http://innerself.com/Commentary/Take_Back_America_by_Sam_Harris.htm

Take Back America

Our nation faces a crisis of democracy. People feel cynical and impotent. Where does our cynicism come from? Is it from Vietnam or Watergate? Is it from the assassinations of the Kennedys and King? Is it from the deluge of negative campaigning...? Or is it from the gnawing sense that money talks, and if you don't have it, you don't have a voice? Whatever its origins, this crisis of democracy has left most of us frustrated, unsure of what to do or whether doing anything is even a good idea.

It's About Us

We've heard all the reasons: "You can't fight city hall!" "Voting is a waste of time!" "They're all a bunch of crooks!" "I'm not political." "Good government is an oxymoron." What do we get from all of our complaining? We get hopelessness and a sense of alienation; and, in the process, we lose our sense of vision. "Why dream about how the world could be," we might ask, "when we don't have the ability to change it?"

When I spoke about this to a class of graduate students in public health at the University of California in Berkeley, I told stories of volunteers' successes and discussed the healing that was taking place between people and government. As I spoke, I felt a growing uneasiness in the room. "Is there something I've said that has put you off?" I asked. After what seemed to be a long silence, a student raised her hand. "When it all seemed hopeless, we were off the hook," she said. "But if you're right, if individuals can make a difference with their government, that means we might have to do something. That's what is making us uncomfortable."

Does the idea of taking back our government make you uncomfortable? I wonder why? Could it be that such an idea intrudes on our false notion that someone else will come to our rescue? I feel it's meant to offer inspiration and show that we are our only hope.

Sharing Responsibility

Some might ask, aren't our elected officials the ones who should take responsibility for the state of our planet and its people including the deterioration of our environment and the poverty of over a billion humans? There are many with whom responsibility can be shared. However, I feel that each of us has helped create the mess we are in through our cynicism and apathy and only we can resolve it. Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart answered the question best when he said, "We aren't passengers on spaceship earth. We're the crew."

However, most of us see ourselves as passengers in the mission of stewarding the health of this planet and its people, not as crew. During the 1980's, a number of us began to get up out of our passenger seats, walk to the cockpit, and realize there was nobody up there. Those cockpit seats are our seats. This is about the migration to the cockpit by ordinary citizens. It shows that some of us have started, and how the rest of us can follow.

We often forget that members of Congress are usually lawyers or businesspersons who ran for office and they know everything about these issues any successful businessperson or lawyer would know, which isn't very much. Some of us believe our elected officials should be mind readers. They aren't! We believe they should know what we want. They don't! You could say that members of Congress know everything we ever asked them to know which, again, isn't very much. If active citizen involvement is so important to solving the problems we face, then why are most of us so alienated, so politically naive? Is it that we don't care? "Americans do care about politics," says Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America, prepared for the Kettering Foundation by the Harwood Group, "but they no longer believe they can have an effect. They feel politically impotent."

Taking Democracy Back

We can take back our democracy. No more waiting for elected officials to lead. No more waiting for non-elected community leaders. No more waiting for the big shots to handle it. That's a lesson I learned long ago. For example, the British departure from India and the expansion of civil rights in the United States was not an initiative from the top. Neither was the fall of the Berlin Wall. In each case, the people led the government.

"Each of the great social achievements of recent decades has come about not because of government proclamations," said James Grant, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), "but because people organized, made demands, and made it good politics for governments to respond. It is the political will of the people that makes and sustains the political will of governments."

That's both the good news and the bad news, because if the political will of the people is asleep at the wheel, then the political will of the government will be asleep at the wheel. So we must wake up, we must organize, make demands and make it good politics for governments to respond. But, so far, most of us haven't. Why?

The late Bartlett Giamatti, former resident of Yale University and Commissioner of Major League Baseball, said it's our disdain for politics and politicians. "What concerns me most today," Giamatti commented at a Yale graduation in the mid-1980s, "is the way we have disconnected ideas from power in America and created for ourselves thoughtful citizens who disdain politics and politicians, when more than ever we need to value politics and what politicians do."

The change that is needed will have to come from the bottom. We must stop waiting for our leaders to save us. We have to save ourselves.

What's Missing? YOU!

Do elected officials deserve the disdain most of us heap on them? I say they don't. I tried to convey the extent to which we are the missing link in comments at a 1988 conference in Colorado. I was one of four people to lead small group workshops at the Windstar Foundation in Aspen. John Denver was the moderator. I completed my three minutes and started to sit down. "I have one more question," John said, calling me back. "Do you know some members of Congress?" "Yes," I responded, "I know some members of Congress." "What are they like?" he asked.

At that moment, I felt a thousand pairs of ears lean forward as if to hear something mysterious or titillating. From my more than ten years of talking with people about hunger and politics, I knew that at best, most people were oblivious to members of Congress, and at worst, they disdained them. And now Denver had asked me, "What are they like?" I prayed for something useful to say. "By and large," I replied, "members of Congress are dedicated, committed people who got caught without us. We sent them to Washington and then we abandoned them there. It's time for us to get back into action.

But we won't get back into action until we discard the armor of hopelessness and denial we wear and then educate ourselves for action. I've been told that people don't get involved in issues like world hunger because it doesn't seem to affect them directly. But I say we always wear a cloak of apathy, even around issues that have a direct and obvious effect on us.

It's time for us to breathe the fresh air of democracy and reclaim what's rightfully ours. It's time for us to realize that democracy is not a spectator sport.

 Sam Harris is a native Floridian, founder and executive director of RESULTS, an international citizen's lobby whose purpose is to create the political will to end hunger and poverty. Over the last 12 years, Sam has led more than 250 RESULTS presentations and lectured at various universities throughout the U.S. Sam can be reached at: Results 236 Massachusetts Ave. N E., Suite 300, Washington D C. 20002. (202)-543-9340 The above was excerpted with permission from his book, " Reclaiming Our Democracy", published by Camino Book, PO. Box 59026, Philadelphia, PA 19102