what I want in the world.

We are in an era where political participation is equated with a consumer-like choice between comparable products.  Different features are minor, and brand preference is most likely what motivates consumption.

How did civil society become reduced to a notion of the “freedom” to participate in a marketplace with extremely limited choice?  Since when did the marketplace of politics become so severely restricted? What happened to a bazaar of goods, where not only are different products hocked in the darker regions of the sale, there are also different approaches, different styles, different sales techniques?

I am not a fan of consumer choice being our only political weapon for change.  For one, it seems to result in a very simplistic dumbing down of politics. Either we take the national brand version of politics: the voting for the status quo, with tiny fringe improvements on the edges of a product that has been repackaged in such a way as to appear as markably different, when in fact the box size has been reduced and the ink colours merely updated; or the alternative, the local store brand, with limited creative license applied to the product and a cheaper, lessened quality feel in the hand.  I am tired of this analogy, I am tired of this limited option, and I am tired of feeling disempowered by the political process that thrives on political alienation of the masses.

So how to bring about change?  When all we want is change, have we really ever considered what we want to change it all to become?

I want, at the root, the following basic scenario:

• happy people doing things that they enjoy.
  • A decrease in struggling. struggling to conform, to economically make ends meet, to fit in, to decide, to gather what we need to get the first two items. This requires a wholehearted approach to the success of society based on the acceptance (not tolerance) of all.  I am not certain what is the best way to go about this, but community education seems like the only reasonable approach.  Perhaps provocative marketing of acceptance is what is needed to jar people into compliance, where their own struggles are seen in context of others’.
  • An increase in economic equality. for far too long, it is generally accepted that there are only two paradigms- the success of the individual to the detriment of the society, or the decline of the individual to the rising up of the society.  Economic equality does not inherently mean that the individual must suffer.  However, societal improvements in economic equality require that we must re-envision what it means to be successful economically on an individual/family-based/community-based unit level.  Are there primative, animal-based lessons to learn from?  Or, rather, is it that fields of poppies instinctively tell us that the ecosystem believes conformity and unification are the only ways for the multiple individual units to thrive?  This is a delicate balance.  Greed, certainly, maintains the inbalance.
  • An increase in thought.  2000 years of Plato’s words and still we have a problem with the mass understanding of what it means to consider how to make improvements in each others’ lives.  This satisfies me to no end, and yet I am relieved that we have come at least this far.

I know, these are pie-in-the-sky, loopy lefty arguments.  I don’t really know what to document next.  When drilled for an answer to what is the ultimate next step, I don’t have one.  In power, I don’t know what my first approaches would be.  Certainly, there is a problem here, where we can isolate the problems but not draft the solutions, or at least, manageable, workable solutions.

I want manageable, workable solutions.  These are sellable to the people who travel with me home, to work, to school, to their food.  These are sellable to the people who have doubts about the whole change process.  So what are those solutions?

I am searching every day.