POWER TO THE PEOPLE

This morning (Sunday, March 1st) I watched This Week With George Stephanopoulos. During the Round Table segment, George Will, a well known political conservative, used an undocumented statistic to describe the size of President Obama’s proposed budget. He said in order to spend 1.7 trillion dollars you would have to spend “one million dollars per hour, three hundred and sixty-five days per year, for two hundred years.” Although I almost always disagree with him, I have also always respected George Will as a thoughtful person, but this blatant abuse of a descriptive statistic is beneath him. In fact, budget money does not get spent one million dollars at a time, so this description completely distorts the view of the President's proposed budget. It is grand-standing reminiscent of Republican congresspersons bleating over the stimulus package and likening it to wrapping the equator x number of times with dollar bills joined end-to-end. Redikulus! Let’s shove that boggart back into his trunk!

What the conservative pundits on cable TV seem slow to recognize is that “the people” are more savvy than we were in the 1940s and early 1950s. The reason, until now, that Congress has been able to quietly vote itself 50% pay increases (as they did in 1989) in spite of public outcry, is because, until now, their actions have been opaque to the masses. When sitting down to hand-write a letter to a congressional representative after the fact was the only recourse the public had, and 50% of that public is only functionally literate, getting away with unethical practice was easy and became, through habituation, the way of doing business in Washington. (if the link on functional literacy does not work, just Google "functionally illiterate Americans" without the quote marks. That should produce over 300,000 hits, but simply browsing the first 20 or so should bring home the immense current reality of this problem.)

President Obama was able to run a successful political campaign that was identified by the slogan “Change We Can Believe In” because that change is already in place – he had only to use it.
I am a member of the generation who witnessed the birth of Citizen Band (CB) radios. It was a phenomenon that spanned several news cycles: the American people were talking – actually talking – to strangers on the Interstate highways and rural byways of our nation. At the time, this was headline news!

Today, I think a large percentage of Americans take the use of the Internet for granted because they grew up with it. I have not seen anyone in mass media exclaiming over the power of the Internet, but that does not mean that power does not exist. The “change we can believe in” is the people, and we can make our voices heard. The danger to us is in our own cynicism bred by the inequities of the past, inequities that appear to still be in place in the present. I think our (we the people’s) failure to recognize that the power base in this country is actually shifting to the people, may become a self-fulfilling prophesy in our failure to realize the potency of “the change” we are.

Let the debate begin among our family and friends about whether or not “power to the people” is a viable reality in the 21st Century, because we are the “new” way that business may be conducted in Washington. It may all hinge on the 2010 elections.

To quote an old friend, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."