Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet Read Online Free PDF

San Antonio, calls citizen groups “universities where people learn the arts of public discourse and public action.” 16
    For we’re not born citizens, as Cortes’ words frankly acknowledge. We learn the arts of citizenship. That’s why the Institute for the Arts of Democracy is an appropriate name for an organization promoting citizen democracy. These arts include active listening, storytelling, dialogue, critical thinking, mediation, creative controversy, the disciplined expression of anger, and reflection.
    In a recent speech, Ralph Nader asked: While one can go to an Arthur Murray dance studio to learn how to dance, where do we go to learn the practice of citizenship? Our answer is that every public encounter—in school, at work, in the community or social group, can become an opportunity for learning.
    I’ll return to this key theme. Now let me suggest other aspects of citizen democracy coming to life throughout American society.
    Citizen democracy is about empowerment through action . Most of us have learned to submerge our common sense, even our own values and tastes, and turn to the “experts”—whether in child rearing, making workplace decisions, or even in decorating our homes. (I recall a few years ago sitting in a café and overhearing a conversation that summed up our sad predicament. One woman confessed to her friend that she felt so intimidated by her interior decorator that she had had to hire a psychotherapist to help her cope!)
    We learn at every turn to defer to others “better qualified.” But that’s changing. Bertha Gilkey, a woman living in the housing projects in St. Louis, got fed up. She wanted to get rid of rampant drugs and crime but was told, she recalls, that “we couldn’t do nothing because we were poor folks and not experts.” She thought that over for a moment and then responded: “Experts got us into trouble in the first place.” Her confidence sparked changes within the project that have transformed it into a desirable place to live and raise a family. 17
    Bertha Gilkey’s liberating moment is occurring for more and more of us. With the S&L debacle costing taxpayers the equivalent in real dollars of the entire cost of World War II, with the toxic waste crisis causing vast and needless harm, and with “experts” producing radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millennia while they have no plan for safe storage—more and more citizens are shedding a sense of deference to the authorities “up there.”
    Understanding citizen democracy as empowering individuals to shoulder responsibility involves us in a radical rethinking of power itself. In the dominant political tradition, power is a one-way force. The cue ball sinks the eight ball in the corner pocket—that’s power! As a one-way force, it is also a zero-sum notion: The more I have, the less for you. You must yield to my power, or I to yours. In striking contrast, empowerment as the core of public life returns us to the original meaning of power, from “poder”—to be able. Power is that which enables us to express our interests and values. It is no longer a one-way force, nor zero-sum. Indeed, we can acknowledge the oh-so-frequent instances where my willingness to shoulder responsibility—to assume more power—benefits you. Certainly Bertha Gilkey’s story is a case in point: her power catalyzed community power, benefitting the entire housing project and larger community as well.
    Citizen politics is values based and values driven . Most of us have also come to think of public life as a series of “issues” driven by narrow interests. But in the most successful citizen initiatives, issues “are dessert, not the main course,” as one effective organizer put it.
    The main course is our values. What motivates people to act, to get involved? To stay involved? What we care about most—our children’s future, peace, security, protecting the integrity and beauty of the natural world, fairness for