Citizens
An army of informed, intelligent, committed men and women is battle ready.
It’s a threat. It’s over-blown. It’s real. It’s propaganda. It’s hard to grasp.
It’s our world as we experience it: globalization, technological transformations, conflicting ideas.
We have sober responsibilities. Educating both ourselves and the next generation, ensuring environmental sustainability, utilizing new ideas and technologies! And, of course, much more.
While we keep getting side-tracked by the many pressures, dangers, and geographies of our time, we know we should be fighting for a better life for the next generation of people in every part of the world.
Or do we? Do we see each other as so insignificant we can’t believe we are capable, let alone responsible, for hauling sandbags to the river’s edge?
The boy who put his finger in the dyke? A meaningless piece of folklore. As an individual citizen we are truly dwarfed by the reach and force of economic and political power wielded by an elite entrenched in wealth and suffused (perhaps also confused) by a sense of the rightness of their own ambitions, pleasures and lifestyles.
When we try to use social media to communicate, we find ourselves on web-like stages built for performance, not action. As we reach out, we become ever more enmeshed. We fear the spider, only there is no spider lurking on the edge. Only the web itself ensnaring, diminishing our lives.
I believe it is feelings and ideas like this that are our greatest enemy. When, as Yates wrote, “the best lack all conviction”… “and the worse are full of passionate intensity,” we forfeit what is likely the greatest set of opportunities of all history.
We can take back our citizenship. It is right in front of. We have time, we have personal resources and we are anything but alone. Whether we wear red caps or blue, attend temples or libraries, write to friends or strangers, speak with neighbors or foreign, we have common dreams. And new scientific, social and intellectual discoveries have given our dreams the power to transform worlds. My experience in Malta, teaching students from all over the world, revived my enthusiasm for the future and my belief it all possibilities.
We forget how powerful the tools we hold in our hands. Social media can be misused. That is only a sign of their power. We, however, can use them for OUR purposes. They allow us to reach far beyond what was ever before possible, to reach for ideas, for explanations, for friends and allies across the world.
Before us are political and economic platforms that can mobilize a new generation of commitment and purpose. We are the “good people,” and we outnumber those who for greed or ignorance have seized the initiative.
Have we forgotten how to believe in ourselves.