All posts tagged Democratic Party

Dear Van Jones: We Need a Dream Party as well as a Love Army

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When I first heard Van Jones call for the widespread mobilization of a Love Army to stand against Trump’s legions of haters, I was taken aback by the juxtaposition of Love, the life-giving force of pure positive energy in the universe, with Army—a hierarchical human structure organized in the service of war, death and destruction.

I’m still not crazy about the term, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind Jones’ call, especially after reading this excellent interview with him in Rolling Stone.

“Tight around Trump is a little hate army… of very cynical, nasty people who took over our government. We have to build a massive Love Army that can take the country and the government back in a better direction. That is completely doable. Because there’s now many more people wanting to get involved than were trying to get involved a month ago, when it would have mattered. [bitter laughter]

“The problem is not the abundance of people with bad intentions; it’s the superabundance of people with good intentions who don’t know what to do yet.”

Jones suggests we people of good intentions get organized in order to fight back in the service of Love. Impossible to argue with that, and bravo to him and other leaders, from Standing Rock on down the line, to getting right back on the horse after that wild bucking bronco episode otherwise known as the election.

The Army metaphor conjures up a vision of many people coming together in a common cause, carrying out a vision set by the politicians and crafted into an actionable agenda by the generals.

That would be OK if we could trust the politicians to actually represent us. But one thing this election season has made quite clear is the extent to which our political elite has become alienated from the ordinary folks. Bernie Sanders aside, both the Democratic Party and the Republicans showed themselves to be equally tone-deaf to the concerns of masses of Americans in every state who are just barely scraping by in an economy entirely rigged for the rich and powerful.

To use obsolete terms that suddenly seem relevant again, America is host to a huge Third World within its own seemingly First World borders. This has always been the case—ask any denizen of a rural trailer park, a city public housing project, or, for that matter, an Indian reservation.

But now the middle class is slipping into the abyss of poverty too. Between the credit card shysters with their 35% interest rates, the mortgage loan sharks, the exorbitant cost of health care and higher education, the takeover of Main Street by the big box corporations and the steady erosion of working class jobs to other countries and to robots….the middle class is going, going, gone.

Why these folks thought Donald Trump, of all people, might serve their interests, is a puzzle for the historians. It seems mainly to do with the dumbing down of our general populace, raised on reality TV and shoot-em-up video games, trapped in oppressive school systems that discourage creativity, questioning and independent thought, and insulated within conservative communities that fall back on a passive, fatalistic acceptance of “God’s will” that can be easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.

That this is the reality for millions of people in “Third World America” is an outrageous truth that Democrats must bear responsibility for, as well as Republicans. President Obama did his best to be the president of “all Americans,” but with the Republican Congress blocking him at every turn, his hands were largely tied. And even he supported the TTP agreement, another trade deal that embraced globalization without accounting for the harm it might do to working Americans or to the environment.

As Van Jones says in the Rolling Stone interview, both parties sold working Americans down the river—and they’ve been doing it for many, many years, it’s nothing new.

What’s new is the social media technology that enables us to know about it, practically as it’s happening.

Even when we’re talking about Big Espionage operations, like the Russian hacking of the U.S. election, now information that would have been sealed away behind CONFIDENTIAL barriers for years is suddenly rip-roaring through social media channels, totally out of the control of the politicians or the generals.

This can seem scary, but it is also a huge opportunity. If we’re to create a Love Army, it will be a decentralized one, mobilizing from individual communities and operating through household computer networks, connected by telecommunications satellites open to any user with a smartphone.

The elites who developed the technology that is so ubiquitous now did not anticipate it would eventually have the potential to be used in the service of populist goals. Donald Trump, with his simple but effective use of Twitter, is so hard to understand because he’s playing both sides so well: the populist general mobilizing the working class to follow him…while at the same time courting the rich and powerful and promising them total control.

What does “populist” mean in these topsy-turvy times? It means Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump—both of these guys tried to work through established channels, the Elephants and the Mules, to gain the power to remake the country in their image. Bernie might have succeeded if the Democrats hadn’t stupidly shut him out, leaving the field open for Trump and his Russian allies to sweep to victory.

van-jones-fist-in-your-faceBut here comes Van Jones and his Dream Corps with a new definition of “populist” and a new, 21st century vision of how to mobilize a decentralized army in the service of Love.

His reset at the values level starts with national teach-ins, “once a week, every week, standing up for the most vulnerable people: Muslims, the DREAMers, Jewish people, women, trans people, black protestors. And once a week, give the whole country a chance to show a whole lotta love – both to demonstrate and deepen a solidarity with those groups, all under one hashtag. #LoveArmy is an opportunity to reassert at a values level….And it has to be inclusive, by the way, of rural poor people, of people in coal country, red-state and industrial Heartland voters who are also going to be let down by Trump, who are also going to be in a lot of pain.

“If you’re building a Love Army that includes all of the usual suspects that Trump went after and also people that Trump tricked, you start building a majority movement. That’s what I’m trying to do. The people that Trump attacked, but also the people that Trump duped.”

The truth is that the Democrats have not acted with sufficient love either. As Jones puts it baldly, “Both political parties suck right now. The Democratic Party has become a hidey hole for all kinds of elite snobbery, and Democrats won’t confess to it and deal with it. The Republican Party has become a hidey hole for all kinds of bigots, and they won’t confess or deal with it.”

Maybe we are at the point in our Union, almost 250 years on, when another party is needed—a party that is truly in the service of all Americans, and even bigger—in the service of Life everywhere on our planet.

This new party needs to go beyond tribalism to work on behalf of the health and well-being of the entire planet and all its denizens, from the rainforests to the boreal forests, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in-between. We are all connected—we know that know scientifically, and our values, as Jones says, must come from that profound awareness of interbeing.

I would like to see Jones stir up not just an army, but a political party that could advance his inclusive activist vision and mobilize those of us who want peace, prosperity and the happiness and well-being of all. Maybe he should call it the Dream Party.

I’m in, Van! Sign me up!

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 10, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Leadership, love, Politics, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 10, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/12/10/dear-van-jones-we-need-a-dream-party-as-well-as-a-love-army/

What Victory Will Be Ours? Parsing the Personal, Political and Planetary in a Dark American Election Season

With two days to go before the election, the menace represented by Donald Trump and his fanatical followers is hanging over me like a dense cold fog, almost a shroud. Hillary may not be a knight in shining armor, but she’s all that is standing between us and the screaming hordes of misogynist, racist, violent bigots, who have been turning out by the tens of thousands for their orange-skinned leader.

This is a moment when I can palpably feel the personal, political and planetary spheres aligning, not in joy but in fear and awareness of what a Trump win would mean for me personally, for the tattered political system of America, and for our beleaguered planet.

Personally, as a woman of Jewish descent, as a feminist and an eco-feminist at that, I am squarely in the crosshairs of the Trumpist band of haters. Not only that but I married a Mexican, making my sons fair game as well! Yes, I would feel unsafe and threatened in a country that legitimized Trump’s bigotry by making him the leader of the land and commander-in-chief of our oh-so-powerful and oh-so-obedient police and military forces.

Politically, we see Hillary holding the status quo center, standing defiantly with the big banks and the corporations that have been fattening on our sick economy for a long, long time. Trump and Bernie Sanders take their stands in the right and left wings, Trump advocating for deregulation and a survival-of-the-mightiest economy, while Bernie is our modern-day Robin Hood, standing up for the poor and oppressed.

If Bernie had been allowed to finish his race without having his hamstrings cut by the media and the Democratic National Committee, we would have had a much more animated and perhaps even more polarized race. As it is, between the status quo or descending into fascist chaos, well, even many Republicans are going with Hillary, though vowing to tie her up in knots once she wins the White House.

On the planetary level, just check “none of above,” as far as either Trump or Clinton being advocates for the Earth. One will dig, drill and burn—the other will do it even faster and harder. The best we can say for Clinton is that she is a reasonable, rational person; she reads the fine print in policy reports; she is a mediating type who is likely to try to find solutions that please as many people as possible. I can see her pushing the fossil fuel industry to reinvent itself as a clean energy machine, even if I can’t see her standing with water protectors for a photo op.

This election won’t be over when it’s over. If Trump should win, it would send an immediate chill over the land, the gloom of winter shading into the dismal gray of the unhinged fascist capitalism represented by the self-aggrandizing faux-gold chrome of Trump. Remember the palette of the film 1984? That’s what I see coming our way with a Trump win.

If Hillary wins, the Republicans will be united once again through their common hatred of the Clintons, and will stop at nothing to obstruct her presidency.

I am already wondering how it could be legal for the U.S. Senate to refuse to do its job in holding hearings for Supreme Court nominees. Shouldn’t there be a way for the American people to insist that our representatives, whose salaries we pay, do the job we elected them to do?

Whatever happens on Tuesday, life will go on. Next weekend I’ll once again be retreating to the cozy Rookwood Inn to lead a group of women in aligning the personal, political and planetary in their own life stories, through my technique of purposeful memoir. We may linger a bit on the political this time, reflecting on how the political backdrop against which our lives have played out has influenced who we have become.

In fact, politics is more than a backdrop; it’s interwoven into the warp and woof of every minute of our lives. Liberal Americans, the coastal and urban blue types, have long had the privilege of believing that America really stood for “liberty and justice for all.” Our eyes have been steadily opened these past few years, as smartphones and social media have shown us scene after scene of the targeting of the less powerful by the security forces of the elites. Less visible perhaps, but no less damaging is the predatory stranglehold of the finance, chemical, pharmaceutical and military-industrial/fossil fuel complexes on our entire society.

Our immediate task, this week, is to take a strong stand against Trump’s would-be fascist dictatorship by electing Hillary Clinton—the first woman president of the United States!

And then—we need to look hard at the conditions that led to Trump’s insurgency, and start working on the deeper ailments of our society. Why are people so angry and afraid? Why are people so stressed, anxious, unhealthy and unhappy? What can be done to level the playing fields for our young people, eliminating the specter of debt bondage and supporting them as they get a fresh start on the journey of life?

How can we stop trashing our planet and start investing in economies based on renewable energy, permaculture and an awareness of the sacredness of all life? How can we shift our ways of living so that we are united by the solidarity of common purpose, buoyed by energetic hope and optimism in our future?

This past week, I have been reading The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein with my current leadership students. I’ll close with a passage (p. 201) to ponder:

“The best victory, says Sun Tzu, is the one in which the losers don’t realize they have lost. In the old story, we overcome evil and leave our enemies in the dust, wailing and gnashing their teeth. No more. Everyone is coming along for this ride. In the new story, we understand that everyone left behind impoverishes the destination. We see each human being as the possessor of a unique lens upon the world. We wonder, ‘What truth has this man been able to see from his perspective, that is invisible from mine?’”

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 6, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Environment, Politics, Social change, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 6, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/11/06/what-victory-will-be-ours-parsing-the-personal-political-and-planetary-in-a-dark-american-election-season/

Hillary Clinton: Holding the Center in These Complex Transition Times, So We Can Do the Essential Work of Creating a Better World

Like most Bernie Sanders supporters, it was hard for me to watch Hillary Rodham Clinton take the stage on Thursday night to accept the nomination of the Democratic Party, while Bernie sat in the crowd looking on, unable to conceal his exhaustion and dejection.

As Bernie said, there is a winner and a loser to every contest, and he lost this time. But it is impossible to escape the feeling that he could very well have won, if the Democratic establishment had not undermined him at every step, aided and abetted by the establishment media.

What would this election season have looked like, if we had two outliers, Donald and Bernie, duking it out?

We’ll never know, because this time around the center held—the center represented by the centrist Hillary Clinton.

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As Bernie has been saying, it’s clear that his revolution has pushed Hillary to the left. We heard it in her acceptance speech, where she said loud and clear that she stands for free public education for kids from families making $120,000 or less. She said, somewhat less clearly, that she stands for “a living wage,” and for student loan relief. We know that she believes in universal health care. She said over and over again that she will work tirelessly to create more good jobs in America…with “clean energy jobs” a phrase repeated more than once in the speech.

I took away two important impressions from her remarkable convention performance last week.

One, she did a brilliant job at pitching herself as a leader. While she does not have the oratorical gifts of Barack or Michelle Obama, she looked more comfortable on the stage than I’ve ever seen her, and she spoke with a believable conviction about her ideas and vision for the country. She looked fierce and glad and on fire to sweep away that cracked glass ceiling once and for all, and hallelujah for that!

Two, it was clear from her speech that this is a leader who can learn, grow and change. While she has principles and commitments that have never wavered—women’s rights are human rights, for example, or all children deserve quality education and health care—she is also capable of shifting her ideas as she learns more about a given issue. This has earned her a reputation of “shiftiness,” but I am coming to see that as unfair. We want a leader who listens, thinks for herself and lets her opinions evolve.

For example, her stance on the invasion of Iraq, or the TPP treaty: initially she supported both these moves, and now she understands that we were led into Iraq on false premises, and that the TPP is not going to improve the lives of ordinary people—certainly not in the US, and maybe not anywhere in the world.

Seeing her position on these issues evolve over time gives me hope that she will also be the kind of leader who, as Bill McKibben wrote in a recent email to supporters, we can “pressure” to move towards the left of the center space she holds.

Like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton is striving to represent “all Americans,” and let’s admit that that category includes the frackers and the assault weapons enthusiasts as well as the environmentalists and the peaceniks. For a leader, holding the center ground in the midst of such fractious, strong-willed constituencies can be exhausting, especially as you are doomed to fully please no one.

But this is the kind of leader a big, complex democracy like America needs. Someone who can sit calmly in the center of the storm and keep the ship of state moving forward, as President Obama has done despite the obnoxious Republican obstructionism in Congress.

Hillary Clinton has the advantage of being deeply steeped in Congressional politics, as well as gubernatorial politics and international politics—as she reminded us in her convention speech, she is no stranger to public life. Almost twelve years as the wife of the Governor of Arkansas, eight years as First Lady of the United States (and not the kind of first lady who just bakes cookies and chooses china patterns); eight years as Senator of New York; and four years as Secretary of State.

As President Obama said in his own super-moving convention speech, there has never been a candidate as well-prepared as Hillary Rodham Clinton to assume the presidency of the United States.

I believe that she will be an effective leader who will be able to get things done in Congress. It is up to us, her constituents, to let her know loud and clear how we want her to represent us.

That is where the Bernie revolution must get back into gear. We can’t sulk on the sidelines and refuse to vote! Now more than ever we must engage relentlessly with the powers that be, rejoicing in successes (like pushing Wasserman Schultz out of the party leadership) and continuing to let the Democratic Party know that if it wants our votes, it has to walk the walk of its democratic principles.

Hillary is right, “we are stronger together.” The Democratic Convention (unlike the RNC) showed an inspiring range of people coming together—people of all ethnicities and religions, all kinds of people standing together under that big tent to participate in steering our country into safer waters.

I was so glad to hear Hillary say clearly that she intends to work through policy to ensure that the rich, including Wall Street and corporations, start standing with the vast majority of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. Clearly, she has heard Bernie Sanders and his millions of supporters. We will need to hold her to her promises.

Hillary Clinton is a transitional figure between the old guard represented by her husband, among many others, and the new millennial wave represented, someone bizarrely, by that old white guy (and Jewish Democratic Socialist), Bernie Sanders.

We are in the midst of a seismic cultural shift, not just in America but in the world. The era of the global free trade cowboy is coming to an end. The globe has become too small and the Internet connections too penetrating to allow violations of human and environmental rights to be perpetrated with impunity. The TPP is a last gasp of this old regime (and why Obama has been supporting it is beyond me, it’s a serious flaw that I hope he will come to regret).

We are moving into a time when the local truly does become the global; when each of us sitting in our homes is aware of how intricately we are connected, all across the world. Next step, to fully mine these connections for the potential they hold to mobilize each of us to stand up for what we believe in, and join hands with others who share our vision of social and environmental justice, irrespective of archaic artificial boundaries like nationality, ethnicity or religion.

No single leader can do this for us. We need to make it happen ourselves, where we live—and this means in our local, physical communities as well as in our virtual communities online.

The Republicans are mobilizing on their side, and they’ve got a leader they deserve.

In Hillary Clinton, we have a leader who will hold the center for us as we do the essential work of social change, transitioning our global human civilization from a “dominate, exploit and destroy” mentality to a “nurture, connect and prosper” mentality.

Is it an accident that our transitional leader happens to be a woman? I think not.

 

 

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 31, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Politics, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on July 31, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/07/31/hillary-clinton-holding-the-center-in-these-complex-transition-times-so-we-can-do-the-essential-work-of-creating-a-better-world/

Brexit, Trump & Sanders Insist: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. But Who Are We?

When faced with the madness of the world, I often get the impulse to just retreat into my own private little corner and raise the drawbridge—let the world go to hell, just leave me in peace! But of course, no sooner does such a thought manifest than I realize how ridiculous it is: there are no “private little corners” anymore on this crowded planet, we are all as interconnected as a hive of bees, and just as vulnerable to plagues, whether mental or physical.

I’m sure you’re aware that bees have been having all kinds of problems lately, caused by humans overworking them or meddling with their environment through chemicals. In one common scenario, chemically addled bees simply lose their way out in the field, unable to navigate their way back to the hive. Out there alone, even surrounded by flowers, they die.

Today’s very close vote by Britons to leave the European Union seems to me just such an addled choice, driven by xenophobia and the injured feeling of having given up too much for too little in the way of rewards. Sound familiar, Americans?

I don’t know enough about Brexit supporters to be able to analyze their motives—I am sure we will be treated to an earful of punditry on that subject in the days to come. What I do know is that this vote symbolizes—or even actualizes—a dangerous political current that we are facing here in the U.S. as well.

Is it pure coincidence that Donald Trump was in Scotland on the eve of this historic vote for just exactly the kind of political extremism he represents? Am I out of my mind to see shades of conspiracy in this series of events: UK votes to leave the EU… stock markets crash…softening up the US electorate with the fear and crisis Republicans have manipulated so well in the past…allowing the engineering of a Republican presidential win, with Trump or someone else at the helm, maybe Paul Ryan?

Oh, give me my moat and drawbridge should that ever come to pass! And yet I know there would be no moat wide enough to protect me or any of us good-hearted people from the danger such a scenario would represent.

The only way around this is straight through, with full engagement. I am heartened to see the mainstream media beginning to regularly fact-check the inimical Mr. Drumpf and trumpeting the fact of his constant shameless lying. But the general public, particularly of the Republican variety, doesn’t read The New York Times. How can we communicate to them the catastrophe they’d be inviting by allowing the Republican Party to have its way with America? How do you communicate with people who won’t listen to reason?

The latest episode of U.S. Congressional charades—I mean, politics—in which the distinguished Democrats of the U.S. House of Representatives sat defiantly on the floor of the Chamber, phone video feeds flying high, signaled not only these courageous Representatives’ desperation to be heard on the gun control issue, but also the tactics that succeed in our weird, through-the-looking-glass times.

Go ahead, Paul Ryan, you can try to shut down the official cameras that, through C-SPAN, would have informed Americans about this bizarre act of democracy happening in the heart of the U.S. empire. Social media is the new Paul Revere, riding at lightspeed to alert the populace, and it is much harder to shut down.

Of course, both sides are working social media. We on the side of sanity—that is, peace, justice, prosperity for all—must work it harder and smarter. It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment we’re in now. We can’t have a Brexit scenario happening here with the U.S. presidential elections. No. Way.

Here are some questions I wish I didn’t have to ask:

  • Why are we allowing the Republicans to get away with stealing our democracy by not appointing a Supreme Court judge? Would they ever allow Democrats to get away with that, should the situation be reversed, with a Republican president making the appointments? We are we standing by passively and allowing this to play out as they want it to?
  • Why do the Republicans want the general populace of the US to be armed with the most deadly weapons a single human being can carry? When the Second Amendment was enacted, it was because at that time, ordinary citizens would often have to be called upon as spontaneous militia. Is that part of the diabolical Republican playbook now too? Think about that for a moment, you don’t have to use too much imagination to see where that scenario goes….
  • Fear and hate thrive on crisis. Could it be that what the xenophobic, bigoted haters fear most of all is a peaceful, just, prosperous world, where everyone is doing just fine?

They’ll tell you such a new world is impossible, but I know that’s not true.

We humans are blessed with extraordinary intelligence. If we chose to use it for the good of the hive, and each member of the hive, we would thrive and create a global civilization that would rival our greatest utopian dreams.

We are capable of it, and we’ve already envisioned it. We just need collective and individual determination to turn back the tides of hatred, fear, violence and isolation. We need clarity and dedication to work together, locally and globally, to manifest the better world our hearts know is possible.

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Bernie Sanders allowed us to see, in a visceral, lines-around-the-block, stadiums-overflowing kind of way, that there are a lot of us good-hearted people here in America, just waiting for a leader to call us together.

We’ve got to stop waiting.

In our networked, hyperlinked times, we don’t need a single charismatic leader anymore, and that’s what the shining example of Bernie shows us: that each of us can and must pick up where he leaves off, and do what we can—just as he always, his whole life, has done what he could—to remake this world according to a positive vision of social and environmental justice for all.

We can, we must…and we will.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 24, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 24, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/06/24/brexit-trump-sanders-insist-we-are-the-ones-weve-been-waiting-for-but-who-are-we/

The Power of Black and White Thinking or Why I Love Bernie Sanders

Teenagers, it is said, see everything in black and white. Something is wonderful or it’s awful. I hate you or I love you. Part of coming to maturity, common wisdom has it, is learning to see in shades of gray, the glass half-full as well as half-empty.

If that is so, I am amused to note in my middle-aged self a return to black-and-white tendencies. Could it be that part of the socialization that enables us to see in gray is also a schooling in the fine art of compromise and settling for “good-enough”? If so, it seems that I am less and less willing to settle. My standards are high, for myself and others, and I don’t want to aim lower.

What does that mean? Well, take Love, for instance, since Valentine’s Day is nigh. I have learned, over years of trial and error, that the most important relationship we have is with ourselves. No, that doesn’t mean I’m an egotistical navel-gazer. It means that in order for me to give love to others—whether people or causes—I must love myself first. I must believe that what I have to give is important, and worth sharing.

And I really have to love myself completely, warts and all. That’s where the absolute thinking comes in. If I were thinking about myself in shades of gray, I’d be picking apart what I like about myself from what I dislike about myself. I’d be doing a daily self-critical dance, castigating myself when I don’t live up to my own expectations.

Here’s what I’ve learned in middle age: doing that dance is a huge drain of time and psychic energy. It’s so much better to say, definitely (and maybe a little defiantly): I know I’m not perfect but I do the best I can and I love myself for trying. I love myself, faults and all, because I know that it’s through failure, hurt and disappointment that I learn to be stronger, better, and more lovable.

How Can We Love Ourselves?

In so many ways it seems that we live in a disposable society. It’s not just diapers and plastic cups we’re throwing away; it’s people and places too. It’s life itself we trash without even noticing. Thinking in black and white, I’d say that’s just not acceptable.

The litany of suffering caused by modern industrial human civilization is long and grievous. You know what I’m talking about, I don’t even have to get into the ugly specifics of species extinctions, animal torture, human-on-human brutality, environmental devastation, disease and anthropogenic famine.

This is the thing: can I know this about human society, my society, and still find it in myself to love us? To love us enough to want to spend my life working to make us better?

I suppose this is why the Christ story has had such a hold on human civilization for so long. Christ died for our sins; he loved us enough to sacrifice himself willingly to remind us to try to live up to a higher expectation of ourselves.

But I am not talking about sacrifice, violence, pain and death, the language of Christianity. I’m talking about love for oneself and everything in the world around us—the language of animism and Buddhism, seeing the world as Gaia, an intricate living organism to be cherished, cultivated and loved deeply and absolutely.

We humans are Gaia’s children. We sprang from her and have been one of her most fabulously successful creations. It is a marker of our success that we are now severely over-populated, to the point where we must either discover new, more harmonious ways to sustain our society, or face species collapse.

I want to believe that we can love ourselves enough to recognize our tremendous potential as a species, and work hard to move ourselves to the next level of awareness.

This is not the time to do the self-castigating dance of “I love me, I love me not.” We need to acknowledge our failures and weaknesses but use them to enhance our awareness of what is good and positive in us. Knowing what we don’t like or want enables us to understand more powerfully what we like and want. That’s the power of black and white thinking.

How Much Do We Love? Revolution vs. Reform

There’s a reason most revolutions in human history have been carried out by young people who have not yet settled into the complacency or despair of “shades of gray” thinking.

Although modern education, in America at least, does its best to indoctrinate children to be compliant and docile, still there are always young people who insist on thinking for themselves and pushing the adults around them to wake up and do what must be done to make the world better. We saw that in the Occupy movement, we’re seeing in now in the Black Lives Matter protests, and, in a very destructive way, we see it in the young jihadists and school shooters who take up arms in violent protest of the way things are.

There’s a reason Bernie Sanders is building such runaway support among young people, and among the young-at-heart older folks too. He’s appealing to our idealism—our stubborn belief that we don’t have to compromise, that we can reach towards creating the world that should be, rather than settling for the fallen and corrupted world that is.

When Hillary Clinton says “I know how to compromise and get things done,” that’s shades-of-gray, middle-aged thinking. Barack Obama went into the White House repeating that refrain, and tried repeatedly in his early years as President to reach out to Republicans for compromise. He has been resoundingly rejected—the Republicans, school-boys that they are, insist on seeing the world in black and white, their way or the highway.

Maybe it’s time for the Democrats to do the same. Maybe it’s time for us to love and believe in ourselves enough to allow our own brand of black-and-white thinking free rein. Bernie Sanders, with his uncompromising social justice platform, his refusal to play the usual political PAC money game, his defiant, teenage idealism packaged in an unlikely middle-aged body, is showing us the way.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 12, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 12, 2016

https://bethechange2012.com/2016/02/12/the-power-of-black-and-white-thinking-or-why-i-love-bernie-sanders/

Swept Away

There are times when I wish I had the skills to be a political cartoonist, and this is one of those times.

I am imagining a huge hurricane bearing down on the huddles of Republicans and Democrats, each hunched in conspiratorial circles around their own little campfires, plotting away about TV ads and televised speeches, while the lightening sears the electrical grid, huge ships get washed up on the streets of coastal cities, and homes are blasted and flattened. Those crazy strategists don’t even look up until the pouring rain puts out their fire, and by then the storm is on them and it’s too late to run and there’s nowhere to hide.

Reading the latest political blog from The New York Times “Caucus” column makes me feel sick.

Here comes a storm that may cost lives and billions in property damage, and all the brightest minds in Washington DC can think about is how best to play it politically?

If that is the way all threats to our wellbeing are treated by our politicians, it is no wonder that we’re in such trouble today.

I expect better from the Democrats, but as so many of my readers have insisted vociferously lately, maybe I need to take off my rose-colored glasses and see my party for what it is.

Just another political party whose main goal and raison d’etre is simply Power.  Politicians who try to play by more humanitarian rules don’t seem to get too far in Washington.  Once they get into the clutches of the political strategists, their lives and minds are not their own.

There must be another way.

I can take off my rose-colored glasses as regards what we have now, the players currently on the ground.  But I refuse to let go of my hope that the system can be better.

True, the Marxist experiment has not worked, and nothing has come along to offer another vision of a more ideal socio-political-economic system.

But there are some interesting ideas brewing on the margins now.  The Living Economies movement, the Green Party agenda, the whole ethos of sustainability as opposed to limitless growth.

Maybe the real end to that cartoon strip I’m imagining is what happens the day after the storm.

The Republicans and Democrats are standing on soapboxes making speeches about how much they care about the damage, but no one is listening to them. People are going about the business of clean-up with determination and good cheer, and it’s quite clear that they have no use at all for the out-of-touch pols.

Yes, those elected officials do control the purse strings of “disaster relief.”   But that’s our money they’re parsing out!  Our tax dollars, far too much of which goes to blowing things up in the military, rather than in constructing a solid, sustainable economy.

The question I am mulling over this morning is, what will it take to achieve fundamental political changes in our country?   Can we do it by reform, or is it going to take all out revolution?

Or will Mother Earth do it for us, sweeping it all away to make way for a new epoch?

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 28, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/28/swept-away/

American insanity

I admit to a feeling of dejection at being back in the USA again.

Same old callous attitude towards women vomiting out of the Republican Party (“legitimate rape,” my ass!).  Same old desperate pleas for money from the Democrats, who are forced to beg for funds from small fry like me to try to compete with the billionaire Republican funders.  Same old blithe disconnect between the reality of climate change (drought, anyone?) and the steady roar of the fracking drills in Pennsylvania and the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.  Shrimp and fish turning up grotesquely deformed by tumors, eyeless and burned, for hundreds of miles around the BP spill.  Whatever.

Not that things were paradise in Canada.  The crash of the fish populations there is alarming, and they too are involved in the dirtiest of business in the Alberta boreal forest (which I refuse to call by the euphemism “tar sands,” implying as it does that there’s nothing there worth saving).  They clearcut forests and pollute rivers and all the rest of it.

But from just a few weeks of tuning into the media there, I can tell that there is much more clarity and focus there on environmental issues.  Every single issue of the Halifax Chronicle Herald has at least one article, and usually several, about energy or agricultural or fishery policy in relation to climate change.  They are actually working towards meeting the goal they set for themselves of generating 15% of the nation’s energy needs by renewable means by 2020, and many are calling for a more ambitious target.

Coming across the land bridge into Nova Scotia one is now greeted by a newly erected forest of huge wind turbines, and there are water turbines churning in the nearby waters of the Bay of Fundy, too.  Many more are in the works.

Although there is political strife in Canada, such as has boiled up in Quebec in recent months, there is none of the viperous, self-destructive attack politics that goes by the bland name of “the election year cycle” here in the States.  Politicians campaign on the issues rather than on smearing and sniping at each other. Voter turnout is about 60%, as compared to the dismal 40% in the U.S.

Why do so many people feel disengaged, disillusioned, and disgusted with politics here in the U.S.?  Why do we feel like no matter how we vote, our values will not be reflected in Washington?

Because it’s true.

I happen to believe that Barack Obama shares my values.  I believe he is a genuinely caring, ethical man who sincerely wants to create a country in which politicians collaborate rather than backstab each other; in which government and corporations serve the public good; in which the goal of economic activity is raising all boats, rather than creating a few luxury liners for the richest 1% of Americans.  I believe he’s a good man.

And yet, he has been unable to make a dent in politics as usual in Washington.  The Republicans have shown repeatedly that they are the party of the wealthy boardrooms of Big Business and Big Finance, and since they own so much of the news media, and so many think tanks, and so many political seats, including Supreme Court seats, well, they can do as they wish and everyone else be damned.

I have noticed a certain grim set to Obama’s jaw in the last year, as the reality of his fly-in-the-web position has sunk in.  He knows that even if he wins re-election, he will be foiled at every turn.  And it doesn’t help that it’s getting harder and harder for him to inspire his base—people like me who are beyond frustrated with the status quo, and no longer believe he and his team can make a change.

When I get those daily emails from Democratic headquarters pressing me to donate to the campaign (just $12!), and then I hear about how the Koch brothers are donating millions to the Romney campaign, the little sprout of hope that springs eternal in me just starts to wither.

Yes, if 100 million Americans donated $12 to Obama it would make a big difference.  But frankly I would rather see some savvy crowdsourcing through social media, with the goal less raising money to burn up on TV than getting more people out to the polls on election day, and empowering ordinary Americans to rise up and insist on real representation in Washington.

I am not interested in betting on the horse race.  I can’t sanction the wasteful spending of huge sums on campaigning, while our planet burns and billions of people are locked in poverty.

Romney will be bad—very, very bad—for the health of the environment and all living things, including humans.

He, and all the slimy bastards who prop him up, must be defeated.

But this battle is about much more than just one country’s Presidential race.  It’s about our future on this planet.  A vote for Romney is a vote for business as usual, and then some—drill, baby, drill.

Why is it that so many Americans are so suicidal?

Maybe we need some collective social therapy more than anything else.

It really does seem that as a nation, we are insane.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 24, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Media analysis, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on August 24, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/08/24/american-insanity/

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