Theory of Change
What if the best response to America’s current political situation was just to ignore it?
I’m not saying stop paying attention, or don’t vote. This isn’t a call to not participate in the current system. I am saying vote your conscience come November, but treat that vote as your least important political act of the year.
Voting is the baseline, the beginning. The actions you take within your community are the true marker of your political identity, and the best way to actually change the political environment most relevant to you.
America was designed for its states and communities to be laboratories for different ideas and ways of life to be tested, with structure to spread the ideas that work really well to other communities that would benefit from them. In the modern era of communication technology, this function has been eclipsed as 24 hour news has brought federal politics into our lives in a much bigger way. Linking the economic success of news outlets to their viewership with ratings systems, ad-driven models, and subscriptions, and then linking the reputation of news outlets to their economic success has made our system of determining what news is important to know subject to capitalistic whims. This means money has been increasingly poured into dominating the average person’s attention with politics and events that only abstractly connect to their actual lives.
I’m not saying that the issues being discussed in federal politics are not important. I am especially careful to not say this as a white male from a middle class background. I understand there are issues I am not personally impacted by that deeply affect the lives of people who are not those things. What I am saying is the best way for me to actually change political situations for the better, for both myself as a privileged individual and those who are not, is to treat the broadcasted political theatre for what it is, and refocus on improving conditions within my own community. By doing so, we have the greatest potential of discovering common ground with those we would consider political rivals and also develop new means of production and commerce that better serve us than the current.
What does this mean? It means reorienting your view of the world and your relation to it. To learn to see yourself as not an atomized point in the uncontrollable global Gordian knot of national politics and world economics, but as a functioning piece of a local economic ecosystem that happens to be missing certain components right now.
Specifically,
this first means developing a community asset map, and working then to fund nonprofit, cooperative, and other entities to fill gaps in services and needs a town can provide for itself.
To quote Martin Luther King Jr.: “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” Technological development since this quote has made it especially possible for community organizing to be as sophisticated as anything in national politics, even more so. Asset mapping is a necessary step for any community organizing movement, to develop an organizing framework for any structural progress to be made, and to ensure input and communication from all stakeholders of a community you attempt to affect.
Small Asset Mapping tangent:
(While there are plenty of resources on community asset mapping already I don’t believe any go far enough. What I want is a community-editable wiki of organizations within a given community that provide for its human needs, from basic needs all the way through higher purposes and things like fun, entertainment, spiritual fulfillment, etc. At its core it should include data collection routines to measure the balance of food, water, and energy produced, traded, and consumed by a given community. In its fully-fledged form, it should include these points and more detailed community data collection, a rolodex of the organizational community providers included (nonprofits, cooperatives, mission-driven businesses, churches, farms, informal community groups, and other non-governmental entities offering community services), and a forum for communication and discussion. All updated yearly. But this can be developed in stages, and will look different for every community. Existing examples you can find online are a good enough blueprint to get the conversation started anyway.)
This process and the resultant work to create organizations, programs, and other forms of providing for human needs has multiple effects:
First, it makes the tasks to create a better world finite. It’s not an endless morass of overlapping global problems, it is your community, and you can figure out exactly what it needs by looking. This has an immensely beneficial effect on my mental health. I am not pouring my effort into my void, I am building a cathedral of thought that can help others and outlast me. This feels very good and empowers me personally.
Second, it gives a vent to the feeling that federal politics are no longer serving us the way they should that is productive. There is so much work to be done out there, including finding creative ways to raise the money to do those things (grantwriting, fundraising, and crowdsourcing immediately pop to mind). Create your own outlet for your political energy, stop wasting your anxiety just reposting memes and having the same arguments with your potential allies. Give yourself some real political skin in the game to identify with beyond your opinion on news.
Third, by focusing on local needs over federal issues, it is possible to align with your neighbors with whom you differ politically. We have become xenophobic locked in our overly technological, high pressure lives, fed an impression of one another through black box algorithms with a vested interested in keeping us inside and disconnected. This has exacerbated our differences and deleted our commonalities, and by becoming active locally I remember how close what we all want really is. If you balk at the thought of working on a project with someone with a different political identity than you, you are exactly who I am talking to. Your fear makes us all more vulnerable. Our damnation and salvation are all intertwined.
This is not to accuse anyone for not doing enough.
This is just what I am doing myself and why. Nor is this turning the back on issues at a global scale, just a suggestion of a tactical shift. The best thing I can do for the global community is be an active participant in the community I live in and maintain strong communication and trade with others. In that way I can help create and adapt models for solving specific problems (sustainable ag, building, transportation, trade, energy production, etc.) widely and apply them specifically, adapted for my unique environ (Boone!) and its people.
So during this election season, I will be paying attention to the campaign ups and downs, but I recognize any president will be limited in their ability to make my life better without a commensurate effort on my part. So I’m not hitching my emotions or energy to it— just one more TV show to keep up with while the real work continues.
Talk to me about it!
I am back in Boone in 19 days and can’t wait to apply what I’ve learned over the last year. Viva la y’all, see you soon!
This post is a series of essays to lay out a personal political philosophy revolving around radically re-envisioning the local community as the units of our society. Go to the Table of Contents here or read more in the series:
2. Theory of Change
More?
Download your free ebook copy of Component 5
Back to Main Page
The Lower Heaven series
Benjamin Loomis Author Page
How to Play Fortuna
Other Yelling/Blog
