Just say no!

I feel strangely nervous about this post.  It's going to be political.  Now to Brit readers, well, we all know that in polite company one just doesn't talk politics (and anyway we're all bored by it at the moment, election and all). To my overseas readers this might initially appear a very parochial, British blog.  Bear with me, I'm not really talking about British politics, although I'll start there.

I won't be voting in the election.  This is more to do with incompetence than laziness.  I'm away at a conference in Munich on the day and I've missed my chance to get a postal ballot.  Anyway, if I had been around, I would have gone to the polling station and spoilt my paper by writing "None of the above" (as in the poem I posted a couple of weeks ago.)

Why?  Well in part I'm fed up with being offered two or three parties who are virtually identical; they're all market driven, economically conservative centralisers.  They all accept the inevitability of globalisation and since Britain is doing OK by it we're all pretty happy here.  So whoever I vote for I will get the same sort of governance; my vote makes no difference.   I live in a very safe Conservative constituency.  We would elect a Conservative party candidate even if he or she was an ass.  My vote makes no difference.  In Britain we have a system of governance that achieves only the election of the same politico's who, through the power of the parliamentary party slavishly follow their leader.  So we have the obscene situation where Labour party MPs vote in support of a Prime Minister who is further to the right politically than most recent Conservative Party prime ministers!  Just so that they can keep their jobs! My vote makes no difference.

I'm starting to rant, but now I'll calm down and come to my main point.

My serious concern is not to do with who wins the election, but the very process by which we make that choice.  All too often when making decisions we concentrate on the outcome of the decision.  This is, I think, a foolish emphasis.  Any decision, election or choice is always momentary, the outcome of a choice will always be transitory it will be overtaken by other events almost immediately.  This is not to downplay the importance of our choices they may well affect many aspects of our lives for a long time but they will always be affected by a complex (even chaotic) and random series of other events that will almost inevitably lead to unintended consequences.

So I am not too concerned with whether any particular decision or choice is good or bad (I rarely can spot the difference until much later!) I am desperately concerned about how the choice was made, who was involved, whose voice was listened to, are they still engaged in the outcomes (or have they left the scene hoping some one else will 'implement' the decision?) I'm concerned about our engagement as a community in making that community a better place to live and so I want decision, choice or election processes that engage people long term (not just for 3 weeks or 10 seconds every 4 years or so)

Our current political systems (and this is not limited to Britain) encourage us to leave too much to a small group of people.  Our current political system is consumerist.  I give you my vote and taxes ... you do all that stuff for me.  I do not believe that this is the caricature of voting that the Suffragettes died for me to have. 

We need a new political system, based on local needs, based on local involvement.  I long for a political system where we vote locally to shape what we do locally, where we carry out what we decide.  I want a genuinely participatory democracy not the consumerist, electoral perversion we are currently offered.  I do accept that decisions have, currently, to be taken on an international scale.  This has consequences as we use fossil fuels to tramp goods around the global economy just so that we can find people who will work for slave labour rates to make our luxury goods.  Going local politically will start to damage that global economy (and yes that will be uncomfortable), but it may also start to create a local, participatory community where we share and work together through those discomforts.

Now, I don't know if any of you have spotted (or are even still reading :-) some similarities between the way we give some politicians power over our communities and the way many church families are run?  Oh sigh, I feel a series of blogs coming on that will explore some possibilities for a participatory and emancipatory community within our churches!

Comments

[Whitewave]

Very interesting. So much of politics is in the nuances that never get described. It's difficult to understand what's really going on in other parts of the world unless those unspoken things are spoken.

Do you have the same problem with the media that we do here? Namely that they exist to sell advertizing time so their sponsors want the news to be tantalizing and entertaining enough to keep viewers tuned in? This leads to the constant creation and exploitation of every possible duality and dichotomy in order to get us all excited but prevents unity and resolution which is our only hope for a future in this world?

I'm not sure that other less shamelessly capitalistic societies would have the same kind of dilemma that we have. But I have noticed that a Brit news report on what the AB said about the Tsunami a few months back was blown so badly out of proportion that I nearly fell out of my chair. I blogged on it, but had to take a fat chill pill first.
___

The Community thing is key, I agree. Several days ago I wrote something about this:
"If [after an agrarian and tribal society has been educated into the modern world] ...the groundswell of educated people decide to dump the dirt farms and create suburbs and industry and businesses, will they truly have ascended to a higher order of operation if they have left behind subtle, delicate and important relational infrastructures that kept their families intact? What if the new economy we've provided for them only supports the greediest and most dishonest and selfish of characters and all the structures that support honor and faithfullness to kith and kin, in a temporary fit of individuation, have been sacrificed and left in the dust."

When the early church was out in asia making converts, often whole families were baptized together. Even now in many parts of the world, the head of the family must be evangelized, then the whole family will fall in step. Connections like that have been lost in our modern cultures and that kind of local idea and responsibility sharing just doesn't happen anymore. We are expected to look after ourselves and delegate what we don't have time for to the bureaucracy. That means the State is given the task of making sure my next door neighbor doesn't fall through the cracks. It's absurd.

I have an idea though. If more intentional Communities are created and they take on the civic burdens that are better handled locally by familiar faces who know the history, then everything will be handled better and less expensively. Funding can be given either in a large sum to start the community, or in smaller bits to sustain it for a longer but limited period. Communication is standardized between them so that people are kept track of. New neighborhoods and archetecture can be developed to create the right environments for this.

I think in the past archetecture was thought to be enough to create a sense of community and it was assumed that people would take care of there environment and each other, but it didn't work. The Community would have to have a mission statement and membership list and the whole 9 yards just like a church or business and they would have to apply together for funding and designated space.

I'm not an economist nor a social scientist so I'm sure there's holes, but I think it has promise. There's more too. Is this kinda like what yer sayin'?

[Caroline]

Yes we have problems with a ratings chasing press and media.

As to your comments about going local, I guess that I'm not as confident as you that any change can be made. I fear that we will tip over the precipice before we make the lifestylechanges that are necessary.

We can't blame the government that we buy Nike trainers and we can't blame the politicos that we insist on buying cheep processed muck rather than locally produced food.

[Whitewave]

I'm not really confident that it can and would get done. But I try not to let the lack of confidence crush my creativity. I spend alot of time with creative and idealistic people and it rubs off on me. I think I'm glad.

I believe as you do that we won't change until it's too late and we're forced. That's just how huge juggernaughts get moved.