(cross-post from Huffington Post)
Sarah Palin should not have mocked Barack Obama for being a community organizer. If anything, tonight’s results proved her wrong. Our new President has given new meaning, and strength to the concept of community organizing. And he has shown us what citizens can do, when given the means to organize towards a cause, that’s greater than themselves.
Tonight I am thinking of the thousands of Obama offices, volunteer networks, and fundraising organizations, along with the sophisticated Internet machine, and the organizing methodology, that went into getting Barack Obama elected. As the signs are coming down, the thank you emails go out, and the temporary offices go back to their original owners, I wonder, is that it? Will we go back to business as usual, each in our homes, going about our private lives?
Or will we use the skills learned during the Obama campaign to mount a national community effort, this time to address the threat of climate change? The last time I checked, we had less than ten years to get our act together. Citizens have a crucial role to play on the conservation end. As someone who has tried for the last year and a half, to curtail my consumerist and energy appetites, I can testify on the difficulty of accomplishing such changes at the individual level. Instead, we need to summon the power of community to help each other.
Tomorrow, after you have come down from your victory high, I urge you to keep alive the citizen spirit that made you pick up the phone, and knock on doors, and put up signs on your lawn. Take that energy and become an organizing force in your community. Start a No Beef Lunch at your kids’ school, or a telecommuting initiative at work, or a volunteer home insulation project in your city . . . The climate cause may not have a face like Barack Obama, but it’s all the more reason to take it on.
[…] видим преди всичко примера на гражданска активност, „защото успешната кампания, проведена под мотото за промяна, даде ново значение и […]
As we take down all the political signs and put up new ones on our lawns, let’s also think of ITS environmental impact. How many trees died to tell me to vote for Barack 29 times and McCain 18 times, how much resource was used in the plastic lawn-signs, metal in its supports, and fumes in their delivery. Is there even a recycling program that encourages people to take these things and dispose of them properly rather than add a layer of a campaign year to your local trash-dump? Are these plastic things made of corn – dyed with organic inks? Is the metal from recycled parts? I tried to search on how much was actually printed, produced, delivered but no info… millions of pounds assumed. So as we knock on doors and put up signs for environmental impact promotion, let’s also think of our own impact in doing so – similar to how nobody carpooled to the Gore event – hypocritical. Let’s just be conscious in our efforts – in all that we do.
Rather than just hear some rants, here are some possible solutions for FUTURE elections or similar promotions:
in small print, advise the person of a website to go to to see how to dispose of it properly – to recycle it at a certain spot. Perhaps the volunteer centers could reclaim these metal posts and such for future elections or re-sell it back to the manufacturer and a portion of the cost. The money can go back to the tax-payers in funding lost programs due to the recession and cuts, etc. The opportunities are there if we’re creative at the onset.
[…] La Marguerite suggests channelling the magic of community organizing seen in the Obama campaign, into tackling climate change. Sarah Palin should not have mocked Barack Obama for being a community organizer. If anything, tonight’s results proved her wrong. Our new President has given new meaning, and strength to the concept of community organizing. And he has shown us what citizens can do, when given the means to organize towards a cause, that’s greater than themselves. […]
Dear Ms. Marguerite,
I love the hope inspired by this post … thank you!
Hope’s a meme that works! We’ve just re-learned how well hope can organize us.
Let’s keep hope alive, let’s self-organize with hope as guidance system.
Barack needs all the good help he can get … so let’s keep on helping him! Let’s exploit the same hopes we’ve helped cultivate via gaining/earning a “presidential election” to help keep hopes for “sustainability” alive and well. Let’s have fun learning how to participate more effectively, more globally/locally to ensure sustainable outcomes = let/may “sustainability” serve as a focal point for “hope” as a self-organizing meme (even tho’ it has no “face” yet).
This opportunity to put President Obama to work … who’s job is that?
That’s such a serious job, I feel the strong need to think outside the proverbial box just to gain a good enough advantage to meet the responsibilities of such a job. So what’s outside the box of “such a serious job”? How about not taking it “too” seriously? … like a game?
Who wants to play games that don’t exist yet?
Who’s got sufficient cognitive surplus to team-up with other good folks to play a serious-game = this opportunity to put President Obama to work on our crucial responsibilities, as both global and U. S. citizens, to ensure “sustainability”?
Since there’s no shortage of good information about “sustainability” out here already, at least one primary opportunity to put Obama to work involves helping him access the most-well organized information as is humanly possible. Why not aim for this as a game?
Assuming the energy of public hope that aligned itself with Obama’s campaign has more substance than we’ve yet realized, how can that esprit of hope be most welcomed to focus on aligning our activities with evolution and actually (i. e., consciously) begin favoring much more sustainable outcomes than the emergency conditions = “less than ten years to get our act together” = we’re actively and collectively and pretty much unconsciously, currently producing for ourselves?
Such games may involve images for participation such as serving as an advisory-team to the recently-appointed captain of a sinking ship or pilot of a ferry-boat that appears to be so dangerously close to the edge of an irreversibly steep and treacherously deep waterfall that it’s likely to go over the edge or whatever …
Anyway, if social-networking overlapping with serious-gaming-platforms can deliver best-in-class information-implementation-designs on sustainable-futures-now to our President-Elect Obama, then such networking-platforms are worth celebrating. What better way to engage in community organizing than throwing a celebration once in while? Let’s party!
I’d love to explore any such possibilities with anyone interested in working/playing to enable the kinds of good information, knowledge, understanding, etc., emerging from the work/play of such folks as Kathia and Alexander Laszlo, to make it onto Barack’s “to do list”. These good folks (and many others, I’m sure) are actively supporting the learning process of “community organizers” by delivering best-in-class learning-resources for sustainable human activity systems:
http://www.syntonyquest.org/who-we-are
Although I’ve never met (I don’t think so, anyhow) either of these good Laszlo folks, I trust the quality of their work/play because of their efforts to further the work of Bela Banathy and also because of their hearty recommendation from Professor Debora Hammond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Béla_H._Bánáthy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Hammond
(I have enjoyed the privilege of conversing with both Debora quite recently and the late, great Bela almost 20 years ago … and the views of both of these folks = these brilliant systems scholars = inspires the kind of hopes that help me keep hope alive … appreciating our human capacity for producing actionable, compassionate intelligence.)
Ciao for now,
paul
[…] видим преди всичко примера на гражданска активност, „защото успешната кампания, проведена под мотото за промяна, даде ново значение и […]
Fantastic post Marguerite !
Would it be possible for President Obama (those two words are very well together, don’t you think ? ^^) to put some of his Internet efforts on fighting climate change ?
I am just visiting change.gov and I am a bit disappointed : why giving a $1000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills ?
This grand per household would be far better in insulation programs in homes. Far better in tax incentives to buy energy efficient appliances and so on…
instead of helping people pay their bills, why not putting this effort in enabling them to cut them firsts. Insulating houses is a one-shot effort…
GreenofaKind, Paul, Edouard, thank you so much for all your suggestions. Love your common sense and enthusiasm!
It seems that our new President-Elect is getting deluged with suggestions from greenies and other folks . . . We all want our voices to be heard. I think that’s great. Most importantly, as pointe buy GreenofaKind, is for us to take action in our own communities, doing whatever comes naturally to us. For me, it is launching a new website for grocery shoppers, soon to come live in a few weeks.
you’re welcome. 🙂
For me it will be releasing in 2009 a series of tips anyone can use to save money while decreasing one’s consumption of electricity, water, heat, energy and so on.
That’s right. 12 steps toward a more sustainable living.
I have been writing it for some time now but never mentioned it anywhere else. So, you heard it here first 🙂
On this, have a great weekend, wherever you find yourselves. 😀
Hi to Edouard, La Marguerite, Paul and Friends,
With the election of Barack Obama, a new day is surely dawning for the family of humanity. We have good reasons to be hopeful. The agonizing throes of the severe and colossal storm we have endured in the past several years have produced an unexpected outcome. The air is being cleansed and the dark clouds that had been gathering on the horizon are being blown away.
Al Gore has reminded all of us that now is the time for intellectual honesty and moral courage as necessary attributes for responding ably to the human-driven global challenges which are looming ominously before humankind. As the horrendous, once in a century storm is being swept away by benevolent winds of change, perhaps we will see that honest and courageous activities of many people will begin to replace cascading, self-interested behavior of a few misguided, greedy people who have been willing to do whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient and socially fashionable… come what may for our children.
Perhaps sufficiently reality-oriented changes in policymaking and action planning, changes that protect biodiversity from mass extinction, prevent more wanton environmental degradation and preserve Earth’s body from relentless dissipation as well as the children from endangerment, are in the offing.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
[…] La Marguerite suggests channelling the magic of community organizing seen in the Obama campaign, into tackling climate change. Sarah Palin should not have mocked Barack Obama for being a community organizer. If anything, tonight’s results proved her wrong. Our new President has given new meaning, and strength to the concept of community organizing. And he has shown us what citizens can do, when given the means to organize towards a cause, that’s greater than themselves. […]
Agreed. The challenge is attracting people to the real work, often hard work, and building a joyful “thrivable” community doing that, rather than letting the high-bandwidth commercial voices distract the community with their messages (buy this green product!)
[…] видим преди всичко примера на гражданска активност, „защото успешната кампания, проведена под мотото за промяна, даде ново значение и […]
Are we suffering from the illness, amnesia, that is resulting in our forgetfulness with regard to the value of the Earth and its environs? Have we been mesmerized by a Tower of Babel?
Perhaps we are forever forgetting about Earth and its environment because too many people, especially the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mainstream media, are worshipping a “totem”. At least to me, there appear to be many too many people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God’s Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its frangible climate destabilized by unbridled overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species. Aside from the “Economic Colossus” nothing matters to them.
Today, it appears that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a “house of cards” and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the invention of dodgy financial instruments and unsustainable business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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