There is a seductive, almost erotic negativity that is floating around. The Zeitgeist would seem to be in a pretty funk.
How can we understand what is going on and - more importantly - how to get a handle?
I find blogging an interesting and useful tool to try and drill into that chaos of this and that which is my mind and attempt to actually discover useful thoughts. At times it seems like drilling through granite.
The problem is to really do something different, to not just spout opinion, but to try to uncover clues about how we can really go forward, recognizing all that we must about the realities of our world.
I am sympathetic to those who feel discouraged and that political leaders that we work hard to elect seem to lack intelligence, nerve or vision after taking office.
Sometimes it all seems overwhelmingly depressing. I remember a time when I was really at a low. I had worked in numerous campaigns, really in a never-ending campaign, a coalition building effort involving many activists for most of a decade. At some point, instead of working as a political consultant and in the matrix of professional campaign services, I was suddenly driving a cab. This was a personal crash. I had sacrificed a relationship for political involvement. The wounding I felt was so terrible I felt I had been drawn and quartered.
Driving required spending a lot of time in the wee hours of the night, driving people on errands that were obviously very shady and suspicious. It was dangerous. But it was also compelling and I began to feel that there is a sort of rip tide in society that can suck you out to sea to drown, as it were, in funk and negativity. When I think about ending up in this situation again, I feel real fear. That isn't just rhetoric. This is a real environment that many people are caught in every day and through the years. It really is something to fear.
Writing is what got me out of it. I wrote poetry, and journalism about the drug scene that one could witness from behind the wheel. The reality of what you can see in the middle of the night is that the dark night of America's soul is revealed in a grand bargain. Some are ground down like the glass that sparkles in the streets under garish street lamps - in order that others may be raised up.
That grand bargain operates out in the open, but goes unrecognized. Few really understand this and those who do largely think of it as just the way it has always been.
I think what I began to discover is that there is a literary tradition that one can be open to, which is about deeper questioning, deeper perception and the attempt to see things in a truly conscious way.
The problem with much of our political life is that this deeper questioning is pretty much prohibited. This happens, not because anyone thought of doing that, but because there is no time. There is always the next election and the practical matters of getting votes together, doing the GOTV chores, getting deals done quickly so that things can move. People develop a practical mind and quit thinking in deeper terms for the most part.
If you have been studying this for a long time and thinking about it deeply enough, you can readily see that what is causing a great deal of distress in American culture is that the political system is not able to move fast enough.
A good model for taking this thought for a ride is the technology adoption curve. In this way of looking at things, the innovators make something new come about. Early adopters are those who see the need and the value of it immediately or quickly and become involved with it. Others aren't so sure and hang back. But some decide to pick up on a good thing. Then more do. Then, at some point, the larger part of the population gets into it.
Politics really mitigates against innovation. Probably, under most circumstances in the past, one could say this is possibly a good thing. Frivolous innovation might be destructive. One should require an obstacle course for proving the merits.
A factor in slowing down the political system is the confusion sown by those who invest millions of dollars in ensuring that the media do not allow clear and unfettered views of the problems that we face. This is because oil and other industries want to hold onto what they have and not allow progressive thinking to take hold too fast.
By "political system" I don't necessarily mean just elected officials. In a short form like a blog you don't want to include everything. But to be precise, I think about the people who vote in primaries and those who go to precinct, county and state party conventions.
These people are the most active citizens in the population. One might not agree entirely with all of them, but one cannot wish for a different set of people. They are our neighbors whether they live next door or in another state.
Interestingly, the discussions on Kos could be verbatim echoes of discussions that have been percolating for decades in, around and about the Democratic Party.
What has become clear to me is that there is a huge need for some new method or venue or way of addressing the culture of the Party, so that we can open up a discussion about how to speed up the response of the political system to the way our world is changing. This cannot be done in sound bites.
One hears call for revolution. This is really an emotional response to the fact that revolution is actually in progress in the world and what is needed is a speeded up systemic way of addressing it.
If you stand around at political conventions to check out who all these people are and where they might be coming from, turn off the sound that is all about the immediate agenda, and really look, you see that this whole system seems organized by people who are heedless and narcissistically consumed by their own status seeking.
This is what we get when the systems we have for communicating anything in public are really inadequate to the rising speed at which our issues are hitting us and the complexity of them.
They wouldn't be quite so inadequate if more people were more motivated to overcome this through taking on the challenge to be better communicators and to innovate to overcome the barriers. But everybody isn't a journalism or an English major or a media specialist.
This is in danger of being too abstract and general, but then it can't be too long.
Health care is a good example of a complex issue. A lot of people know something about it, but not necessarily enough. How does a population of generally intelligent people overcome the barriers to lack of expertise and become able to agree to a higher degree on the nature of the problem?
How can progressive people who see a need for reform policies of any sort, get around the fact that among Democratic primary voters, there may only be something like 10 to 20 percent who identify themselves as progressives? Roughly half that in the general voting population?
As I contemplate this not-so-easy question, it seems that the looming problems of our world, globalization without economic equity, corporate power, global warming, Peak Oil, the rise of billions of people in Asian countries who aspire to middle class prosperity, on and on... are not just ordinary issues. They are not separate issues either.
These require stepping up to an unprecedented level of consciousness and intellectual discipline on the part of more people than anyone every contemplated needing to before in the history of the human race.
What is needed is a way to engage the entire American culture in a dialogue about the necessity for throwing off our blinders and facing reality directly.
This has to start with the Democratic Party because it is the vehicle that exists and comprises the heart and soul of the American electorate.
As I contemplate how to begin, I realize there is no easy way forward. Many people who are in my own baby boomer age group are set in their ways and get very argumentative if you suggest that there might be other ways to think about things.
Many people are so conditioned by the culture of protest that they literally cannot think outside that box. And, if you point it out to them that this psychological phenomenon might exist, they see you as trying to undermine what progress is being made.
Talking with people about this tends to bring the immediate reaction that there is no time for this sort of "above our pay grade" thinking. We are referred to the current GOTV program and urged to get with it. People won't answer emails or phone calls if you propose to discuss outside the box thinking.
But starting a new party will only compound the problem. It is human nature that is the issue. This can be observed in the Green Party. The problem is overcoming the tendency to resist new thinking about old problems that is an ancient element of our DNA.
If you think about the fact that arrowheads are useful in dating archeological sites because they changed so little over hundreds and thousands of years, you realize that this aspect of human nature is there because in the past, it meant survival.
This trait may be a survival tactic from the past, but we also can depart from old paths and discover new ways. that is also a part of our DNA.
Through the coming years and decades we really have to call on our ability to promote new thinking in ourselves and others we can engage with.
It has taken decades to create our current situation, but we may not have decades to address it. We have to get the system to move faster.