I miss the unafraid, generosity of spirit, the optimism and enthusiasm of the JFK era.
JFK wasn't just a leader, but was arguably one of the the smartest, most alive, most articulate, humorous and progressive thinker that American politics has yet managed to produce. Many of his observations still ring true and many of his jokes are still funny.
I was in the sixth grade in Waco, Tx and chiefly remember spending the next several days out of school and with the images on television. I'll never forget that drumbeat echoing, echoing, echoing down the years.
I wonder if the Occupy movement, at a deeper level isn't at least symbolically, the American consciousness trying to wake up after fifty plus years of brain trauma. We The People remembering who we are.
A friend called a while ago, and we got into a conversation about all this. I am always intriqued and chagrined to hear someone saying that democracy is no longer in effect and that Wall Street and the big international banking congolmerates are in complete control of the entire political process.
Is that really true? What does that mean when you break it down?
I have been involved in local politics in several states over the years in diverse places such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Washington State. I have lived in the midwest, visited in the Deep South, New England and California.
My greatest conclusion is that the more we are consumers interested in being entertained, the less we are citizens.
Human beings, Americans first, really became enmeshed in a mass manufactured dream life that became a whole mind-encompassing reality beginning about the 1950s.
Those images on the TV set really could have produced a national sense of PTSD on a deeper, psychoanalytical level, especially when combined with all of the traumas of the 60s and later.
I think those of us who are progressive in our outlook have a tendency to be caught up in literature, the world of ideas, thinking and taking in the wider world. We look for innovations that can take the whole long trajectory of human history in better directions.
I think when Kennedy was shot, then Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy we were shocked to the core. These were some of the most forward thinking best minds of our time, possibly any time. I think the yellow caution flag went out in a big way.
We all became more cautious.
We criticize our leaders, Democrats in Congress and the President. But we little reflect on ourselves in relation to more local, less headlined average people and circumstances. These are the people who decide, after all, who the candidates will be and who wins the primaries. The whole discussion around policy begins with the process of deliberating platform planks at the local level.
We The People have elected cautious, even timid leaders over the years time and again and not just at the level that shows up in the spotlight. The average Democratic group in any locality tends to support pragmatism and caution because it has proven realistic.
TV commercials became the center of all campaign efforts in the decade or so after Kennedy. This is because technology afforded an efficient use of money and the system was structured around it. This was not anybody's conscious decision, it was built of highly pragmatic details like how to build better databases. The decision making about the message became something less and less shared beyond a circle of practiced experts.
As a default, without anybody analyzing this, the system became more dollar intensive and less citizenship intensive. It also became pragmatically centered around the prerogatives of money, gradually, very gradually over years and decades.
Now we begin to wake up and realize that the mass manufactured consumer society illusion we were happy in has turned into a nightmare without the moral imperative that America was founded on. Lincoln, as President/lawyer/poet contractualized this as "government for the people, by the people and of the people."
Come to think of it, he was assassinated, too. Not a great correlation this, between great minds and bullets. Should this inspire further caution? Or greater courage? Should we avert our eyes or look more keenly?
We recently moved from New Mexico to Washington State, an hour north of Seattle. We opted to not have cable and are without a TV. On the edge of the ocean, on the boundary between humanity and nature, this seems a good departure.
I think We The People need to re-occupy our own minds and re-occupy our own role as citizens.
If Wall Street and Big Money has too much power, it is largely because We The People gave it up so we could be We The Consumers. That is a state of mind we have gradually lulled ourselves into as we avoided the pain from all the assaults on our ego from how big and fast and complex our world is.
We need to re-occupy the space we left vacant, waking up from all the brain traumas we have suffered over the past half century and the mass manufactured dreams that Madison Avenue and Wall Street have been projecting just to create an atmosphere conducive to buying stuff.
We have to occupy the future.