BREAK THE HABIT OF ISSUING
Lappe, Frances Moore
Break the Habit of Issuing Manifestos BY FRANCES MOORE LAPPE Coming up with "our" foreign and domestic policies should not be the priority of progressives. The real priority of the 1990s is...
...Parents in Chicago are pushing through the most extensive school decentralization in the country's history...
...they are envisioning solutions themselves...
...The 1990s call on us to be part of redefining democracy as citizen engagement in public problem-solving...
...We have parallel priorities in the international arena...
...In fact, the biggest challenge facing progressives is breaking the habit of list-making, breaking the habit of what I call "the manifesto" approach to social change: We decide on the program, and then "sell" it to others, or preferably, "convert" others to our truths...
...Shoring up governments from the Philippines to Central America which are unaccountable to their own people not only helps spread hunger and poverty abroad, but also undercuts the well-being of most Americans...
...Third World people can arrive at their own solutions...
...Now she is co-founding the Institute for the Arts of Democracy...
...If, in drawing up our alternative designs, we appear merely as more "experts" with our own brand of specialized knowledge, we do nothing to diminish the sense of powerlessness that people feel...
...The real priority of the 1990s is democracy itself...
...yet as long as we thought our job was protesting and preaching, we left them undeveloped...
...We need these arts to solve real problems...
...Community-based organizations affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation are taking responsibility for reforming schools from Maryland to Texas...
...If our process mimics the dominant instrumental view of politics— or if it fuels the polarized, highly moralized brand— we do nothing to encourage people to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement...
...As a result, people seek an organizing mechanism that is automatic (even, handily, "invisible"), allowing them to avoid public encounter altogether, trading citizenship in a polis (or membership in a community) for consumership in a market...
...Its action program is called Building Citizen Democracy...
...Frances Moore Lappe is author of "Rediscovering America's Values" and co-founder of Food First...
...That means learning to preach less and listen more...
...This means learning, modeling, mentoring the "democratic arts"—active listening, dialogue, creative controversy, reflection/evaluation, negotiation, and compromise, among many others...
...In "economic literacy" workshops in California and elsewhere, low-income workers are discovering their hunger and their capacity to demystify the jargon...
...What we need may not be more bright ideas for alternative structures and programs...
...Today's mon-omaniacal celebration of "the market" suggests a profound disillusionment with politics of every stripe...
...From these examples and others, progressives should be asking less, Do these programs match our vision?, and more, What can we learn about the concepts and arts of politics as community problem-solving?'What draws citizens into the public realm and sustains them over time...
...Students in a grade school in southern Ohio are organizing themselves in teams to address community environmental problems (not just painting posters for Earth Day...
...And how can these concepts and arts be adapted to diverse settings and actively taught, empowering more and more Americans to see public life as a vital human need, a rewarding arena just as essential as private life...
...For the real crisis—the world crisis—is not that equality and liberty haven't been realized, but that people feel increasingly disaffected from those public processes essential to their realization...
...it is to create a politics of practical problem-solving—one that is engaging and rewarding, that respects people and allows them to develop their own values in interaction with one another...
...Food First has argued for fifteen years that our primary responsibility as U.S...
...Our biggest stumbling block is not the lack of a convincing program but the lack of a process through which people can create that program...
...To the degree that we dwell on our own ultimate vision, we blind ourselves to the here-and-now renewal of citizen politics...
...It's happening...
...to worry less about our vision of the future— and our policy priorities—and more about building on an emergent politics of community problem-solving in which people develop the capacities to shape that future themselves...
...Citizens are successfully challenging the power of the mining industry through Kentuckians for the Commonwealth...
...Rather, our energy, our creativity, is needed to consciously create a democratic process, out of which will be forged concrete alternatives...
...citizens is educating our fellow citizens and our legislators that the national interest is served by getting out of the way of bottom-up change in the Third World...
...If this is true, the real challenge to progressives is neither to proclaim beautiful values nor to design elegant answers...
Vol. 54 • November 1990 • No. 11
