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by Paul Ballard
January 1, 2013
New Year’s is for setting hopes, challenges and resolutions for the future. We do this for ourselves and our families. But we can also do so for our society and our world, and what we can give them.
In recent weeks several events have affected my views considerably. Hurricane Sandy was a violent and painful wake-up call that our highly affluent society is nevertheless vulnerable to natural forces beyond our control. We need to stand together as a community to handle them. Over Christmas, as I was enjoying turkey and ‘pancit’ and a host of wines and delicacies, I heard about Mary’s Meals. It’s a small successful charity started online by Martha, a ten year old girl in Scotland. Mary’s Meals raises money to feed poor children as an incentive to go to school in Malawi in Africa and other developing countries across the world. One of my favorite charities – “Médecins Sans Frontières” (MSF) [Doctors Without Borders] helps desperately poor people living in conflict torn regions such as Congo, Burma, Haiti. MSF sends highly trained Western doctors to assist, treating the wounded, distributing medicines against malaria and tuberculosis. A man in Washington D.C. became a wealthy and successful lawyer after receiving a publicly funded education. He decided to give back by financing a poor teenager from high-school through college and to graduate school. Sandy, Mary’s Meals, MSF, and the D.C. philanthropist all tell me we need to reach beyond ourselves and our own lives to enrich our world and make it a better place for our children in future.
Looking back over the past decades, I now see that things with the most life-changing effects on me and my family, and the world we live in today, never figured in my New Year’s resolutions. This was chiefly because I did not anticipate them. Also it was because I never saw myself bringing them about, even though, as a member of our society, I played a role, albeit a small one. The information technology revolution, especially the rise of the Internet, has radically changed how most of us work, communicate with each other and live. Globalization and faster, cheaper global transportation and supply chains, have transformed our wages and jobs, making access to higher education and high-tech skills all the more important for our future prosperity.
As I see it, we live in a more rapidly changing world today. But it is a world we only partially and incompletely understand. So broader changes quietly occurring in our midst will have more far reaching consequences for our and our children’s futures than specific circumstances in our own lives. These forces include such things as climate change, healthcare reform (or the lack of it), access to higher education (or the lack of it!), technological innovation, globalization of investment and jobs, the rise of new global powers, world population growth and world poverty. Some or all of them will have more impact on our lives long term, in terms of where geographically we live and work, what work we do and with whom, and our individual prosperity, comfort, security and happiness.
How well our society manages change in these and other areas will depend upon our collective openness to embracing change itself. Our ability as a community to come together and agree a positive, forward-oriented way ahead is crucial. This even if it means shaking off old habits, old prejudices and old ways of doing business. This even if it means challenging and pushing back against today’s vested interests by talking truth to power. But ‘vested interest’ is not in reality a four letter word. We are all, in different ways, part of today’s ‘vested interests’. So, we have to challenge and push back against ourselves to move ahead individually and collectively. And that’s why we set ourselves New Year’s resolutions, isn’t it ? It’s to challenge ourselves to change in order to achieve our most important goals.
Yet, despite the pressing challenges, our society at times like now seems politically unable to come together to address them. Even the relatively straightforward problem of the Fiscal Cliff appears to be beyond reach of a solution for our political leaders.
So how can we help change our society so it can take up the challenges we face? And what can we as individuals do to move things along?
I got some ideas:
1) Commit to listening to and working with other folks whose views we do not share. An old friend of mine liked to say “Never criticize or condemn someone else’s views, until you have walked a hundred miles in his or her shoes.”
2) Commit to ensuring community decisions made on our behalf by our governments and elected officials are based truly upon the popular will, and not distorted or held back by the power of today’s vested interests. For decades both our political parties have used redistricting of U.S. House constituencies to reinforce the power of their incumbents, through gerrymandering. As a result, today the party controlling the U.S. House won much less total popular votes than the minority party. This means our political representatives listen less to us than to powerful moneyed interests such as big corporations and big unions. We could all join others who have formed movements in states – like California – to call for creation of independent, non-partisan redistricting commissions.
3) Commit time to learning about the facts underlying major issues – so we don’t allow the media, pundits, politicians and vested interests to get away with distorted visions of the future. For instance, the shale oil and gas revolution right now in the USA will certainly help our economy in the next ten to twenty years. But it will not reduce energy prices, nor will it help address climate change long term.
4) Have courage and take time to participate – even if it is only to blog, or use comments in online newspapers to get across our views. Better still, we could work with others to help catalyze changes through volunteer organizations in our local communities.
5) Stop to ask why and to question received wisdom, rather than simply accepting as given those easy politically correct versions of reality we hear everyday. For instance : ~ What if Iran didn’t want a nuclear capability to attack the US, Israel or Europe – but to defend itself as a Shia Islam nation from the rising tide of conflict with Sunni Islam? ~ What if Israel – despite the best intentions of many but not all Israelis – were not a pluralistic democracy (like the USA) and was led by factions using weapons supplied by us to conquer more land without wanting peace? ~ What if the most important problem with healthcare in America today was not who pays for it – private individuals or the government – but how to reduce its cost through new approaches to organizing the private healthcare market? What if allowing four or five oligopoly telecoms companies to close off their infrastructure to competition simply pushed up prices without building out the nation’s broadband network? We must be prepared to ask politically incorrect or initially shocking questions, to understand our changing world as it is today.
6) Ask of our political leaders and politicians that they eschew extreme politics of no-compromise in favor of comity and working together for the good of all. In that great Christmas movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, we all know Santa Claus – aka Kris Kringle – pushes Macy’s to help people by sending customers to Gimbel’s if they don’t have what the customer wants. Why not expect our politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties to start doing the same on policy ideas? If we demand bipartisanship of ourselves, we should expect it of our leaders too! Eternally fighting each issue to death without resolving it may serve partisan vested interests. But it can never further our public interest as a community.
7) Get serious about taking the power of money out of our politics, by challenging its nefarious effects through our own activism and participation.
As for me, in my own small way, I am setting myself the goal for 2013 of doing more in these seven areas, working with others as best I can. I invite you all to join me, because I am sure we will get more done if we do it together.
Happy New Year!