When I first heard this phrase, I was puzzled. For me, it could easily be the other way around. But then I’ve always enjoyed opposites and contradictions; you know, turning something on its back and looking at its belly. Whether we use this phrase as a campaign guide or a life guide, I’ll stick with John Kenneth Galbraith in his distrust of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdoms are "ideas esteemed for their acceptability." And accepting conventional wisdom takes the place of thinking for yourself or thinking things through. Let's not be lazy. Let's think this through.
Values unite? Aren’t values kind of personal? Aren’t they kind of individual and subjective? One man’s value is another man’s vice? And aren’t there different values for different families? One family’s Sabbath is another family’s Saturday?" Don’t different cultures have different values? One culture’s unclean pig is another culture’s barbecued ribs with a Cajun dry rub?
Issues on the other hand seem more objective and complex and hard to figure out. CAUTION: This could end up being a "Why I like John Edwards" essay even though it didn't start out that way.
Isn't it easier to turn to the Style Section and talk about hair and boobs and who's hot and who's not?
But aren't issues our day-to-day problems? And aren’t they the deals we try to work out around the kitchen table or the conference table? Didn’t King Arthur come up with the idea of problem-solving around a round table to keep individual values and rank out of the way? Issues aren't convenient or conventional or easy. They take hard work to do and hard work to even think or write about.
Kitchen table problems include:
Healthcare for a child or a nurse for an aging parent
Childcare so that you can earn a living
A living wage and way to save
How to get to work when you can’t afford the gas
Big round table problems for communities and nation-states to tackle include:
Keeping the populace and the workplaces healthy
Building infrastructure to transport goods
Protecting our water and air and other natural resources
What to do about melting glaciers
Protection from invaders from Visigoths to tainted food to marauding hurricanes.
When you stick words in front of values like "moral" or "cultural" or "traditional" with the implication that some values are better than others, that’s when the fur begins to fly. And the politicians know it. All this "values" talk is meant to keep us at each other’s throats. If we all get easy-to-stick-on labels, we avoid really getting to know each other and each other’s individual stories. We just stick a label on them like "Southerner" or "Easterner" or "Californian" or "liberal" "foreigner" and walk on by, keeping our head down. Accidents of birth become badges of honor or dishonor. Who's your daddy?
Around here in Montana politicians like to say, "I go to church on Sunday in my pickup with my dog in the back and my gun on the rack". Oh, I get it, your a white Christian guy even if you are one those Democrats. Wink. Wink. Nod. Nod. This kind of dodging and weaving works on a surface level or in a superficial ad campaign, but it’s a pretty useless dodge and weave in getting to the heart of a problem that needs solving or in defining the kind of community we want to live in.
So thank goodness for for those folks in Iowa and New Hampshire who take their civic duties seriously. Here’s what some Republican folks said recently about "all hat, no cattle" Fred Thompson, (from an AP story on July 5, 2007): http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...
Still, for all Thompson's style, he left others waiting to hear more substance.
"I like him a lot, but the jury's still out on him until he tells us more," said Thomas Gilbert, 76, who traveled from Fayetteville, Ga.
His wife, Margaret Gilbert, 73, agreed: "He's a good speaker and said things I think that essentially most Americans agree with, but I really don't know that much about him or what he'd do."
"I don’t know what he’d do?" Yeh, Americans change and turn slowly but when they turn they stay put and start thinking for themselves. And now Republicans and Democrats and Independents are all looking for something more than speeches about Mom and her apple pie and her six shooter. We all done with those.
But we first have to get past the labels. And this is where listening comes in. The ability to listen to each other kind of super cedes the fact that we all do or don’t have guns or dogs. It super cedes the fact that here we drive pickups and like dogs and in other countries they ride bicycles and eat dogs. Listening to somebody implies that they matter; that they are somebody; that their ideas matter. So if we leave the guns at the door, can we have that conversation? Then we can roll up our sleeves and get the job done.
Lazy labeling instead of listening won’t get that passenger train built. It won’t rid ourselves of the blood sucking health insurance industry. It won’t prevent a company from paving our high school track field with asbestos. It won’t help us figure out how to afford that hundred-mile trip to work with a gas guzzling pickup.
Look, we don’t need to get along all that much, really. For our mutual benefit and the moral sentiments that Adam Smith talked about, we should find out how we can cooperate without losing our personal and private sense of self. One way to do this is to use our collective votes to pick people who are willing to take on the lousy system we have now and just get something done. Couldn’t we use our collective votes to elect people with principles, but also the guts to work on our problems and not leave it to the next guy? Shouldn’t we elect problem solvers? Shouldn’t we begin to bring out the best in people instead of continually trying to tamp down the worst in people? Campaigns that talk about "values" without any plans are lazy and dismissive of citizens. But it also could be more malevolent than that. There are people in government, in business, and in the media who continue to cough up crap in order to divide us up along the old culture war lines. That's where boobs and hair and skin color and clothes and smells come in. Democrats smell fruity. Republicans smell of Aqua Velva, Old Leather , and All Spice.
Culture, Identity and Disco
The infected wounds of the 1960’s that never healed keep infecting our politics. There have always been "culture" wars and "values" wars, class distinctions and differences of opinions, but the battle lines that warp our communal lives today were drawn up in the 1960’s when the phrase "counter-culture" became popular. The cultural values of the time were very straight and orderly. Suburbs sprouted up after World War II with nice neat little lawns. You washed your car on Saturday and went to church on Sunday. Your dad wore a nice gray suit. Your mom wore an apron. Father knew best and Ozzie loved Harriet. But Father was suppressing his battle memories and Mom was starting to question her "feminine mystique" and Beaver was starting to listen to Elvis.
Things are always bound to change and you can resist it or embrace it. For some of us, neat and orderly wasn’t and still isn’t much fun. Dressing up like Mom and Dad was for kids. And with a little more time on our hands, many Boomers embraced the idea of a revolution in attitude. Boomers experimented with shedding their cultural and identity skins. So the predominant cultural values of conformity and corporations; restriction and reservation dissolved into freedom and fun. Black and white mutated into tie-dyed. And it was fun for a time. It was a party. We didn’t have to dance in couples. We danced in the street. We danced with whomever. We danced together.
But we also danced to cover the pain. For all the revolution and dawning of Aquarius, there were the brutal truths in the streets of Los Angeles and in the villages of Vietnam. There was the pain of having young civil rights workers shot and then our Gandhi shot on a balcony in Memphis. With some hope we looked to another Kennedy and he was shot. Then the dancing in the parks of Chicago turned to marching and beatings and panic. Then we had the lottery and the decisions to stay or run away. Then we had Kent State and finally some kind of truce.
Because most of us without trust funds had to go to work, things changed. College had kept adulthood at bay. Self-interest didn’t look selfish there. But most Boomers had to join the job force and most had to enter the white or blue-collar world that their dads had labored in. Add to this mix the women with their newfound freedom elbowing their way into the workplace. They found that they had few if any role models in those worlds.
So all kinds of chaos ensued as the Boomers tried to find their place at work. Sometimes they ended up working alongside their fathers whose company life they had disdained. All that freedom plus gender and racial equality just got stuck together then with a bit of masking tape and Elmer’s glue. In cubicles and assembly lines and stores across America, all that "freedom to be me" and "equality" and "love it or leave it" kind of thinking was shoved down and inside. We covered them with white out.
In the 1980’s the culture wars took another turn as times got better for a few and stagnated for the majority. The water cooler wars began to heat up. Greed was declared good and work took a lowly position to wealth. If you were a mere worker, you were looked on as second class. If you were an investor, you were cool. So conservatives made sure that people got 401K’s and that then made everybody an investor. See then, everybody was cool. Wasn’t it Irving Kristol that said that "supply side economics failed economically, but was a big win politically?" Unions that were once places of family and camaraderie were now, thanks to Reagan, seen as rough and dirty places without the upstanding virtues and integrity of the clubs of the wealthy. And the middle working class had their taxes doubled because of those welfare queens in pink Cadillacs.
Slowly the average worker who used to be called John Q. Public, was now called Joe Six Pack. He was demoted from citizen to consumer and he didn't know what happened. His story changed and so did his wife Jean’s. Stories make us human and are essential for community. They are as essential as water and food and shelter. Squashing our stories makes us commodities and no longer citizens. We are now human resources and not people. We are bulk items and not individuals. We are separated into packages with bland brand names.
For the last 25 years, democracy has been pushed aggressively backwards by ultra conservatives. Rather than the expansion of rights, rights have slowly slipped away from the average American as corporations got the handouts and got less and less regulated. Congress capitulated to the corporations and lowered the standards by which these behemoths operated. Basically, a Vichy government was put in place. Joe and Jean no longer had a political party that represented them. The conversation of democracy began to disappear as a handful of mega corporations took over our airwaves and literally pressed the mute button on our individual stories.
So now we’ve become a nation of isolated folks. We are a nation of people that bowl alone. We live on cul de sacs. We’ve replaced the welcome mat with a "Keep Out" sign. We’ve lost our moral compass and are adrift. We talk about moral values but we’ve lost our moral obligations to each other, to our community and to our nation. Everyone is a victim and no one is responsible. He’s too heavy, even if he’s my brother. Workers who no longer had a party that cared about their work place conditions and rights, turned to a party that at least shared their "values". It was better than nothing, they thought. But most just stopped caring about any kind of civic mindedness.
And most recently the freedom, the liberty that our young nation was founded on has been traded in for the jalopy called "security". Benjamin Franklin warned us about this. "Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither." From a nation of pioneers and risk takers we’ve become a nation of recliners and pill takers.
So we started with that phrase that gets tossed around a lot that "Issues divide and values unite". So the values talk is all noise to keep us from talking to each other. If we did, we’d soon figure out that all any of us want is that pursuit of happiness deal that our founders wrote down as our right. If we started talking again we’d realize that the whole single interest stuff is so five minutes ago. Shared interests are in now. Partners are needed not patriarchs. Obligations and responsibility are what adults have. Maturity is seeing the good, the bad and the ugly and talking about it. Maturity is picking the inconvenient truth over the reassuring lie.
Democracy likes conversation. Authoritarians try to stop the conversation. If you are talking, you are not fighting. If you are listening, you’re not preaching. But authoritarians want to keep the 99% of us fighting each other so that’s why the O’Reilly’s and the Hannitys and the Malkins all shout and rant and "cut off your mike." That’s why the news is geared to bad behavior and "Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood"is one of the few news shows that catalogs accomplishment and community events.
Democracy loves to dance. Hierarchy wants no part of Mardi Gras. That’s why New Orleans is on the butcher block. Authoritarians don’t like the ideas of cultures mingling together and having fun. They want to bring the waltz back, not Carnivale. They want you watching "Dancing with the Stars" not practicing "Footloose."
Bill Moyers and others urge us all to change the story of our lives and of our nation. America has always had simultaneous pain and promise. Maturity, Carl Jung said, was seeing our shadow self as well as the self we present to the world. It's acknowledging our history of racism, sexism, and blood thirstiness. Nothing really does come easy. And you really can’t get something for nothing. And you can't shop away your pain. And there is no Staples EASY button for getting rid of bigotry.
It’s time to turn things around and become compasses and not weather vanes as Moyers suggests. It’s time to embrace power sharing instead of power hoarding. Partnerships are a hell of a lot easier than being out there on your own. Rugged individualism is just a weasel phrase for selfishness. Sometimes that horse is just too tall and so you need a leg up. And we don't need no stinking badges, pundits. We are somebodies.
There are two Americas, my friends. One of inclusion and one of exclusion. In one there are those who love her and in the other there are those who just want to use her. Well it's time to take the path to One America that works for everybody. That is freedom's promise. And it's also good for business. That's why the business publications are starting to warm towards Edwards. Because...
It's time for family over the company.
It's time for civic values over corporate values.
It's time for competition not monopolies.
It's time to be neighbors again instead of just a bunch of people living next to each other. So link arms, my brothers and sisters and begin the march. This is not the time for calm, compromise or caution. It is the time to say, "Enough". Our time is now. "Their time is over", said John Edwards in Prestonsburg on Wednesday, July 18, 2007.
UPDATE: Watch CNN at 5PM EST says a David Bonior e-mail to Edwards supporters for
YouTube.
What really matters?
You choose.
You don't want to miss it!
.
Hmmm? I think some fur is going to fly on ISSUES tonight. And Edwards will go online after the debate tonight to answer questions that you may have.