Life In the Turn Lane

 

 

Our Country, As It Could Be

 

Integrated, diverse crowds in Cincinnati are not exactly an every day event.  So I was doubly thrilled to stand with thousands of us on Fountain Square this week to watch Obama's speech to the NAACP – (even though I got there too late for the "Yes! We Can".)   Blocks away at the Convention Center, he couldn't hear our shouts and cheers – but we could.  And, to me,  that's the point.  As he said, we have work to do, none of the big ideas will happen without us – all of us.  Now I'd like to see the picture of the thousands of us – black, white, brown, with the caption: This is what Cincinnati looks like! Then, maybe we could hold onto the image that it's us. We – all of us – who are the ones who can.

 

Something seems to be happening.  Themes of citizen dissent and the life potential of groups have been on my mind.  Not only do they manifest in this Fountain Square experience, there's evidence that others feel it too, that our hopes and dreams are merging with reality.

 

A business writer in the Cincinnati Enquirer has come up with an "invention" which owes its birth to the necessity of Ohio's economic condition.  It's a 'yes, we can' kind of proposal.  John Eckberg's idea:

"Ohio should move immediately to get those auto workers back on the job – those executives back in offices – by producing the nation's first-ever state-backed automobile and create the ultimate Green industry for our state." Op-Ed, Cincinnati Enquirer, 7-14-08.

 

Hooray!  This has the energy of both dissent and new group life.  It's  We The Peopleⁿ.  It beats Anheauser- Busch with a Belgian twist. 

            I think I get it; but maybe I don't.  America's appetite is bigger than its purse, so it borrows money from China et al to fund a war, etc., American government (that's us, isn't it?) "bails out" failing home owners, businesses and banks.  With what?  Money borrowed from our current lenders?  So who owns what?  And!  Why do people in financial trouble look to "the government" when they have need for bailing?  That must mean people do rely on "the government".   So, then, why shouldn't we – the government -  make the decisions in the first place so we don't end up where we are now?  The each-man-for-himself system seems to have a few flaws.

 

We have a we-the-people system already, but it works so well few of us think about its potential.  Eckberg says:

"...it works pretty well in Hamilton [OH] where a publicly owned utility company keeps rates low.  Government does a great job sometimes.  Turn on a spigot, water comes out.  NASA put people in space.  Letters get delivered everyday.  Streets get paved.  Firefighters save lives.  Police come when 911 is dialed."

 

As if that's not enough good news, I'm discovering a scientific explanation for our we-ness that puts it beyond just a progressive political point of view.  The principle is coherence.  Here's the quantum physics description – but it sounds mightily like a people phenomenon too: 

"...subatomic particles are able to cooperate.  [They] not only know about each other, but also are highly linked by bands of electromagnetic fields, so they can communicate together.  They...begin resonating together.  ...they begin acting like one giant wave and one giant subatomic particle. ...Something done to one of them will affect the others." Lynne  McTaggart, The Field.

Of course there's much, much more.  But, it makes sense to me that we are each a piece of a greater whole, that we affect the whole and the whole affects us and that we exist within a "field" that allows this to be possible. 

            It also makes sense to me that this is scary stuff to the reductionists who see the world as isolated bits, who have little sense or experience of the possibilities of "we".  David Brooks and the die-hard Hillary-ites come to mind.  If the world is separate bits, each fighting for its place, then domination through power makes sense.  To me this is a really, really lonely point of view, and it's beginning to look like it's also scientifically unsound.

 

Perhaps we humans are in process – moving from our historical understanding of how the world works into a period of connectedness; in this early 21^st century we seem to move forward with the shell of Newton on our backs; no wonder it's a struggle.

 

I'm ready to shed my shell, resonate with others and see what we could do together.  Maybe build a green car? – a "Buckeye" for instance.  Assure health care for all?  Compassionate elder care?  Maybe even alternatives to war.

 

A while back my question was, Who? We?  A People?

Fountain Square and Mr. Eckberg offer an answer:

We are.  And, God willing, maybe we can act like it.

 

© Beverly Jones 2008

     Do the Doing. Together.

    193!! days