor will it do so if left up to the Lord, it will require years of hard work. It will require dedication of each and every one of us.
So I ask are you a "me" or a "we"?
Ron McBride
www.wedemocrats.org